Dispensationalist fascination with prophecy has waned in recent years, as Evangelicals seem to be recalibrating to the larger church tradition on eschatology. But I find that in talking to Catholic and Orthodox friends, some of them fear a Rapture of a different kind. They worry that Evangelical Christians will soon evacuate not the earth but the public square.

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church in the 1970s and ’80s, I heard quite a bit about “the Rapture.” This was the dispensationalist apocalyptic teaching that some day, some day very soon, born-again Christians would be secretly whisked away to heaven, right before seven years of dystopian hell on earth. Evangelical gospel tracts, films, and even comic books depicted the confusion on earth as everyone else looked around at the empty sets of clothes lying about and realized that the one common denominator behind all these missing neighbors wasn’t UFO enthusiasm or mob ties but a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Perhaps, we were told, they would remember the warnings and realize they’d been left behind. And here comes the Antichrist.

Dispensationalist fascination with prophecy has waned in recent years, as Evangelicals seem to be recalibrating to the larger church tradition on eschatology. But I find that in talking to Catholic and Orthodox friends, some of them fear a Rapture of a different kind. They worry that Evangelical Christians will soon evacuate not the earth but the public square. In an era of tumult over sexual revolution and threats to religious liberty, will social conservatives turn around to find the empty clothes of the Evangelicals all around them and realize they’ve been left behind to face the spirit of the age?

On the face of things, there is not much to worry about here. After all, Evangelicals are still pro-life and pro-marriage. But there is reason to wonder where Evangelicalism will go after taking leave of the religious right, whether into suspended political animation or into the sort of political activism that avoids the points of greatest tension with the ambient culture. Some social conservatives have criticized in recent days a large gathering of young Evangelicals for speaking on sex trafficking, global poverty, and orphan care with little mention of abortion, homosexuality, or threats to religious liberty. As some Evangelicals worry that Pope Francis is going wobbly where John Paul II stood strong, some observers both within Evangelicalism and without worry that it is already running from the most heated forms of engagement and is waiting for Francis to catch up.

Even some older veterans of the old Moral Majority feel that all their political efforts have changed nothing and that it’s time to retreat from the public square. Evangelical church planters don’t want their churches “mobilized” to fight marriage initiatives in their states. Pastors want their churches to “move beyond” the culture wars and treat abortion as one issue in a “holistic” witness focused on other issues. Some young Evangelicals shrug off concerns about religious liberty because they believe this sort of rights talk doesn’t match up with Jesus’ ethic of self-sacrifice. Other young Evangelicals insist that “engaging the culture” is more important than public action, that politics changes nothing.

Does this mean that Falwell’s warrior children are giving up? Some of the older ones, yes. Others of the older generations and most among the next generation of Evangelicals aren’t walking away from public engagement, but they do hear a trumpet sound in the eastern skies that gives them pause. As Evangelicalism grows increasingly estranged from American culture—especially from the evaporating culture of the Bible Belt—it grows increasingly committed to the “strangest” aspects of the evangel itself: atonement, resurrection, reconciliation, and so on. Some younger Evangelicals’ flight impulse from issues deemed “political” isn’t a move to the political left as much as a move to the theological right. Evangelicals want to conserve a supernatural gospel without sacrificing its social, cultural, and political importance, a gospel they saw often negotiated away in previous generations in a ploy for social and cultural acceptability and political success.

It’s true that the newer generations of Evangelicals are often interested in more than just the culture-war issues of the past. They work on orphan care, ecological stewardship, human trafficking, racial reconciliation, prison reform, economic inequality, and poverty as well as abortion, economic freedom, and marriage. But those who work most on these issues at the congregational level do so with decidedly conservative motivations and strategies—and theologies. Evangelicals concerned about poverty, for instance, rarely mirror the thinking and policy of the Great Society, even when they deviate from the talking points of the Republican business class. They focus on helping the poor by, among other things, working for marriage stability, family accountability, and personal responsibility. They are as committed as ever to the sanctity of all human life and to marriage as a one-flesh union between a man and a woman.

Indeed, often the “broader” agenda items reinforce their social conservatism. Evangelicals working with the poor see the devastation of family breakdown, substance abuse, predatory gambling, and so on. Not that this changes the way they’re spoken of in public. When Evangelicals adopt, the secularist Left accuses them of “stealing” children for “Evangelism,” though if they didn’t the left would accuse them of caring about “fetuses” without providing them homes.

These Evangelicals actually go to church and so represent the future. The problem is that “young Evangelical” is a confusing term, especially for a media culture that often defines the concept in terms of marketing rather than theology or ecclesiology. It would be a mistake to lump the convictional Evangelicals of whom I speak in with the professional dissidents who make a living marketing mainline Protestant shibboleths to Evangelical college audiences by questioning everything from biblical inerrancy to a Christian sexual ethic. As one wag once said of Al Gore, that he is “an old man’s idea of a young man,” these Evangelicals are usually an Episcopalian’s idea of an Evangelical, just as the “nuns on the bus” are secularizing America’s idea of a Catholic.

But these sorts aren’t, demographically speaking, where the future is, among those who are actually filling and building churches. The “red-letter Christian” who speaks as though the Sermon on the Mount is a pretty good Galilean first draft of the 2024 Democratic party platform isn’t likely to be launching an Evangelical church-planting movement. Or an Evangelical adoption agency, soup kitchen, or halfway house for people just out of jail. The pop-left of Evangelicalism usually has quite little to do with Evangelical churches and is usually ephemeral even by the standards of Evangelical faddishness. Rob Bell once pastored a megachurch; now, last I heard, he was talking about starring in his own reality show.

Read More.