In a Negative World, evangelicals need to be much more concerned with what they are doing than with what other people are doing. I think this principle applies within evangelicalism as well. Rather than fighting over control of the field, perhaps embracing fragmentation is the best route. I believe it works with rather than against the grain of American Protestantism, and offers the possibility of solving some of the longstanding problems of evangelicalism such as the proverbial “scandal of the evangelical mind.”

The New Calvinism, or “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement was one of the hottest things in evangelicalism for about a decade after Collin Hansen’s 2006 Christianity Today article that put a label on the movement.

Now, almost 20 years on, the movement has changed considerably. New Calvinism has shifted from an “All-Star team” model designed to exert influence over the broader evangelical world to a post-superstar model that primarily serves its own community. This represents the maturity of the movement, perhaps putting it on a sustainable footing for the future.

The best treatment of New Calvinism is sociologist Brad Vermurlen’s book Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism. This book is an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation at Notre Dame. I hosted Vermurlen on my podcast three years ago to discuss this important work:

Vermurlen uses a framework called “strategic action field theory” to model New Calvinism as one faction among several vying for dominance over the evangelical field. A “field” in this case is a complex entity that contains elements of a field of practice and a playing field or battlefield. He writes:

Evangelicalism in America writ large can no longer properly be considered a unified Christian movement but instead is a heterogeneous arena of conflict and contestation—that is, a field. It is not merely diverse; it is divided.

And:

The crucial insight from strategic action field theory that helps to explain the New Calvinism is that through social processes of game-like contestation, leaders of movements and organizations strategically battle and vie with their competitors for a more advantageous position in and over their field, which is defined by possession of symbolic capital and power.

He identifies several different groups within evangelicalism, including mainstream evangelicals, progressive Emergents, and neo-Anabaptists. The New Calvinists were far from the largest group numerically, but generated influence out of proportion to their numbers. They were even in a sense in a dominant position over the field.

Despite only being one “corner” of American Evangelicalism, the New Calvinism’s celebrity star-power, publishing and media prowess, and (especially) its conservative positioning in relation to the mainstream of its field put it decisively in a dominant and incumbent position.

We see this dominance in the fact that the people sometimes referred to as “Big Eva” are disproportionately from the New Calvinist movement. Brad Isbell, a confessionalist Presbyterian podcaster who is often skeptical of the New Calvinism movement, calls it the “gospel-industrial complex,” and created this chart of the major parts of the movement. (TKNY is Tim Keller).

Vermurlen highlights some of the ways that New Calvinism operated as a power projection network (my term):

It begins by showing multiple ways New Calvinist leaders strategically positioned themselves in relation to their field competitors to secure a “competitive advantage” (especially among university-educated young people) over other expressions of Evangelical Christianity. These include providing clear “black and white” answers; promoting traditional notions of masculinity and femininity [in reality: pseudo-traditional – AMR]; offering historical rootedness within a tradition of the Church; deemphasizing autonomous will and self-direction; evincing theological seriousness; focusing on elite urban culture; and being apolitical and nonpartisan…As part of this positioning, many New Calvinist leaders have also positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of the field’s established orthodoxy, trying to enforce who is “in” and who is “out” based on the “rules of the game.”

The power of New Calvinism came from three key factors in my view: its social momentum, its superstar leaders, and its media mastery.

In terms of social momentum, Vermurlen uses “acceleration” as a symbolic term for this:

The suggestion is that the New Calvinism’s “force” is best explained not by measuring out its mass (i.e., the number of persons and organizations involved in it) but instead by its acceleration—its change in “velocity,” so to speak, over the last twenty years. By “acceleration” and “velocity” here, I do not mean anything overly technical; I am using them heuristically to indicate a complex of other, more symbolic factors besides “the hard numbers” (mass) that has propelled the New Calvinism as a “social object” through its field.

Like the Macarena, New Calvinism benefitted from getting hot. It was, for a time, the “current thing.” We see this perhaps most significantly in a 2009 Time article that listed New Calvinism as one of ten ideas changing the world. But nothing stays hot forever. Vermurlen notes that the peak energy of the movement passed by 2014.

New Calvinism was also characterized by its superstar leaders such as John Piper, Tim Keller, and Mark Driscoll. In part, the movement could be conceived of as an All-Star team.

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