The Modernist Conflict in the American Church
Allan MacRae, one of the original faculty members to join J. Gresham Machen at Westminster Theological Seminary, once observed, “All through the history of the church of Christ there has been a ceaseless struggle to maintain the truth.” That perennial struggle took a rather virulent form from 1890 through the 1930s.
The promise of a new century fostered a progressive spirit and an unfettered belief in the goodness and potential accomplishment of man. World War I offered a massive setback, especially in Europe. America, however, being an ocean away and untouched by war directly, ran headlong into the 1920s. “The Roaring Twenties,” they would call it. The description for this greater period is modernism. The rejection of God and the dismissal of religion sit atop the list of modernism’s endeavors. This cultural bomb landed hard on the American church.
As modernists left the church and modernism left God behind, church leaders across denominations began to “rethink” their theological convictions and their ministerial priorities. They were not willing to be left out of the cultural conversation, resulting in what church historians call liberalism. Liberalism accommodates modernist sensibilities, primarily summed up in an aversion to the supernatural and a godlike belief in human goodness and potential. This means that the doctrines of Scripture as inerrant and authoritative will be passed over. This means that God will be reduced to a God of love and acceptance. This means that Christ will be reduced to a good man or to a brilliant teacher. This means that the cross will be reduced to an example of love and selflessness. This means that the future kingdom of God will be transferred to a utopian society of equity here on earth. The cumulative effect of these doctrinal departures was that the church became derelict in its commission, ceasing to be light in the darkness.
As MacRae’s quote reminds us, however, there are those who enter the struggle to defend the truth. In those early decades of the 1900s, they were called fundamentalists. The word fundamentalist was first used to describe anyone who believed in the fundamentals of the faith and also fought for them. The fundamentals included the inerrancy of Scripture, the deity of Christ, His substitutionary atonement on the cross, miracles, and the necessity of preaching and believing in the gospel. To understand this divide between fundamentalism and liberalism, consider three individuals: Charles Augustus Briggs (1841–1913), Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), and J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937).
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Jesus and John Wayne: A Review
Written by John D. Wilsey |
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Du Mez’s work reads less as history and more as ideology, and an ideology with little in the way of faith, hope, or charity. All we have before us as we reach the end of the book is a cliff edge, with no path forward to forgiveness and reconciliation. There is no apparent hope. But hope is central to a Christian historical method.Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (New York: Liveright, 2020), 386 pages, $18.95 (Hardback).
As I begin, please indulge me as I make a few personal prefatory remarks. I have reviewed dozens of books in my professional life, but this review will be different. Consider this review a cri de coeur over a book written as a cri de coeur. I am deeply invested in more than one element of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne. For one, I know Professor Du Mez professionally and I have a deep and abiding respect and admiration for her. I also am a white, conservative evangelical Christian, so I read the pages of this book with the realization that my people are the subject of this book (although I do question how valid the way DuMez normativizes the concept of “white evangelical” is). And lastly, I am a Christian historian myself, and am constantly thinking about how to be a worthy student and teacher of history, as well as a creditable teller of past stories for present audiences. In short, I do not read Du Mez’s book from the standpoint of total objectivity, nor do I approach her subject matter as a set of pure abstractions in which I have no part.
Furthermore, I bring my own experiences as an evangelical to the narrative that Du Mez has produced in her book. I was not born into an evangelical family. In fact, I am the first evangelical Christian in my family’s history, as far as I know. I was raised in a family of mainline Presbyterians and Episcopalians, and did not go to church except on holidays during my childhood and teenage years. I came to Christ after I went to college, and initially joined a Southern Baptist church because the person who led me to Christ was a Southern Baptist. Thus, the history of evangelicalism in the 1970s and 1980s was a history I learned about in books, and had no direct experience thereof.
Still, since coming to Christ in 1988, I have partaken in the recent history of evangelicalism. I have studied it, but I have also witnessed it unfold as a seminary student, as a member of a pastoral staff in a Southern Baptist church, as a Christian school teacher, as a seminary professor, and as a husband and father. Predominately white conservative evangelicals, of the Southern Baptist kind, are my people. My wife and I homeschool our children—we often laugh at ourselves as “weird homeschoolers.” I have a profound love for evangelicals and a loyalty to them based in personal identity, but also in thirty years of full-time service to them and alongside them. Still, I am not blind to their flaws, and I am not their unconditional defender. White conservative evangelicals are what they are for a host of reasons. They have a complex history, and their story is a story that is thrilling, fascinating, heartbreaking, and everything in between.
Du Mez has given us a history of evangelicalism going back to the early twentieth century. Her history is troubling. She lives and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of the most significant centers of evangelicalism in America, and her book reads as an anguished and prophetic cry of the heart to her own people. I would guess that my own awareness of a personal stake in this history is multiplied exponentially for Du Mez, who, I suspect, claims white evangelical Christians as her own people, too.
Du Mez’s overall argument is that white, conservative, evangelical Christians in America since the early twentieth century have been at least as influenced by culture as they have by theology. For her, John Wayne serves as a paradigmatic figure illustrating this enduring dynamic. A militant, masculine, Ameri-centric ethos, inspired by mythical and gendered ideals of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, the nuclear family, and law and order came to define white evangelicalism from Theodore Roosevelt (d. 1919) to Donald Trump. Combined with this ethos, evangelicals adopted and cultivated a continuous attitude of embattlement and a sense of suffering persecution. What resulted time and again in the world of evangelicalism was the calculated production of a cosmic conflict between light and darkness, between purity and threats to purity—with evangelicals always being on the side of righteousness, and any opponents being on the side of wickedness. Evangelicals cast themselves on the side of America, and so by extension their detractors were either in league with, or were even themselves, enemies of America. The effect has been that conservative white evangelicals have consistently and increasingly betrayed the faith that they purportedly claimed by embracing anti-Christian standards such as oppressive patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and militarism, both explicitly and implicitly. In Du Mez’s words, “Like [John] Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. . . . For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself” (11).
Du Mez bases her thesis on a narrative that begins with Theodore Roosevelt’s move to become a cattle rancher in Dakota Territory in 1884 and ends in the middle of the Trump Administration with its correspondent reckonings among evangelicals with the consequences of #MeToo and #ChurchToo. She unweaves an ugly tapestry of evangelical complicity in the creation of “Christian nationalism” (a conflicted term at present), disregard for the plight of African Americans, uncritical glorification of war (especially in Vietnam and the War on Terror), creation of a unique subjugating sexism that resulted in widespread trauma, celebration of abuse of power in church and secular contexts (e.g. Bill Gothard and Oliver North), and tears over perceived threats to religious freedom. Du Mez concludes her book by arguing that evangelicals created a culture that culminated in the rise of Donald Trump. While she acknowledges that such a culmination was not inevitable, the inescapable, logical end point of her history is Trump’s election to the presidency, in which he rode a wave of immensely enthusiastic support from a broad evangelical base.
Any honest appraisal of a book like this must reckon with the ugly details of the narrative. At times, I was embarrassed. At other times, I was angered. Frequently, I felt defensive—and I admit, at times I wanted to find ways to argue that she was objectively wrong. And of course, many of my reactions were defined by simple sadness and regret.
Abuse is an enduring theme of this book. I was never a victim of sexual abuse, but I did suffer physical and verbal abuse as a child and as a teenager. It took me years to realize that the things that happened to me in my youth were not my fault, that they were not normal, and that forgiveness did not mean that I had to maintain relationships with people who abused me, as if nothing had happened. As a historian who studies the history of the intersection between nationalism and theology in the context of war, diplomacy, and political thought—and as a person with painful memories of abuse, who recognizes that abuse is deep and widespread in our communities—Du Mez’s book is often compelling. To say that this book is important, that it should be widely read, that it should be taken seriously, is obvious.
It is a supreme tragedy that American evangelicals have, for generations, replaced the authority of Scripture with that of what I have spent years characterizing as our own “evangelical magisterium.” This magisterium is religiously and culturally authoritative, and often even compels Scripture to submit to it. It consists of three dynamics: pragmatism, experience, and sentimentality. Du Mez is at her best when she demonstrates how these dynamics have played out in various historical contexts, especially from the early years of the Cold War through to Trump’s presidency. The results of the application of this evangelical magisterium are tragic, and Du Mez narrates those tragedies on every page of her book. For example, evangelicals have been, in significant ways, excessively interested in political power. But political power is fleeting and usually comes with a cost not worth paying. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, foresaw the results of an overly-politicized religion. In de Tocqueville’s estimation, when church and state remain separate, religion can remain in a state of splendid isolation from political squabbling. In such a state of affairs, church leaders can enjoy the respect of the whole populace, regardless of political or religious conviction. But when church leaders begin to engage in political maneuvering, the Christian faith becomes ensnared in politics and gets associated with the factions in which religious leaders bring the church into alignment. Religion, Tocqueville said, “does not need [political powers’] assistance to live, and in serving them it can die.” We are seeing this occur before our very eyes today.
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Fame Among the Faithless
Let us not be content to know of Elisha in these chapters of Scripture. Let us not be content to know of Christ and His glory in the Scripture. There are many in that great day who may say Lord Lord did not we know these famous prophets of old and He will tell them to depart from Him. Instead, take hold of Christ by faith that you may know Him and be found in Him, trusting in Christ alone for salvation.
Elisha had become sick with the illness of which he would die. Then Joash the king of Israel came down to him, and wept over his face, and said, “O my father, my father, the chariots of Israel and their horsemen!”
II Kings 9:14 NKJV
Shortly before Jesus was crucified, Pilate realized Jesus was from Galilee and sent for Herod who was ruler of that region and in Jerusalem for business that night. Luke 23:8 tells us Herod “was exceedingly glad; for he had desired for a long time to see Him…and hoped to see some miracle done by Him.” Jesus did not provide answers to Herod at which point Herod and his soldiers treated Jesus with contempt and mocked Him. It is not uncommon for those who have great fame to be sought out by those who have no faith. The world loves to be among the famous.
In the final account of Elisha’s ministry, Joash the king of Israel went to see Elisha. We know only a little of King Joash but what we know is not good and summed up like this:
And he did evil in the sight of the Lord. He did not depart from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin, but walked in them.
II Kings 13:11 NKJV
When Joash visited Elisha it seems he went hoping for some help from Elisha in fighting against Israel’s long-time enemy, the Syrians.
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Why I Do Not Celebrate “LGBTQ+ Pride Month” But Mourn It
Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Monday, June 3, 2024
This is not a month to be “proud” but rather a month to mourn. Mourn the moral rot pervading our country. It has harmed not only the nation as a whole, but especially those who in their self-delusion celebrate what is injurious to themselves, and to their relationship with others and God.Not only is pride generally a sin, but also there is nothing to be proud of in the so-called “LGBTQ+ Pride Month.” Let us love persons with same-sex attractions and gender-identity dysphoria by rejecting that facet of their existence that dishonors the persons whom God has created in his image.
We should also show sympathy for their struggle with sinful desires, and applaud the way God can use the mortification of such desires to deepen a relationship with himself and others. Yet no one should take pride in such desires or the behavior that follows from gratifying them.What is there to be proud of?
Why should one take pride in being erotically aroused by the distinctives of one’s own sex, which is either narcissism or self-deception (viz., the failure to apprehend that one is already fully one’s own sex)?
Should people also take pride in being erotically aroused by close kin (incest, i.e., attraction to a kinship same, akin to attraction to a sexual same) or by multiple persons concurrently (which Jesus rejected based on the logic of God’s intentional creation of a sexual binary)?
Why should one take pride in rejecting the messaging of one’s body as designed by God by identifying with a “gender” at odds with one’s biological sex? A complaint against one’s Creator is nothing to be proud of, but rather an expression of idolatry.Social harm and the condemnation of Scripture
The “queer” lifestyle is one marked by disproportionately high rates for sexually transmitted disease and higher numbers of sex partners (especially for homosexual males), as well as higher relational turnover and increased mental health problems (especially for homosexual females).
These risks correlate with known male-female differences; expected results when an intimate relationship lacks true sexual counterparts or complements. Same-sex unions don’t moderate the extremes of a given sex; they ratchet them up; don’t fill in the gaps, but widen the breach.
Scripture (including Jesus and the apostolic witness to him) views homosexual practice and transgenderism as abhorrent sexual immorality (“abominations”) that can get unrepentant offenders excluded from God’s kingdom. Such behaviors assault the foundation of sexual ethics as defined by Jesus himself, his Scripture, and his apostles.The dangers of “LGBTQ+” politics
The “LGBTQ+” political agenda is the most illiberal and hateful agenda in politics today. It is characterized by efforts to stifle free speech and the free exercise of religion. It is the greatest threat to these freedoms in the Western world today, and has been for decades.
No political lobby has concentrated more on canceling and censoring others, indoctrinating school children, and even mandating compelled speech (the hallmark of totalitarians).
People’s jobs are being put at risk who dissent from “LGBTQ+” dogma: teachers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, florists, photographers, small business owners, lawyers, corporate executives, etc.
Children are being directed toward chemical castration and mutilation surgery, an obvious instance of child abuse being pushed by the state. Indeed, the state is now moving in the direction of regarding parents who fail to affirm their child’s “LGBTQ+” identity as perpetrating child abuse (we know who the real child abusers are), requiring the state’s intervention to take your own child away from you.
Men identifying falsely as women are invading women’s restrooms, locker rooms, sports, shelters, and prisons, even being celebrated with misogynistic awards declaring them to be better women than real women.
The very idea of faithful Christian education is being put at risk, with calls for tying federal student loans, grants, and accreditation toward lock-step compliance with “LGBTQ+” ideology.Moral rot and true love
Science is suffering at the hands of a movement that teaches that men too can have periods and give birth. A gnostic spirit pervades the land, declaring entrapment in bodies not designed to express their sexually immoral desires.
This is not a month to be “proud” but rather a month to mourn. Mourn the moral rot pervading our country. It has harmed not only the nation as a whole, but especially those who in their self-delusion celebrate what is injurious to themselves, and to their relationship with others and God.
As Paul told the Corinthians, they should not be “puffed up” or “inflated with pride” over their ability to tolerate an egregious act of sexual immorality (there a case of adult-consensual incest). To support the “queer” life is a manifestation of functional hate, not love.
Therefore, I choose rather to love, to love truly, those who identify as “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “transgender,” rejoicing in the truth rather than in the lie, whatever the cost for doing so.
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