By Christ’s intercession, prayers are divinely answered with lavish love and generous grace. Therefore, it is a true blessing for your church when you intercede for your pastor before your heavenly Father’s throne of grace.
When we think of people in the church who may need prayer, we often think of people struggling through life.
We pray for the single mother fighting to hold things together, the depressed young man unsure and anxious about his future, or the lonely widow who has just lost her husband after decades of being together.
My guess is that your pastor did not figure in your list of people to pray for at church.
Your pastor may not be struggling, but he needs your prayers.
He is the one who lovingly exercises God’s authority. He diligently preaches God’s Word, week after week. He tenderly shepherds you through life. So it might seem strange that you might pray for your pastor.
After all, isn’t it supposed to work the other way around? Isn’t your pastor supposed to pray for you? It is true that your pastor prays for you. But it is equally true and important that you pray for your pastor.
Your Pastor Needs Your Prayers
The apostle Paul, in his many letters to many churches, repeatedly appeals to the saints of God to pray for him and his ministry (Rom. 15:30; Eph. 6:19; Col. 4:3; 1 Thess. 5:25; 2 Thess. 3:1).
Paul planted churches throughout the known world both in Asia Minor and in Europe. If he needed the prayers of God’s people, be assured that your local pastor is no different.
As the American Presbyterian pastor, Gardiner Spring (1785-1873) said in an address, “When the churches cease to pray for ministers, ministers will no longer be a blessing to the churches.”
Paul considered those praying for him as partners in ministry (Rom. 15:30). When you pray for your pastor, you are not only ministering to your pastor but also partnering with him in ministry. You are sharing his sacred burdens as you intercede for him. 
It is an encouragement and a delight for your pastor that you are praying for him. Pray for him and let him know you are praying for him.
In Indian culture, pastors are often idolised. We place them upon a pedestal as gurus and we are always looking up to them. So much so that we often do not see their need for God’s grace. Not surprisingly, we do not pray enough for them.
Your pastor needs your prayers—whether he asks you for it or not.
Here are five ways you can and should be praying for your pastor.
1. Pray for Your Pastor’s Spiritual Walk
The vitality of your pastor’s personal spiritual life directly affects his ability to minister to the congregation.
Do not assume that your pastor is immune to the temptations of sin, the weariness of the flesh, and the distractions of this world.
He is susceptible to every frailty and brokenness that affects men and women in this life. It is vital that his life is nourished by the steady grace of Jesus Christ.
Pray your pastor will find his joy and sufficiency in the justification of Christ alone and not upon the approval of men, or even his own self-estimation.
Offer up prayers that he would not be discouraged by Satan’s accusations of his sins and failures, but trust in the atoning work of Jesus.
Pray he would fall deeper in love with his Lord and Saviour. Ask the Lord to give him greater delight in his spiritual disciplines of grace.
Pray that he works out his salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), confident that he who began the good work will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:6).
Pray that his life would be one of authentic confession of sin and repentance. It is particularly tempting, in our Indian shame and honour culture, to hide sins and present an ideal self-righteous image of oneself.
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Written by Jonathan D. Holmes and Deepak Reju |
Monday, December 6, 2021
Limiting open access and anonymity starves the appetite of our sinful nature. But this takes time. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Addictions start early, are cultivated for years, and become ingrained as personal choices begin to rewrite our embodied existence. The longer the addiction has been cultivated, the longer it will take to get rid of it. Ingrained patterns take time to unwind. So be patient. Take a long-term view of starving the appetites of your friend’s sinful nature.

AN ADDICT’S FOUR FOES
Our problem is that we walk in unbelief. We fail to believe that God cares or that he desires to enter into our struggles with the sins of lust, pornography, and sexual temptation. —John Freeman, Hide or Seek
Those entrenched in porn tend to live suffocatingly small lives, constantly looking for their next fix. Those who begin to find freedom begin inhabiting a larger, more colorful existence. —Matt Fradd, The Porn Myth
Manuel is sitting in his room, all alone, at 10:32 p.m. The door is shut, and his phone and laptop are on his desk directly across from him. He could go to bed, but he’s feeling the pressure of fierce temptations. He feels aroused. His thoughts have been on an attractive woman he saw at the gym this afternoon. There is a war raging in his heart, and he wants to make a godly choice. His flesh pitches him lies, all of which attempt to justify his sin: “Just one more time, and then you’ll stop.” “You deserve it.”
What will lead Manuel to act out? Four ingredients enable a fall—access, anonymity, appetite, and atheism.1 Remove any one of these four As, and you make acting out much less likely.
In our effort to rescue prisoners of pornography, we’re getting to know the enemy. These four As are formidable foes. The goal of this chapter is to understand them and figure out how to disrupt them so their power is broken. What does a discipler need to know to help his struggling friend?
In the age of the Internet, access to an online world is available virtually everywhere. That creates a huge problem for porn addicts because the Internet is littered with sexually explicit material of every description. Thus, open access is dangerous for any struggler’s soul. Though the Internet can be used for great good, it also causes extraordinary harm.
A common strategy for fighting porn addiction is to restrict strugglers’ access. We take away their freedom in order to protect them from themselves. Their pride makes them think, “I can handle this,” but they are wrong. Until they grow in maturity in Christ, the desires of their flesh are too strong, and their self-control is too weak.
You Need to Be Radical
Our approach to limiting access is shaped by Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:
You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (vv. 27–30)
He reminds us of the seventh commandment: do not commit adultery. But he takes the command one step further. He’s not just talking about the physical act of adultery. Christ expands the definition—if a person looks at another with lustful intent in his heart, it is as if he too has committed adultery. An addict doesn’t need to touch a woman to commit sin. He merely needs to look at her lustfully—and he does that every time he looks at porn.
Jesus goes on: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. . . . If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matt. 5:29–30). He’s using exaggeration for effect. The point is not that a sinner should actually do physical harm to herself but that she should understand how serious sexual sin is. Christ uses graphic imagery to say, “Be radical. Don’t take a soft approach to fighting sexual sin. Brutally cut it out of your life.”
Pause and think for a moment. As a discipler, start with your own approach to sin. Are you radical in cutting it out of your life? Think about your last bout with sin—what did you do? If you are not ruthless with your own sin, how do you expect others to follow suit?
On their own, addicts typically aren’t radical in cutting off their sin. That’s the case with Preston. He looks at porn because he’s held on to access points, and he’s grown too comfortable with his sin to cut it out. Rationalizations, excuses, and a love for his sin encourage him to hold on. Preston often thinks, “This will be the last time,” or he lets himself off the hook by saying, “Everyone’s doing it, not just me.” He yearns for the naked photos and spends a lot of his time scheming how and when to look at them again.
Christ said to be radical. When you talk to an addict, do you plead and exhort him to take a more radical approach? We often say to strugglers, “Be brutal in cutting off access points.” Get the person you are discipling to measure her last few months against Jesus’s words. Has she taken drastic measures, or has she made excuses, delayed making adjustments, or continued to hide? Has she tolerated her sin, coddled it, maybe even welcomed it, and, in so doing, continued to give it a chance to ruin her life?
Many porn strugglers don’t like losing access to the Internet, and so they fight against restrictions. You’ve heard the complaints: “How do I live without the Internet? I need it to do my job. . . . I’ve got to check my email. . . . I need it to connect with my friends. . . . I must have it for X, Y, and Z.” Our response? There are consequences for sexual sin. The person should have thought about these consequences before he or she acted out. What is better—for your friend to lose an eye or hand but walk toward heaven or for her to run toward hell? If she chooses to indulge her sin, to ignore God’s commands, to disobey and shake her fist at God, then her rebellion and foolishness will lead to death.2 If she wants to grow in holiness, it will require sacrifice.
Fighting sin is serious business. Don’t let your friend indulge her sin. What drastic steps can she take today to cut off her access to pornography? If she confesses looking at porn the previous week, your conversation should revolve around her access point and how to cut it out. Show zero tolerance for her sexual sin. Graciously and lovingly exhort your friend to get rid of access points!
Strategies for Closing Off Access Points
Here are some practical steps to consider as you help an addict to get rid of his access points.

Ask the porn addict about every e-device he owns.
Encourage him to get a software monitoring program, such as Covenant Eyes, and to put it on all his devices.
Get rid of standard web browsers and rely on a browser that is carefully monitored.
Get rid of the applications store. If he needs to download a new app onto a tablet or phone, provide him with access only temporarily.
Use special restrictions to cut out the web browser and app store, set time limits, and so on. Make sure the restrictions code is known only to an accountability partner. If the addict knows it, he will remove the restrictions in a moment of weak- ness and act out.
Get rid of all apps that have an embedded browser.

What’s the principle behind these six points? We’re removing control from the addict and giving it to others because the addict can’t steward the freedom of open access.
The nuclear option is to get rid of televisions, tablets, phones, and laptops for a period of time. In our Internet age, that’s hard to do, but it is viable, especially if the Internet is available in safe settings, such as a workplace that monitors its own computers.
If an addict does need access for some legitimate reason, such as to download an application for work, then the addict should notify his accountability when an access point is opened and follow up when the access point is closed. If the accountability doesn’t hear back soon, he should get in touch with the addict directly. Maturity is demonstrated when the addict takes initiative on these matters and is open and honest about what’s going on.
ANONYMITY
Because of his guilt and shame, a struggler typically hides his pornography use. He may sit in a bedroom by himself or in an office with the door closed. If he is around others, he may orient his screen so that no one can see what he is doing. It’s rare for strugglers to view porn in coffee shops or in the middle of open areas where people are going back and forth. Rather, they pursue isolation and anonymity.
Solomon writes, “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (Prov. 18:1). The one who deliberately isolates himself is focused on his own desires. As he feeds his sexual urges, his selfishness grows, and his corrupt desires become the centerpiece of his life. His selfishness separates him from community and, even worse, makes him unfriendly to those who should matter the most.
Pornography pulls an addict away from the very thing he or she needs—God’s wisdom available through God’s people. The one who isolates himself because of his desires “breaks out” against wisdom. The sound judgment that leads him down safe paths is abandoned or, even worse, mocked. He ignores or discards the wisdom that is available from a few choice godly friends or in his local church com- munity. In this way, isolation can kill a person’s soul.
Isolation allows addicts like Manuel and Preston to keep a safe distance from accountability relationships and community. And, in some cases, a consequence of isolation is that the addict remains unknown to others. We can’t press into Manuel and Preston’s lives if they hide, avoid accountability, put up protective walls, and refuse to be vulnerable about their sin struggles.
Why does a struggler act in this way? Sin likes to hide, and sexual sin in particular has a field day when it is kept secretive and hidden. It prefers darkness, which, in the Bible, is associated with an immoral, sinful life apart from God. The apostle John warns us, “If we claim to have fellowship with him [God] and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth” (1 John 1:6 NIV). We are hypocrites if we claim to love God and, at the same time, coddle sexual sin.
One of the antidotes to sexual sin is to yank it into the light. God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all (see 1 John 1:5). As a struggler steps into his light, he repents (see Mark 1:15), confesses (see Prov. 28:13; 1 John 1:9), and exposes his sexual sin (see Eph. 5:11–14).
Strategize to get rid of anonymity in an addict’s life. For example, an addict will watch pornography and masturbate late at night, alone in a room, with the door closed. That’s what Preston does. He isolates himself so that he can sin. Lily, a graduate student, studies for long days and nights at home by herself, where no one will know if she chooses to view porn.

If Preston and Lily are not talking to anyone about their sin, the first step is for them to open up and get others involved in their lives. They need to take a step out of darkness and toward godly relationships.
Since Preston struggles late at night, we ask him to give his laptop to his roommate at 9 p.m., to hang out in more trafficked parts of his living situation, such as the living room, and not to shut his door until he’s ready to go to sleep.
We also ask Preston to always keep his office door open. When he’s overwhelmed, he’s not allowed to shut the door and plunge into porn. He should turn his desk so the screen is visible to employees who walk by his office.
We ask Lily to study in public places, such as the local library or coffee shop. Long periods of study alone at home often lead her to act out.
We encourage Lily to tell her friends to hold her accountable to not be home alone for extended periods of time.

APPETITE
Men and women have passions, desires, and motivations that drive what they think and do (see Gal. 5:16–17). We all have cravings or appetites. Sex. Coffee. Good food. Fun. Comfort. Power. Success. You name it, someone wants it. But imagine a desire that takes over a person’s life and becomes a ruling desire. That’s what your addicted friend is fighting—a desire that he or she has fed, nursed, and cultivated until it’s grown big and strong. We saw this in detail in the last chapter.
You could think of this desire as a dragon: a tall, ugly, scaly, fire- breathing, beady-eyed beast generated by a struggler’s sinful nature. Whenever a struggler looks at pornography, he throws the beast a thick, juicy steak. He is making provisions for the sinful nature, satisfying its desires (see Rom. 13:14). The more he feeds it, the more it grows, and grows, and grows. It always wants more. It’s never satisfied. Eventually, it takes over.
To fight the dragon is to ally with the Holy Spirit in the war with the sin nature. The apostle Paul proclaims, “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:17). The dragon’s power is destroyed when the struggler starves her sinful nature’s desires and puts them to death. Some days, those desires get the best of a struggler, and the dragon wins as she gives in to temptation.
Adelynn felt that way most days. She’d been losing her battle with a porn addiction for over a year. There were dozens of moments every week in which she felt as though her selfish cravings for porn had overtaken her life. Other days, she found victory as she walked in the power of the Spirit who dwelled in her. A year later, with a lot of help, prayer, adjustments to her life, and brutal honesty with God and friends, she saw tangible changes in her addiction.
Although we teach addicts how to handle temptation and how to restrict access, it’s the desires that rage within them that are the ultimate problem. As a discipler, are you focused only on fighting off temptations, or are you also working to curb the struggler’s corrupt desires? Are you paying attention to the war within? Practically speaking, you can’t focus only on eliminating access and anonymity. You should talk to an addict not just about his external circumstances but also about his appetites. Ask him,

What do you love and hate right now?
How is selfishness or pride ruling your heart?
What do your actions show you that you want?
Lust energizes, but that’s not the only thing that causes you to act out. What else motivates you?
Are you angry at God?

Dig deep into his heart to expose the corrupt desires that have taken root there. As you pull out the roots, you expose what motivates him to seek out porn.
Our chief strategy as disciplers is to grow holy appetites in a sinner. Holy appetites expel unholy desires. As the addict grows in greater love for Christ, his affections drive out the weaker sexual desires.
That means we want to spend a significant portion of our time with sexual strugglers talking about Christ. We demonstrate that Christ really is the addict’s hope by thinking about who he is and what he done for us. As much as we can, we marinate them in gospel truth. Because we come to know Christ through his Word, we spend time in the Word with the people we are discipling. And we make sure that strugglers are engaging the common means of grace (God’s Word, prayer, fellowship with believers, consistent attendance at church, participation in the Lord’s Supper).
Is most of your time focused on dealing with the addict’s sin, or are you actively cultivating the addict’s love for Christ? Do you point the addict to the common means of grace to grow her relationship with Christ? There is no better way to help a porn addict than to repeatedly set her eyes on the cross.
ATHEISM
Every believer wrestles with momentary atheism—she has occasions when she gives herself over to her unbelief. When Adelynn looks at porn, she chooses her sin over God. In that moment, she is embracing sin’s lies, rebelling against God, and disbelieving the promises of the gospel. Viewing pornography is Adelynn’s functional way of denying the existence of an all-loving God who has provided for her every need. It reveals her doubt regarding God’s character— in terms of not just his love but also his mercy, goodness, and sovereignty over her life. In the moment that she acts out and looks at porn, she is declaring, “I believe the promises of my sin will satisfy me” and “I doubt the promises of God right now.”
The struggler’s momentary atheism leads to dangerous spiritual consequences. It’s unlikely an addict will say, “I’m don’t believe God’s character or promises right now.” He won’t be that blunt. Rather, you’ll witness firsthand the consequences of the atheism and porn struggles—a lack of assurance, a hard heart, and self-deceit. We’ve highlighted them for you below so you can look for them.
Lack of Assurance
Each time Adelynn views pornography, unbelief acts like a swarm of termites, eating away at the foundation of her faith. Questions plague her: “How can I profess to be a believer and doubt like this? How can I call myself a Christian and continue to look at porn and masturbate?” When Adelynn doubts, the apostle James tells us she’s like “a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind” and is “double-minded . . . unstable in all [her] ways” (James 1:6, 8). This double-mindedness leaves her feeling unstable, even somewhat crazy. Doubt undermines her assurance as a believer. This doubt may be accompanied by a lack of engagement with the common means of grace. If an addict is not reading the Word (see Ps. 1:2), not pursuing regular fellowship with other believers or regularly attending church (see Heb. 10:25), not partaking in communion (see 1 Cor. 11:23–31), or not finding ways to love and serve others (see Mark 12:31; Gal. 5:13–14), her heart will grow cold to the Lord.
A Hard Heart
To embrace sin is to turn your back on the living God in unbelief. If tolerated and coddled, unbelief leads to a hardened heart. The author of Hebrews warns Christians, “Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day . . . that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:12–13).
Imagine taking a hammer and slamming it down on a solid rock. It cracks a little, but the rock holds together. A hard heart is in a very dangerous place spiritually. What would it take to soften a hard heart (rather than chisel it!) and see it more open to Christ and the gospel?
As we see from Hebrews, a possible antidote to a hard heart is twofold. We have a personal responsibility to fight our unbelief: “take care . . . lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart” (v. 12). There is also help in daily fellowship with other believers: “exhort one another every day” (v. 13). These show us how to soften a heart, but they are also the preventative measures for slowing down the hardening of a Christian’s heart.
Self-Deceit
Self-deceit starts early as the addict drifts away from God and the gospel. It doesn’t happen by itself. Long before an addict acts out, self-deceit conspires with his desires (and sometimes his fears). A guy sees a girl in skimpy clothes on a hot spring day and begins to imagine the possibilities. He wants her. He wants sex. He wants to be affirmed. He buys into the lie: Jesus is not enough right now. As his heart rages and his body gets aroused, he can ignore his conscience and actively convince himself of anything. This is the sin before the sin. Self-deceit sets him on the well-worn pathway to acting out.
In a moment of self-deceit, the struggler doesn’t want to see the truth or believe it. He doesn’t want to believe that Christ is sufficient.
He wants pornography to satisfy him. Like the Pharisees who didn’t want to believe Jesus was the Son of God, lest their Pharisaical house crumble (see John 12:19), so also an addict doesn’t believe Christ is enough, lest he be forced to give up his sin. Sexual sin makes him feel good quickly, so he wants to believe it provides the relational satisfaction that he craves.3 Is it any surprise that the devil wants us to question the One who is all-sufficient? The worst lies are the ones about the all-sufficient Christ.
This is the slippery path of a porn addiction—unbelief and rebel- lion lead to self-deceit, hardened hearts, and forsaking the Lord (see 1 Tim. 4:1). Practically speaking, you should encourage your struggling friend to take personal responsibility for fighting his doubts. As addictions get worse, believers can give up and give in.
But also take time to exhort your friend—to speak a gracious and loving but firm word. Ask him,

Are you wrestling with doubts about God’s character? If so, explain.
Can you share some of your thoughts and feelings about God? (It may be embarrassing, especially if you’ve been critical of God in your thinking. But I encourage you to be honest.)
Have you wrestled with any other kinds of doubts? If so, can you share them?
Would you say your heart is hard or soft toward the gospel? What softens your heart?
By its very nature, self-deceit is hard to recognize in yourself. So, let’s consider: What do you get from your pornography habit? In what ways does your sin satisfy you? What are the promises of sin that you are believing? In contrast, are there promises of God that give you hope?

You may think, “I’m not going to make much of a difference.” Who knows? Your words may be the very lifeline your friend needs to end his turning away from God and to persevere in his faith!
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
The first two As (access and anonymity) deal with external temptations; the second two As (appetite and atheism) reveal the battle in the heart. When fighting sexual sin, we start with restricting access and anonymity. We take a radical approach to cutting off access points and getting rid of opportunities for anonymity.
Limiting open access and anonymity starves the appetite of our sinful nature. But this takes time. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Addictions start early, are cultivated for years, and become ingrained as personal choices begin to rewrite our embodied existence. The longer the addiction has been cultivated, the longer it will take to get rid of it. Ingrained patterns take time to unwind. So be patient. Take a long-term view of starving the appetites of your friend’s sinful nature.
But keep in mind that restricting access and anonymity alone is not an adequate strategy. An addict can cut off access to porn but still wrestle with fleshly desires that rage inside his heart and doubts that fill his mind. At best, when you restrict access, you put a fortified wall around a sin-crazed heart. When an addict develops good habits for fighting external temptations and achieves significant victory over them, the battle often shifts inward. Satan puts more pressure on the struggler’s inner life—his appetites and atheism. The war in the heart becomes more fierce.
Consequently, our strategy shifts. Though we start by taking steps to limit access and anonymity, we then move to focusing on the internal war, in which the appetites of the heart are involved. As disciplers, we spend more time working through an addict’s desires, motivations, and doubts than focusing on limiting access, as important as that is. At the same time, since issues with accessing porn and fighting off temptation consistently come up, we expect them to be a normal part of our conversations.
In this fight, it’s a mistake to take a narrow view of a struggler and become far too focused on her sin. Faith is the wind in a sinner’s sails. Without it, there is no true forward progress. Help her to fight unbelief, root out self-deceit, and grow in her affections for Christ.
Hold out to her the riches of our glorious Savior. After all, what better way to help a porn addict than to repeatedly set her eyes on the cross?
Chapter 3 of the recently released book, Rescue Plan, by Jonathan D. Holmes and Deepak Reju. Used with permission.

Perhaps the price of elite evangelical respectability in the modern academy is adoption of the embarrassment reflex—understood as, in its deepest sense, a willingness to allow the idea of the “social” to displace that of the classically theological at the taproot of intellectual life. Such a displacement demands that evangelicals norm their theological claims against the conclusions of the social sciences, rather than vice versa—or else be tarred with the dreaded label of fundamentalist.

Nearly thirty years ago, Notre Dame historian Mark Noll fired a resounding shot across the bow of his own tradition, declaring boldly that “[t]he scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”[1] Ever since its publication, few books have loomed over evangelical intellectual life more powerfully than The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which laid out what Noll viewed as a devastating indictment of evangelicalism’s incapacity for meaningful engagement with disciplines beyond its boundaries.
Over the decades since, a much more comprehensive evangelical intellectual ecosystem has emerged, partially in response to Noll’s critique. New colleges and universities explicitly interested in cultivating the “life of the mind” have been founded. The catalogs of publishers like Crossway Academic and InterVarsity Press overflow with interdisciplinary efforts to place the evangelical tradition into conversation with topics of current interest. A complex of parachurch groups like the Gospel Coalition, with thoughtful evangelical content ranging from popular to scholarly, has sprung up online. And at the K-12 level, the classical education movement has promoted thoroughgoing engagement with the philosophical and spiritual wisdom of generations past. By virtually any metric, the landscape of evangelical intellectual thought is materially more developed than it was in 1994.
And over those years this matrix of institutions has incubated a new sort of public figure: the elite evangelical. The elite evangelical was educated at top-flight institutions and largely eschews the “culture war” language of Moral Majority forerunners like Jerry Falwell. He reads Christianity Today, listens to Tim Keller sermons, and tends to know far more about J.R.R. Tolkien than J. Gresham Machen. Above all, he is proficient in the use of the word “winsomeness.”
The rise of such a class, however, has not led to much of a rapprochement between America’s evangelicals and an increasingly secular mainstream. Nor has it seemingly engendered a healthier and more unified evangelicalism. Indeed, the recent 2021 General Conference of the Southern Baptist Convention exposed publicly what had already been obvious to many observers for some time: an ugly and deepening rift between these post-Scandal “elite evangelicals” and the rank-and-file members who fill evangelical church pews across the country.
The SBC presidential election victory of “moderate” Ed Litton over conservative hardliner Mike Stone (as well as longtime SBC fixture Al Mohler) was widely perceived as a referendum on the denomination’s alignment with ex-President Donald Trump, but the issues in play transcend any single figure. Many observers were caught off guard by the size and vehemence of the coalition backing Stone’s candidacy, a reflection of the fact that a large and growing faction of lay evangelicals are deeply concerned about their movement’s present trajectory. Chief among their targets is the group of elite evangelical figures—the pastors whose op-eds appear in the New York Times, the writers who pen Gospel Coalition columns, the seminary professors who urge greater interaction with secular academia, and so on—that they derisively describe as “Big Eva,” and view as steering evangelicalism away from theology and toward issues like immigration, racial justice, the environment, and so on.
For those firmly ensconced in the elite evangelical ecosystem, it is easy to write off much of this backlash as a result of escalating political partisanship. Kept out of view is the question of whether any of the alarm is warranted—whether perhaps there’s something in the elite evangelical water that actually does merit their concern. What if the worry that manifests—often inaptly—as complaints about “liberalism,” “cultural Marxism,” and “critical race theory”—has an intelligible root?
Over the last few decades, whenever the political right happens to hold power, there have tended to appear claims that conservative American Christians—particularly evangelicals—are closer than ever to establishing something like an American theocratic caliphate. The Bush years had Damon Linker’s The Theocons; the Trump years had Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshipers and Jeff Sharlet’s The Family Netflix docuseries. Such commentary is downstream of the reality that American evangelicals often figure as the villains of modern academic historiography—characterized chiefly by their opposition to teaching evolution in schools, criticisms of various efforts at promoting civic equality, negativity toward environmental legislation, and so on.
For the elite evangelical who inevitably encounters such vilification within “mainstream academia,” the psychological response produced by all these allegations is likely to prove complex. Elite fears of an real-world Handmaid’s Tale are implausible on their face: at the time of this writing, Republican presidents have appointed twelve out of sixteen Supreme Court justices since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973,[2] and yet have never been able to marshal a majority to overturn that precedent, let alone revise the American constitutional order more dramatically. The most exaggerated versions of these claims don’t even attempt to persuade anyone not already adhering to preexisting secular assumptions.
Instead, for elite evangelicals, the critiques that cut deepest tend to be those that allege that American Christians have betrayed their own tradition in a fundamental way. Three recent books—all of which have sparked much discussion and controversy within evangelical circles—epitomize this sensibility. In Taking Back America for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry argue that American Christians have bred a toxic “Christian nationalism” committed more to acquiring and wielding political power than to living out Christian ideals. In Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, theologians Gregory Thompson and Duke L. Kwon contend that the complicity of the American church in historical racism is so severe that “the language of White supremacy and reparations, now so unfamiliar and awkward, [should] one day become as fixed in the church’s imagination and fundamental to its vocation as the language of repentance and reconciliation is today.”[3] And in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, historian Kristin Kobes du Mez posits that twentieth-century American Christianity was colonized by a toxic nationalist-inflected masculinity, one that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump.
The crucial common feature of these texts is that all of them are, at least in a sense, addressed to evangelicals (or at least point in that direction): they are calls to action of a sort, urging evangelicals to adopt alternative interpretations of their American Christian tradition, without repudiating it altogether, in the name of progress. At the heart of all three books is the conviction that popular evangelicalism as such is on the wrong track—that it needs to be saved from itself through immediate course correction, or risk falling back into a fundamentalist morass.
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