So what went wrong? How did “the remarkable coming together” of these doctrine-bonded evangelicals fall apart? The short answer is the politics of the blue communities. What counts as winsomeness in any community is determined by that community, not by those looking to be found winsome to them. In blue communities, partisan political preferences proved increasingly non-negotiable.
Ed Litton’s decision not to seek the usually perfunctory second term as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) will not surprise keen observers of the evangelical world. It marks just the latest effort by elites to salvage a collapsing evangelical movement bent on capturing the largest Protestant denomination in North America. Damaged by his insistence that “sexual sin is only whispered in the Bible,” and exposure as a decade-plus plagiarizer of others’ sermons, Litton’s usefulness to the woke evangelical cause has collapsed.
For 20 years, a resurgence of evangelical vitality associated with superstar New York City pastor Timothy Keller sparked waves of new church plants among Gen Xers, Millennials, and Generation Z. Its tentacles penetrated the largest evangelical publishing houses and the largest protestant denominations, including the Presbyterian Church in America and the SBC. By 2012, Christianity Today’s Skye Jethani justly called the phalanx of luminaries and institutions involved the “Evangelical Industrial Complex (EIC).”
But according to one of its brightest lights, North Carolina pastor Kevin DeYoung, the party is over:
. . .on the other side of Ferguson (2014), Trump (2016), MLK50 (2018), coronavirus (2020–2021), George Floyd (2020), and more Trump (2020–2021), the remarkable coming together [of reformed evangelicals] seems to be all but torn apart. . . . We won’t be able to put all the pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again . . .
DeYoung accurately identifies hot political realities as key factors in the break-up of the EIC. We should add to DeYoung’s list of political flashpoints critical race theory (CRT), the crisis at the U.S. border, Black Lives Matter, identity politics, and the recent totalitarian suppression of truckers by Canada’s prime minister. Left unidentified is the political party whose sensibilities precipitated Humpty Dumpty’s fall from his wall.
The EIC fell under the spell of what theologian Karl Barth called an “alien norm” — the capture of the church’s message by an external, and therefore, illegitimate pretender to spiritual authority. The alien norm, in this case, was the political proclivities and antipathies of “blue communities” — college educated, Democrat-voting denizens of the nation’s cities and blue enclaves clustered across the fruited plain.
From its inception, the Keller movement vowed to find winsome ways to reach blue communities. Keller recognized that cultural ignorance and captivation by culture endangers faithful proclamation of the gospel and harmony among the faithful.
But not to worry; unity within the burgeoning EIC was to be rooted in core doctrines, not in politics or church-planting strategy or anything else. The previous president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, spoke for the EIC when he invoked that ancient, oft-repeated aphorism: “in essentials, unity; in nonessentials, diversity; in all things, charity.”
So what went wrong? How did “the remarkable coming together” of these doctrine-bonded evangelicals fall apart? The short answer is the politics of the blue communities.
What counts as winsomeness in any community is determined by that community, not by those looking to be found winsome to them. In blue communities, partisan political preferences proved increasingly non-negotiable.
Since 2014, the so-called Overton Window has repeatedly lurched left and altered blue community sensibilities in the process. Named for the late policy analyst Joseph P. Overton, this “window” designates the range of politically acceptable views held within a given community at a given time. As the blue community Overton Window moved left, winsomeness to them demanded not only accommodation of an ever-more Squad-pleasing Democrat Party, but also un-winsomeness to the un-woke.
