Renewing Evangelical Witness in a Sexual Revolution World
Part II of my response to Aaron Renn on the "three worlds of evangelicalism."
In Part I of this two-part essay, I examined Aaron Renn’s historical argument in his influential article “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” In short, I believe his positive-neutral-negative framework is incorrect and risks misleading evangelicals both about their history and the demands of the current moment. In that post I offered reasons for skepticism both toward Renn’s analysis and some of his prescriptions. In this part, I want to pivot away from a pure critique of Renn’s position and offer some alternative paths forward for evangelicals.
Assessing the Moment
A revealing moment in Renn’s essay comes when he mentions Rod Dreher’s proposal of the Benedict Option. Renn clearly thinks highly of Dreher’s idea, and he thinks quite meanly of evangelicals who don’t adopt it. He writes:
Despite ample evidence that America has now entered the negative world, no evangelical strategic approaches to it have emerged. American evangelicals are still largely living in the lost positive and neutral worlds. Their rejection of Dreher’s Benedict Option was not about too much Catholic terminology or disagreements over strategic elements. It was rooted in a denial of reality. Evangelicals were, and to a great extent still are, unwilling to accept that they now live in the negative world.
This is a bold claim. Interestingly, in criticizing evangelicals for not adopting Dreher’s framework, Renn declines to quote from the actual book The Benedict Option. This omission could be due to the fact that Dreher’s book, published in 2017 with a premium endorsement blurb from none other than Russell Moore, actually doesn’t talk about the landscape of evangelicalism and political engagement the way Renn does. Instead, Dreher’s vision in 2017 was focused on the survival of a culture of discipleship within the church, and largely resigned to the triumph of the Sexual Revolution in conquering politics and education. Fascinatingly, both Renn and Dreher pinpoint the Obergefell decision as the beginning of a sort of “negative world,” but where Renn chastises evangelicals for not having a politically energized counteroffensive ready, Dreher flatly says that “The public square has been lost:”
Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to…stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again? Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.
Simply put, this is not the message that many who have picked up the mantle of the Benedict Option hold up. In fact, this exact sentiment—that Christians are better to value spiritual formation over political mobilization—is often ascribed to people such as Tim Keller and Russell Moore, both of whom Renn singles out as exemplifying an elite-placating spirit. Nevertheless, the above paragraph expresses well a key way to really understand our cultural moment.
Dreher’s book helpfully makes explicit what Renn’s essay only implies. At issue is the Sexual Revolution and how its ascendance over politics has created a new baseline of citizenship. Renn and Dreher are both correct that fifty years ago, you would have been considered a decent, respectable person among both political parties and among most major corporations even if you expressed disgust at homosexuality. On college campuses and in Hollywood the situation is historically different, which is why Renn’s taxonomy is unreliable even if it arrives at a correct destination. What everyone can agree on, however, is that today, the situation is reversed. A person who publicly expressed personal revulsion at gay or lesbian sex would have a very difficult time winning national office, and the outcome to a working class person’s career for doing the same would depend heavily on volatile factors. It is, of course, nearly impossible to imagine the CEO of a Fortune 500 company surviving in his or her office.
Yet what complicates discussions of Christianity and culture is the fact that in other ways, it is actually more plausible to hold onto Christian doctrines in the public square than it was even a couple decades ago. As Ross Douthat has pointed out, the interest in “spirituality” among Millennials and Gen Z has functionally exiled the New Atheism that seemed poised to govern intellectual life in the 2000s. A CEO of a current Fortune 500 company who quoted Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens on the moral bankruptcy of religion would face an enormous amount of public backlash (this is probably truer in the U.S. than in, say, Europe). Further, the cash value of the Sexual Revolution on Christian businesses is not always straightforward. Chick-Fil-A, for example, is the most popular fast-food chain the country, and simultaneously the most socially conservative. Their views have generated political attacks and criticism, of course, but to this point, those attacks and criticism have not prevented the company’s success…nor has its seemingly antiquarian (yet very pro-employee) practice of closing on Sunday.
The point here is that to correctly asses the cultural moment, clarity is mandatory. It is simply not true, and easily falsifiable, to say it is impossible to be a convictional Christian in spheres of politics, business, or education. Moreover, the resistance to Christian ethics in those spheres is often highly localized, with challenges in the deep south and heartland looking much different than in urban coastal centers. It may seem like a banal observation, but things are simply different for different people in different contexts. The Internet’s flattening character is not just annoying, it is deeply deceptive, and can lure evangelicals to misidentify what’s required in their actual communities due to fixation on clickable narratives.
However, the transformation of mainstream culture on the question of sexual ethics is undeniable. Christians who believe in a biblical philosophy regarding sex, marriage, gender identity, etc., are viewed as threats in many major centers of culture-formation. Regardless which scholarly treatment of the reasons for this transformation you prefer, its existence is self-evident. So, evangelicals in 21st century America face a dilemma. Our spirituality, so far as it seems a quaint part of our self-expression, is welcome, but our bodily ways of life are not. We can indeed succeed in business and industry, but every rung up the ladder brings us further into a narrowing canyon of confession, where any foray into sexual ethics could undo our economic station. The intertwining of law and sexual revolution give our worldview of the body a political relevance, as unfaithfulness to the rules of diversity, equality, and inclusivity are increasingly interpreted as unfaithfulness to our civic responsibility.
The re-emergence of a Religious Right to seriously countermove these trends feels very improbable. Trump himself embraced LGBT rights, and there’s little evidence that populist conservatism has the conviction to hold the line. At the same time, The Benedict Options reads too defeatist. It seems to ask Christians to choose between engagement and formation, when the New Testament would have us do both. Christians, especially nonwhite Christians, have found themselves in a dangerous position before. Thus, the current challenge is not so much how to survive (since our “survival” is both eschatologically guaranteed and not of primary importance), but how to prick the conscience of the unbelievers.
Clarifying the Objective
Which leads to the second question: What should evangelicals be trying to accomplish right now?
The question is more complicated than you might think. Populist evangelicals make a fair point when they argue that “above-the-fray” pietism leaves our neighbors and our social institutions at the mercy of inhumane worldviews. Interestingly, this is more or less the same point that Carl F.H. Henry made in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, an essay intended to prick the consciences of evangelicals on the issues of social justice. That Henry’s book would almost certainly be decried as “woke” among the very same people arguing for a new synthesis between theology and politics is telling.
The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism is concerned primarily with the credibility of evangelical gospel witness. Importantly, Henry did not argue that a socially engaged evangelicalism—an evangelicalism with something to say about racism, for example—could usher in a golden political age. Nor did he argue that Christians need to prove to elites that they are worth listening to. The latter point is critical, especially since Renn and others have said explicitly that this is the motivation behind the “cultural engagement” model. Henry’s contention was that evangelicals who neglect the implications of their faith in the social realm are not just being strategically unwise, but wrong. Henry believed that evangelicals who stopped short of making racism a theological issue were for forfeiting their confession; they were subjugating the message of the gospel to cultural and political preferences. As he writes:
Today, Protestant fundamentalism, although heir apparent to the supernaturalist gospel of the biblical and Reformation minds, is a stranger, in its predominant spirit, to the vigorous social interests of its ideological forebears. Modern fundamentalism does not explicitly sketch the social implications of its message for the non-Christian world; it does not challenge the injustices of totalitarianisms, the secularisms of modern education, the evils of racial hatred, the wrongs of current labor-management relations, the inadequate bases of international dealings. It has ceased to challenge Caesar and Rome, as though in futile resignation and submission to its triumphant Renaissance mood. The apostolic gospel stands divorced from a passion to right the world. The Christian social imperative is today in the hands of those who understand it in sub-Christian terms.
The point that readers should really see here is that Henry believed that a truly Christian political message would be one that rebuked and undermine sub-Christian ethics in all of public life. Today, the only thing that Henry lists above that would find broad agreement among Trump-supporting evangelicals would be confronting the secularisms of modern education. Right-wing evangelicalism is, for the most part, economically libertarian and racially paralyzed, unable to call anything belonging to a market economy “unjust,” while channeling all its energy into two or three hot button issues that make straight party voting more plausible.
With Henry, then, let us clarify that the objective is not to curry favor with any elites, either in secular society or religious institutions. Nor is the objective to get the Republican Party in questioned seats of power, or to always be pushing back against political correctness, wokeness, or whatever -ness ideology is agitating the media and educational classes at the moment. But also, the objective is not to achieve some hackneyed sense of “balance” between two political extremes, nor to turn a blind eye to the way progressivism assaults human dignity and the family. Rather, the objective is to be consistently Christian, through and through.
The tendency among many who subscribe to Renn’s taxonomy is to measure the success of Christian political witness by the amount of tangible power that conservative Christians wield in society. This is evident from the way that many on the New Right argue that conservatives should be more willing to use the cultural Left’s strategies of contempt and illiberalism. “These obviously work, since the culture is so liberal,” they argue. “So it’s time for conservatives to stop worrying about how we win and start ensuring that we win.” This is unacceptable on two levels. First, even if it were plausible, this is surely not Christian moral calculus. The Bible does indeed care about how we behave, even toward unbelievers, and that the end does not justify the means. Second, however, this sentiment is not even true on its face. The cultural Left enjoys hegemony within the halls of education and media not primarily because they hunt down and destroy conservatives or mock them, but because the progressivism is affable to fallen human nature. Even if we could contort the Scriptures to give license to an “at all costs” cultural strategy, we would quickly find the same strategies that seem to work for the Left don’t work for us, because (unless we abandon our message) we are calling for people to submit to something greater than themselves.
So if we cannot measure our success by tangible metrics of social power, how can we measure them? We can use the metrics the New Testament gives us: fidelity to the gospel message (2 Timothy 1:13) and love for each other inside the church (John 13:35). These are the most important, most fundamental metrics of success for Christians. And if we find that our strategies for political victory undermine our gospel integrity or make hatred and strife within the church more plausible, we can be sure that the results on the ground do not matter to God. We have forfeited the success that matters. And like the man who builds bigger barns right before his soul is required of him, we can be sure that the rewards from this trade off will not be what we hope.
Conclusion
The Sexual Revolution has wrecked devastation on Western society. It stares us in the face on a daily basis. Evangelicals are right to sense that the stakes are enormous, that untold millions are deceived and suffering, and that much of the American political system in particular seems unable to train the conscience correctly. People like Aaron Renn are correct to say this.
But this “new moment” in Western history does not demand theological novelty. It demands greater reliance on the power of the Spirit and the authority of Jesus to order his church and his world. The danger, as I see it, is that many younger evangelicals are being suckered by their frustration and confusion at the world they see around them into Faustian bargain. They are exchanging the power of their witness for something that feels more present, more real: something they can vote for, something they can Tweet about, something visceral and powerful. To be sure, this is not to say that we ought never rethink our strategies. It is to say that when our energies turn decadently inward, and when we silently or audibly cheer on the splintering of Christian fraternity, we have taken a wrong turn. We are looking for power in the wrong place. We are trying, as Francis Schaeffer warned, to do the Lord’s work in the world’s way.
It doesn’t have to be with this way. We can repent. We can interrogate the role of digital media in our lives, the way it catastrophizes all of life and stifles our sense of the Spirit. We can interrogate the way we’ve adopted fallacious thinking, believing that the options are either accommodation to the sexual revolution or scorched earth culture war against our own brethren. We can be wiser about who we listen to and why. We can live with temporal bandwidth rather than be a hostage of presentism. We can choose to think wisely instead of reactively. But we have to make that choice. The world will not push us toward it. The information economy will not make it easy. We have to choose it. And we must.
“Right-wing evangelicalism is, for the most part, economically libertarian and racially paralyzed”, this, so much this. And there is nothing biblical in being libertarian or racially-indifferent. I hope sincerely that the believers of your generation are grappling with Xn’s relationship to culture in the way you are. 
Mr mel ladi and I have been looking with befuddlement at the rise of the Christian libertarian, especially from our Trump-leaning friends of our own Boomer generation.
I think it would be very fruitful to investigate the effect of the prosperity gospel movement and the name-it-and-claim-it flavor to the current evangelical divide. IMO the economic libertarianism which is now so plain on the right was nurtured by these heresies.
I’m amazed how many on the populist right politically defend structures that support the wealthy while decrying elites as if they aren’t very nearly one and the same.
Off my hobby horse now. I believe that it is our faithfulness to Jesus and His teachings which is the only tenable way forward from this moment. I’m glad to read more from today’s younger people coming to the same conclusion. It’s not Jesus and ... it’s just Jesus.