The Importance of Learning of Modern Evangelicalism - Essay Example

Evangelicalism [The of the appears here] [The of appears here] Interest in understanding Evangelical Christianityand its role in the modern world has grown considerably in recent years. The importance of learning more about Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, and the other varieties of modern Evangelicalism has become obvious. These once-marginal religious movements and traditions have remained vigorous while other faiths have faltered, and in North America especially, Evangelicals have become much more assertive in public affair. "Evangelical" is one of those labels that is used a great deal in public discussion but is not well understood. The term means, in it simplest denotation, pertaining to the evangel, which is the Christian gospel, or good news, that God redeems sinful humanity through His son, Jesus Christ. Evangelicals have stressed that people find salvation only through personal faith in Christ's atoning death and through the life-transforming power of the Holy Spirit. They find these views to be the central theme of the Bible, which they hold to be divinely inspired and the ultimate authority for their Christian faith and practice The label "Evangelical" also denotes these Christians' commitment to proclaim this gospel to others by word and deed. 1 Variations time and place have nuanced the term's meaning and usage, and loaded it with much historic freight. The "Evangelical" label was first used by the churches of the Lutheran Reformation in the sixteenth century, but it gained wider currency during the widespread revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when "Evangelical" became the common label for movements of spiritual renewal and evangelistic outreach within Protestantism. This generic understanding of "Evangelical" also makes it an appropriate label for contemporary Biblicist and charismatic movements within the Roman Catholic Church. In late twentieth-century usage, "Evangelical" also frequently connotes "conservative," in that the Evangelical movements and traditions have opposed theological liberalism and insisted on adherence to historic Christian doctrines. The primary locations of Evangelical movements in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century have been the nations of the North Atlantic, and especially North America. Evangelical Christianity also has made rapid strides outside of the North Atlantic region, especially in the past twenty-five years. Religious statisticians claim that half of the world's Evangelicals now reside in the so-called Third World, and they project that by the year 2000, three-fourths will be from these regions. In Africa, for example, conversions and church-planting are projected to give that continent more Christians than North America by the turn of the next century. In parts of East Asia as well, notably in China and Indonesia, Evangelicals account for most of the recent dynamism Christianity has shown. In Latin America, where conversion to Evangelical Christianity outpaces the birthrate, Pentecostalism is the fastest growing alternative to traditional Roman Catholicism. Even in Europe, where the Christian inheritance of the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the pietist/evangelical revivals of prior centuries has waned very rapidly, fresh renewal movements have begun and are struggling against the secular tide. Because of these worldwide trends, students of religion have been scrambling to understand the history, character, and current thrust of the varied family of movements and traditions known as Evangelicalism. In the United States, where Evangelical revivalism was the dominant religious persuasion in the nineteenth century, a harvest of scholarship on religion in the Early Republic has appeared in the last twenty years, and it has underscored an important message: to know American Evangelicals is to know a great deal about the heart and soul of nineteenth-century America. 2 Thereafter, Evangelical Christianity began to lose its cultural dominance in the United States, and it seemed to be on the way out as a significant force. Yet its surprising longevity and recent return to prominence have suggested that understanding twentieth-century Evangelicalism might aid our comprehension of contemporary America as well. Scholars have been working to discover why the formula that works so well in almost every other western nation--modernization = secularization--has to be carefully qualified, if not discarded, when talking about the United States. And in much of the Third World, the growth of Evangelicalism and modernization are concurrent, if not closely related. Sources in North America for the study of modern Evangelicalism are bountiful, if one knows where to look. Much of the earlier record of these movements and traditions can be found in the archives and libraries of tie major denominations and their major educational and service agencies. Studying Evangelicals over the past century becomes more difficult because beginning with the Wesleyan holiness movement in the 1880s; Evangelicals have often broken away from the historic denominations to form their own groups, or to conduct their religious work through nondenominational, parachurch agencies. Evangelicals' parachurch proclivity in particular has changed the shape of Christianity, worldwide. A vast and growing portion of international Christian activity has emanated from these independent, voluntarily organized and supported agencies for religious work: foreign missionary societies, evangelistic associations, religious publishers, student fellowships, and the so-called "electronic church" of religious radio and television. 3 Since the typical pattern for preserving the record of the religious past has continues to follow denominational lines, much of the story of modern Christianity will be lost unless the work of parachurch agencies is documented. Fortunately, the Archives, Library, and Museum of the Billy Graham Center have placed a major emphasis on collecting the materials of nondenominational agencies. They have developed an unmatched array of sources to document this vigorous but still largely uncharted aspect of modern Christianity. These collections thus provide a unique and comprehensive starting point for research and for the creation of new materials for ministry. What complicates the perception of contemporary evangelicalism as a nativist response to a cultural crisis is the inclusion in the nativist movement in the 1970's and 1980's of a number of ideological elements carried over from the nativist response in the previous awakening. While we will not take the space here to go into detail, a few words are necessary to establish the historical context for this last assertion. The theological and sociopolitical worldview arising out of the Second Great Awakening held firm, as we saw, throughout most of the nineteenth century, but its legitimacy was, by early twentieth century, brought into doubt by such forces as immigration, industrialization, and especially for theology evolution and cultural relativity. A new worldview thus came into being. Just when the new worldview came into being is arguable, of course, but certainly by World War II most Americans agreed politically on government involvement, both domestically and overseas, in regulating the economy, policing behavior, and upholding people's welfare. They agreed socially that urbanism and secular education represented paths to success. And they agreed theologically on some brand of Social Gospel and of "higher criticism" of the Bible. 4 But the consensus was not complete. Several factions held out, opposed to government interference perhaps, or to the disappearance of rural life, or to the teaching of Darwinism. By the 1920's, persons with some or all of these objections had developed into the Fundamentalist movement, a force felt chiefly but by no means exclusively in church life. The target of ridicule, as at the time of the 1925 Scopes trial, this dissent nonetheless persisted through all the decades of this century. In the 1920's its enemies were Darwinism, Modernism, Bolshevism, and Spiritism, while today those enemies carry such labels as "evolutionism as fact," "Godless communism," or "secular humanism." 5 Followers of this dissent, in other words, are still around, nourished through Bible Institutes, evangelical colleges, Christian day schools, Campus Crusade for Christ, Carl McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches, Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and of course Billy Graham. If somehow Graham's premillennialist message never became the new orthodoxy, still it helped keep alive such elaborate evangelical infrastructures as these. With the addition of radio preaching, and then TV, there is little wonder that dissent from the dominant worldview of the middle decades of this century stayed alive. H. L. Mencken would see William Jennings Bryan buried just days after the Scopes trial, but Fundamentalism in its various forms survived not only Mencken's ridicule, but the cynic himself. Of course, the current crisis of legitimacy is not the same as gave rise to Fundamentalism in the 1920's. Not for decades have most Americans believed Protestantism would prevail worldwide, that increased capitalism would solve all societal problems, or that all ethnic differences would melt in the metropolis. Today what we despair over is different. We have lost faith in Keynesian economics, in the United States as world policeman, and in the good faith of government legislators. City life has brought not utopia but the jungle again, and secular education proves hollow for many. The Social Gospel proved no more adequate a guide to the Kingdom than did the New Deal, and, while biblical scholarship has kept apace, it has been of interest to only a few of the intellectual elite, not a path to new understanding by the faithful. 6 There seems little doubt, then, a crisis exists in the American worldview emerging out of the passing of the Depression and the successful execution of World War II. The quiet years of the Eisenhower Administration symbolized not just the complacency of most citizens (especially the "silent generation" of youth) but indicated as well a fairly high degree of agreement on what was true, on what was important, on what was real. Daniel Bell (1960) even suggested that ideological debate on such matters had ended. But for whatever reasons the failure of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam incursion, the seemingly ineradicable poverty in a nation of plenty, or the inability to forge a workable foreign policy recognizing the existence of Third World and socialist nations the 1950's consensus eroded. By the 1960's, the erosion was apparent, and by the 1970's, it is fair to say, the Wallace-McLoughlin second stage was abroad in the land. As James Q. Wilson (1980) points out, the signs of this second stage were almost classical: an expanded cohort of young people, unconventionality in morality, alienation from extant institutions, public disorder and high crime rates, and declining party loyalties. Clearly, Americans had moved beyond the stage of personal malaise to the stage of doubting their institutions and disagreeing over both diagnosis and remedy. 7 In such a context, therefore, it is hardly surprising to see also a vigorous nativist or traditionalist movement, a movement promising to revitalize the culture by returning to the old ways, even as internal enemies (liberals or secular humanists in this case) are identified and blamed for the crisis. The current evangelical movement, especially in its political expressions, quite readily fits this description. More accurately, nativists and traditionalists grabbed hold of the evangelicalism already there and gave it new vigor. Responding now to institutional crises different from those of 1890-1920, evangelicalism nevertheless borrowed heavily from its ideological predecessor, fundamentalism. The similarity is seen in the biblical inerrancy doctrine, for example, or in the appeals to family virtue and the simple life of small town America, uncomplicated by new-fangled education which, anyway, only teaches secular humanism. The similarity is seen too, especially in the right wing of evangelicalism, in the potential for virulent and paranoid politics. Righteousness without the patina of education or, as Tocqueville would say, self-interest not properly understood tends toward despotism. 8 Despotism, at least from evangelicalism, is unlikely in our day; however, for the same reasons evangelicalism is unlikely to provide the next worldview. Soul-winning served in the nineteenth century, as Tocqueville acutely observed, as the power behind institution building and belief in a common, civil oriented religion. By contrast, its twentieth century expression is, as McLoughlin notes, "a divisive, not a unifying, force in a pluralistic world". It must be repeated, however, that these observations are tentative. Major cultural shifts go notoriously unnoticed by the persons living through them, leaving to the next generation not just the new worldview but its recognition as well. Reference: 1. Avery William O., and Gobbel A. Roger (1980). "The word of God and the words of the preacher". Rev. Religious Res. 22 2. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Church History; March 1, 2000; Wiers, John R. 3. Evangelicalism; The Reader's Companion to American History; January 1, 1991 4. Boyd Hilton, 1991. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865; Clarendon Press 5. Susan Juster, 1994. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics & Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England; Cornell University Press 6. James Fuller, 2003. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War ; Journal of Southern History, Vol. 69 7. Wayne Flynt, 2005. Religion for the Blues: Evangelicalism, Poor Whites, and the Great Depression; Journal of Southern History, Vol. 71 8. George A. Rawlyk, Mark A. Noll, 1994. Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States; McGill-Queens University Press Read More