Aspiring evangelical elites must adopt the mindset of being a minority in a pluralistic elite. America’s historic Protestant elite was a hegemonic majority. Today the old WASP establishment is long gone. Protestants are a minority in America, albeit still a plurality. They are a tiny minority among the American elite. The rising generation of evangelical elites must achieve a group consciousness, a sense of unique purpose as Christian leaders in a country very different from that overseen by the once all-powerful WASP elite. 

One of the long-running themes of my work is regenerating effective leadership in America. This month I have an important new essay in First Things magazine that continues this investigation. It’s on the problem of the evangelical elite:

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isn’t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ­culture-shap­ing domains of American ­society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court. There are hardly any leading evangelical academics or artists. There are few evangelicals at commanding heights of finance. The prominent evangelicals in Silicon Valley can be counted on one hand. There are not even many evangelicals leading influential conservative think tanks and publications, despite the fact that evangelicals are one of the largest and most critical voting blocs in the Republican coalition. Two domains are exceptions that prove the rule: politics and business.

I undertook an extensive investigation while researching this piece. I not only read several books, I also interviewed a substantial number of people in various domains to get their perspective on the problem.

I don’t believe that I’ve yet gotten it quite right or that this is the final word on the subject, but this is a critical area for reform, and my essay advances the ball. It’s a mix of diagnostic, critical analysis, and also practical suggestions on what needs to be done to change things, across both the institutional and individual domains.

One thing I point out is that evangelicals rarely think of “elite” in terms of the domains I mention in my opening paragraph. In the evangelical world, the term “evangelical elite” almost always refers to evangelicalism’s internal clerical elites.

How can we explain this lack of representation in the halls of power? One reason is that evangelicals do not typically understand “elite” in these terms. Ask evangelicals who their elites are: the bulk of the names will be pastors, theologians, and other professional Christians. Pose the same question to Catholics and far more lay leaders will be on the list.

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This is also how the culture more broadly perceives things. Artificial intelligence is trained to operate as a cultural summarizer. A Grok AI query for the top fifteen evangelical elites in America returned a list that was 100 percent pastors and other professional Christians, whereas only 20 percent of the names from an identical query about Catholic elites were clergymen.

If you are interested in what Grok returned, here is the document. Note: Tim Keller was actually dead when I ran this query, but Grok still returned him. John MacArthur was still alive when I ran it, however.

You may get different results if you run these queries today.

One of the areas I say needs continued work is the evangelical theology of vocation. The “faith and work” movement has come a long way, but fails to get at structuring and ordering activities in elite domains.

The sociologist Andrew Lynn studies the evangelical “faith and work” movement, which seeks a robust theology of vocation. In Saving the Protestant Ethic, he notes that the movement’s own practitioners “see their religious tradition as completely devoid of any theological frameworks that confer value on secular work.” Faith and work leaders have attempted to fill this lacuna, but they have been only partially successful. Their movement assigns a value to secular vocation, but it has a limited vision of what Christians should aspire to do in their vocations. The faith and work movement stresses conducting business ethically, doing high-­quality work, sharing the gospel in the marketplace, practicing love-your-neighbor relationships with colleagues, and taking a “redemptive” approach to business or entrepreneurship. These are all good things, but they can and should be done by all Christians at all levels of society. What’s needed is a theological mandate for leadership at the top of the key domains of society.

You’ll note that the things the faith and work movement advocates are things that I also tout in my book Life in the Negative World. So I’m not negative towards them. They are just insufficient.

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