Reviewing A New Evangelical Manifesto [1]

Recently a different voice has been emerging in the USA:
 The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good (NEP) exists to advance human well-being as an expression of our love for Jesus Christ, which is itself a grateful response to his love for us and for a good but suffering world. The result of their recent deliberations is the book A New Evangelical Manifesto.

I'm aiming to review it as I read it. It consists of a series of articles collected together. I'll aim to write something about each over the next month or so.

The first article is by Brian McLaren and is very much a mise-en-scene of Religion, Christianity and particularly Evangelicalism in the USA today. He reminds readers that the stats indicate that the numerical health of Evangelicalism is probably more down to transfer growth, fleeter cultural adjustment and lower overheads but that it seems that this has only bought Evangelicalism about 30-40 years before the decline that afflicts mainline churches starts to settle in.

He points out that the cultural shift we've been experiencing in the West poses new questions that make the old questions traditionally fought over by Christians rather irrelevant. The driver here is new situations faced everyday: no longer are other faiths an abstract set of propositions and a theological stance, rather they are a set of practices of- and reactions to- and conversations with real people. He reminds us that the costs of running a church have gone up such that smaller churches are sliding into unviability and in turn this affects and is intensified by age-demographics. And of course, there are predictable responses to this: blaming several ways, despair, denial, guilt-tripping ... so far, so familiar.

A less -noted consideration is perhaps less relevant or recognisable in GB than in USA: the role that the political clout of the Evangelical right has had in turning off the younger generations: the religious label has become so bound up with the political that a plague on both houses is called down. This is different between the two sides of the anglophone Atlantic: the USA has tended to see a right-wing political engagement by Evangelical churches. If anything, over the last 30 years, British evangelicalism has tended to become left-leaning -at least in social matters relating to power, wealth, poverty, war economics and so on.

something that probably does play on both sides of the Pond is the tendency for Christians to retreat into nostalgia, nativism (a kind of nostalgia for the old social settlement of white, heterosexual male dominance) and negativity. McLaren points out that these are precisely the attitudes that tend to put younger people off. And actually, not just younger people. Such people can't hear the actual Good News we are supposed to be about because the Bad News of our attitudes and disconnection shouts so loudly through our institutions, habits and misguided pet peeves.

I was interested to notice how McLaren highlights a dynamic in Evangelicals that seems also to exist among Muslims in the face of post-modernity: a desire not to be labelled by the conservatives as being liberal or in some way 'infidel' which leads to a tendency to try to position oneself in such a way as to continue to allow the conservatives to do the defining and also to fail to listen to the most important critiques of those most in touch with the cultural issues involved.

McLaren's hope is for a networking by 'new' Evangelicals with Jesus-centred people in other polities: Orthodox, Catholic, Mennonites and so forth.

I think he's right, but the difficulty will be whether this 'tendency' can manage to drag the semantic centre of 'Evangelical' towards the centre and leftwards. It is a shame that etymology is not determinative of meaning, because in this case it would very much help the cause.

Steven Martin's essay 'How the Church went wrong' follows McLaren's. This starts with a recognition of the gap between NT hopes for the Church on the realities of many people's experiences and the force of it is exemplified by the angst about whether the effort of going to church will really be repaid by the experience which many people face.

In the face of this, he proposes that following Jesus is to deliberately and habitually do what the world deems impossible. The Constantinian comrpomise is identified as being close to the root of the Church's failure to commend in word and deed such a following of Jesus. This is a familiar thesis, and the quibbles that it wasn't so much Constantine as those who came after that actually did what is criticised don't really take away from the fundamental point that the all-too-often easy acceptance of state power by churches has usually led to betrayal of gospel values. Of course, what isn't examined is what better response there might have been and how might it have played out -a great topic for some counter-factual histories. But the remaining issue in this aside is whether we can develop a useful and faithfully-Christian way of using power -and a wise eschewing of it when called for.

Martin briefly recounts the terminus ad quem of Constantinian Compromise in the form of Church apologists for Nazism: people of impeccable piety but who committed crimes against humanity and/or were apologists for them. So the problem is actually about whether piety follows Jesus or is actually a way to follow the ways of the world with a veneer of faith, religion or spirituality. And the former is 'impossible' whereas the latter is deemed realistic.

While I'm signed up for the main message of this essay: I'm niggled by some things. One is the issue of whether being a Christian really means leaving government, as mentioned above. Another is that I'm quite worried by those who are keen on the idea of radical discipleship and 'living the impossible' but who seem to be radically unempathic, judgemental and offputtingly uncompromising. Now I know that Martin isn't advocating for their responses but I'm wary and weary of those who use the trajectory of this sort of argument to ensnare the fired-up in some profoundly un-Jesus-like stuff too.