by Joshua R. Colson
The term evangelicalism means many things to many people. In contemporary usage, the term often refers to a bloc of white, conservative Christian voters. Indeed, pundits and pollsters regularly identify evangelicals with the Republican Party, free markets, and politically conservative causes. The identification of evangelicals with the Republican Party is apparently justified by the fact that eighty-one percent of white, self-identified evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.[1]
However, on the verge of Trump’s election, Randall Balmer published Evangelicalism in America, wherein he argues that modern evangelicals’ marriage to the political right is actually a radical departure from their own history. Across an introduction and eleven chapters, Balmer seeks to “[remind] evangelicals of their heritage as agents for change” so that they “will one day reclaim their noble legacy of advocating for those on the margins.”[2] In what follows, I will summarize Balmer’s central arguments before analyzing their strengths and weaknesses.
Summary of Balmer’s Arguments
Chapters 1–3: Laying the Foundations of American Evangelicalism
In the first three chapters, Balmer endeavors to explain three key presuppositions that historically undergirded and distinguished American evangelicalism. Namely, evangelicals have been characterized by an insistence on the separation of church and state, an antipathy for tradition, and a commitment to primitivism and biblicism.
First, Balmer notes the important role played by evangelicals—Baptists in particular—in the development of the distinctly American idea of separation between church and state. As a matter of fact, he traces the roots of this idea, which culminated in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, to the New England Baptist minister, Roger Williams.[3] Unlike all other Western countries at the time, the United States opted against a state church in favor of religious liberty and plurality. Balmer argues that the resulting freedom of religion has enabled “political stability” by “siphon[ing] off social discontent that might otherwise find expression in the political sphere.”[4]
Next, Balmer argues that American evangelicals, beginning with the “Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery,” have had a penchant for eschewing “tradition and history” in favor of “a kind of determined primitivism.”[5] Instead of creedal documents and hierarchical church structures, the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement claimed to derive all of their doctrine and practice from the Bible alone, an extreme application of sola Scriptura. Restorationists adopted Scottish “Common Sense Realism,” a hermeneutical philosophy which “placed the Scriptures within reach of the masses” by “asserting that the proper reading of the Bible was the plainest and most apparent one.”[6] This hermeneutical disposition was widely appropriated by evangelicals and subsequently led to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy on the one hand and the “emergence of Pentecostalism” on the other.[7]
Chapters 4–7: Evangelicals as Agents of Social Change
After illuminating some of the foundational commitments of American evangelicalism, Balmer proceeds to unearth the “radical tradition of progressive evangelicalism.”[8] He notes the “Benevolence” of antebellum evangelicals which “took many forms, including education, prison reform, advocacy for the poor and for the rights of women.”[9] Along with these forms of benevolence, evangelicals were deeply involved with abolition and temperance movements. The social action of early nineteenth century evangelicalism was, at once, driven by its eschatological commitments and enabled by the masterful communication skills of its leaders.
While many modern evangelicals hold to some form of premillennial apocalypticism, this commitment was not the case for the vast majority of their early nineteenth-century forebears. Balmer keenly observes the prevailing mood of optimistic postmillennialism that dominated the evangelicalism of that era:
Amid the Second Great Awakening, with all of America intoxicated with Arminian self-determinism, an air of optimism about the perfectibility both of humanity and society prevailed; postmillennialism, the doctrine of Christ’s triumphal reign on earth, suited the mood, and it complemented nicely the Enlightenment’s sanguine appraisal of human potential. This spirit of optimism unleashed all manner of reform efforts—temperance, abolitionism, prison, educational reform, missions—consonant with the assurance that Christ was even then vanquishing the powers of evil and establishing his kingdom.[10]
Only after the carnage of the War Between the States did the evangelical, millennial consensus begin to shift to premillennial apocalypticism. That tragedy, coupled with a rapidly “urbanizing” and “industrializing” culture, spelled the death of the optimism that was once the evangelical zeitgeist.[11]
Beyond their theological and eschatological commitments, antebellum evangelicals were excellent communicators. Perhaps this fact is unsurprising given that “most evangelicals churches” were marked by the centrality of the “sermon, the spoken word.”[12] Evangelicals cared about broadcasting their message as plainly as possible to as many people as possible. Thus they developed “presses . . . denominations . . . and benevolent societies,” all of which were later “copied” by politicians and their parties.[13] While the eschatological commitments of evangelicals shifted in the late nineteenth century, their commitment to clear and clever communication has never wavered even if Balmer finds much of their postwar message “less edifying.”[14] Indeed, as we will see, Balmer spends the next four chapters largely criticizing the “less edifying” message of modern evangelicals.
Chapters 8–11: The Rise of the Religious Right and Aberrant Evangelicalism
Balmer begins this critique with an attack on, what he dubs, the “myths of origins” of the “Religious Right.”[15] The Religious Right—the politically conservative evangelical voting bloc that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s—often claims that it arose in response to the Supreme Court’s decision regarding abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973). Balmer, however, traces the movement’s origin to another court case, Green v. Connally (1970), which led to the 1976 “revocation of [Bob Jones University’s] tax-exempt status” over their racial-segregation policies. Further, the IRS under the administration of Jimmy Carter—whom evangelicals helped to elect—stripped tax-exempt status from other evangelical institutions.[16] These developments, which fueled a fear of government overreach in religious institutions, called the Religious Right into being. Therefore, fear of government overreach, and not the abortion question, led to the evangelical shift from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party in 1980. The abortion question merely served as a galvanizing issue in the years to come.[17]
Next, Balmer investigates how “Evangelicals, disturbed by the social and intellectual currents in the broader world, constructed their own universe as a refuge.” That is, he investigates “the evangelical subculture.”[18] Included in this subculture are athletic events and parachurch organizations, most of which stress traditional ideals of masculinity. Indeed, Balmer argues that both evangelical athletics and organizations (such as Promise Keepers) serve as “reassertion[s] of patriarchalism.”[19] The evangelical subculture is a retreat from and a response to an increasingly egalitarian culture, a response which Balmer laments.
In his final chapter, Balmer expresses his consternation with the state of modern evangelicalism, which he perceives as a shell of its former self. He bemoans the political activism of the Religious Right, specifically their advocacy for “public prayers in public schools . . ., taxpayer-funded school vouchers, and . . . posting religious documents, such as the Ten Commandments, in public places.”[20] Instead of continuing adherence to the principles of the Religious Right, Balmer calls evangelicals to embrace the classical Baptist principle of the separation of church and state. “America needs more Baptists,” writes Balmer,
women and men willing to reconnect with the scandal of the gospel and not chase after the chimera of state sanction, women and men prepared to stand on conviction and articulate the faith in the midst of a pluralistic culture—not by imposing their principles on the remainder of society, but by following the example of Jesus and doing what Baptists have always done best: preaching the gospel from the margins and not lusting after temporal power and influence.[21]
Critical Analysis and Conclusion
Balmer rightfully reminds American evangelicals of their own heritage, rich with its belief in a church-state separation, tireless in its efforts for social reform, and relentless in its advocacy for the marginalized. Evangelicals have every reason to be proud of their tradition. Yet Balmer calls modern evangelicals to discern whether they measure up to the example set by their forebears. He concludes that they do not. While many of Balmer’s critiques of modern evangelicalism are warranted, I, nevertheless, believe that Balmer’s central arguments are flawed in two major ways.
To begin, Balmer’s closing argument for separation of church and state basically undermines the entire spirit of his book. After spending several chapters lauding antebellum evangelicals for their social reform, he closes by urging evangelicals to adopt a strict separation between the church and state. He argues that they should avoid “imposing their principles on the remainder of society.” However, his argument raises an important question: How were the social reforms for which antebellum evangelicals advocated realized? Yes, evangelicals formed independent organizations (abolitionist and temperance societies, for example), but they also directly involved themselves in the political process. Perhaps this point is most readily recognizable in the abolition movement when resolutions like the following, passed at the Freewill Baptist General Conference of 1844, were not uncommon: “Resolved, that this conference believes it to be the duty of all Christian voters to act on anti-slavery principles at the ballot box.”[22]
Additionally, evangelicals were frequently involved in party politics. The great Freewill Baptist preacher Hiram Whitcher, for instance, “was a leader of the Liberty Party in New York, and because of his campaigning, some of the state’s highest Liberty vote totals were recorded in communities where he regularly preached.”[23] The antebellum evangelicals—whom Balmer lauds—clearly had no problem pursuing their agendas at the ballot box and in the halls of congress. Would Balmer call that an imposition of principles, though? The Southern states who soon seceded as a result certainly did.[24] Antebellum evangelicals clearly had something different in mind than Balmer with respect to church-state separation.
Ultimately, evangelicals of yesteryear believed that the state should not interfere in the church but that the church has every right to influence and interfere with the state; and their churches did. Balmer’s problem with the Religious Right, then, ultimately has less to do with the fact that evangelicals are involved in the affairs of the state and more to do with the fact that they are not involved in the state in the way he thinks they ought to be. While evangelicals of the last four decades have been apologists for traditional gender roles, the pro-life movement, traditional marriage, and free market economics, Balmer wants evangelicals to advocate for so-called social justice issues such as the pro-choice cause, women and LGBTQ+ rights, and anti-capitalist causes.
Regardless of whether evangelicals are wrong for the posture they have taken in the past four decades, Balmer’s failure to discuss deeply the developments in evangelicalism that led to this posture further weakens his assertion that they are wrong. This point constitutes the second major flaw in Balmer’s work. He identifies the Scopes Trial of 1925 as the point when evangelicals ‘checked out’ of the culture that they felt they had lost.[25] However, he fails to discuss the fact that evangelical withdrawal from culture at the turn of the century was in many ways a reaction to the excesses of the Social Gospel and the ascendancy of Protestant Liberalism at the turn of the century.[26] Further, it is not as if nothing happened within evangelicalism between 1900 and 1980, though reading Balmer’s book might give one that impression. Most poignantly, Carl F. H. Henry called for evangelical cultural engagement as early as 1947 in The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry was laying the foundation for evangelical social action long before the rise of the Religious Right. Nevertheless, Balmer fails to mention Henry a single time in the book; the silence is deafening and inexcusable.
In the final assessment, Balmer succeeds in reminding evangelicals of their rich “heritage as agents for social change.” However, his arguments for renewed social engagement among evangelicals are fundamentally inconsistent and incomplete. They are incomplete because they fail to reckon with the rich evangelical thought from 1900 to 1980. They are inconsistent because he criticizes the Religious Right’s ‘imposition’ of their beliefs through the political sphere while failing to acknowledge that the Religious Right’s political engagement is not so different from that of the evangelicals of yesteryear. Perhaps, he would have been better off explicitly calling for evangelicals to reorient some of their political positions.[27]
About the Author: Joshua R. Colson is the pastor of Brandon’s Chapel Free Will Baptist Church in Middle Tennessee, where he has served since 2016. He holds two degrees in theology from Welch College (B.S., M.A.), and he is currently pursuing a second master’s degree at Vanderbilt University. He is interested in systematic theology, church history, politics, and all things pertaining to golf and the St. Louis Cardinals.
[1]“Election 2016 Exit Polls,” New York Times, accessed January 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html.
[2]Randall Balmer, Evangelicalism in America (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press), xvi.
[3]Ibid.,2–5.
[4]Ibid., 6.
[5]Ibid., 15.
[6]Ibid., 20, emphasis mine.
[7]Ibid., 22–23.
[8]Ibid., 39.
[9]Ibid., 45.
[10]Ibid., 69.
[11]Ibid., 71. For more on this subject, see Stanley J. Grenz, The Millennial Maze: Sorting Out Evangelical Options (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1992), 55–63.
[12]Balmer, 78.
[13]Ibid., 79. For more on this topic, see Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Random House, 1998), 22–31.
[14]Balmer, 81.
[15]Ibid., 109.
[16]Ibid., 113.
[17]David French convincingly disputes Balmer’s claims about the rise of the Religious Right. See “Fact and Fiction about Racism and Rise of the Religious Right: No, Evangelicalism isn’t Built on a Lie,” The French Press, May 24, 2020, https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/fact-and-fiction-about-racism-and.
[18]Ibid., 136.
[19]Ibid.,140.
[20] Ibid., 153.
[21]Ibid., 167.
[22]Minutes of the General Conference of the Freewill Baptist Connection, 1844 (Dover, NH: The Freewill Baptist Printing Establishment, 1859), 245. Just three years earlier the General Conferenced passed a resolution calling for churches to “[remember] them that are in bonds as bound with them . . . by petitioning Congress and other bodies, legislative and ecclesiastical, which have power to effect the subject, directly or indirectly to do what they can for [slavery’s] immediate and everlasting overthrow” (Minutes of the General Conference, 1841, 212).
[23]Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 107.
[24]The divisiveness brought about by evangelical involvement in the abolitionist movement also undermines Balmer’s argument that early American religion served to “siphon off social discontent that might otherwise find expression in the political sphere” (Balmer, Evangelicalism, 6). On the contrary, religion often fueled social discontent. G.C. Goen keenly observes that the splits of the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist over slavery (1839-1845) was “a full dress rehearsal for the subsequent disruption of the nation” (Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denomination Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War [Macon, GA: Mercer University, 1985], 67).
[25]Balmer, 72.
[26]See Russell D. Moore, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 19.
[27]More to the point, a large number of evangelicals would vote for more progressive candidates if those candidates did not completely reject the pro-life movement. Regardless of Balmer’s arguments surrounding the mythos of the Religious Right’s connection to the abortion issue, I firmly believe that the largest reason evangelicals overwhelmingly support the Republican Party is because of their pro-life stance—a stance with which the GOP has aligned itself. If the Democratic Party openly welcomed pro-life candidates, I suspect that they would gain evangelical support. Take for instance the United States Senator Joe Manchin, a pro-life Democrat from West Virginia. Although he is a Democrat in a deeply red and deeply evangelical (54% of the 2018 electorate) state, Manchin garnered 45% of the evangelical vote in his 2018 Senate election (“Election 2018: West Virginia Exit Polls,” CNN, accessed February 4, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/west-virginia). While Exit polling is unavailable, another pro-life Democrat (John Bel Edwards) has twice been elected governor of deeply Republican Louisiana. Surely, the pro-life stance of these candidates has something to do with their ability to achieve victories in such improbable places. They are pro-life, but they also favor universal healthcare, social welfare, labor unions, and other progressive causes. I sense that many evangelicals would readily support pro-life Democrats.
By their pro-life advocacy, many evangelicals believe that they are manifesting Jesus’ concern to care for the marginalized. Indeed, Balmer notes how some evangelicals “invoke the moniker of ‘new abolitionists’ in an effort to ally themselves with their antebellum evangelical predecessors who sought to eradicate the scourge of slavery” (109). It is true that some evangelicals paid little attention to abortion at the onset. It is true that W. A. Criswell once stood for a pro-choice position, and it is true that the Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions in favor of a pro-choice stance (110). However, Criswell later renounced his former stance (Moore, 124) and the Southern Baptist Convention was largely led by theological liberals when those resolutions were passed. It became decidedly pro-life during the resurgence of theological conservatives in the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
Like it or not, abortion is the central issue for many evangelical voters who might otherwise readily support progressive causes. However, the Democratic acceptance of abortion-on-demand until the point of birth has pushed evangelicals, many of whom—especially in the South—were once Democrats into the Republican Party. Being forced into the GOP over this one issue has, I think, led to many of the problems with political involvement of modern evangelicals (unfettered free markets, anti-immigration, etc.). This issue needs to be explored more deeply.
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