For all their talk of evenhandedness, winsomeness, and giving others the benefit of the doubt, these ideals are tossed out the window the minute the discussion turns to matters that conservatives deeply care about and are willing to advocate for at the political level. As Christians, we should call out this double standard for what it is: hypocrisy. The term “white evangelical” has become purely pejorative in both secular and professedly-Christian news outlets.

We live in contentious times. With virtually every major event or story comes a flood of news reports from both major news outlets and a seemingly endless array of bloggers and podcasters, and these reports demonstrate the sharp ideological differences between various segments of our Western population. It can be difficult for Christians to find trustworthy voices that both report the facts and give sound, biblical insight into current events.
In the midst of this clamor, one group of evangelical cultural commentators has branded itself as the most “nuanced” and “balanced” segment of the Church when it comes to hot-button issues. They continually decry partisanship, calling for both sides of the political aisle to work together and for Christians to be a winsome presence to their surrounding culture. On the surface, this sounds quite laudable. Over time, however, it has become apparent that their version of “balanced” and “nuanced” reporting is consistently slanted in one direction—that is, to the political and cultural Left.
What makes this group difficult to identify is that they often don’t explicitly affirm many of the standard “progressive” or “liberal” dogmas. Because of this, they don’t completely fit within the parameters of what is traditionally labeled “progressive evangelicalism.” Some of them even have a reputation for being “moderate conservatives.” However, I contend that the label of “progressive-lite” is appropriate for this group. Rather than openly subscribing to a full-blown progressive ideology, their public output is characterized by a pattern or disposition that consistently marches to the drumbeat of the Left to the detriment of Christians on the Right.
This leftward slant is evidenced in at least three ways:
1. Presenting “Niceness” as the Solution to Society’s Problems
Individuals in this group downplay any kind of conflict between Christians and those who hold to opposing worldviews. The term “culture war” is always either discouraged or radically redefined. For example, in an article with the tagline “Our ideological opponents are not the enemy,” Russell Moore argues that Christians should never consider themselves engaged in spiritual warfare against other human beings, no matter how hostile they are to the gospel. He writes “there are indeed malevolent spiritual beings in the universe, usually imperceptible to us. These beings mean us harm. They are not our fellow image bearers.” This then “frees us to rage against the old reptile of Eden but constrains us to be gentle toward his prey (2 Tim. 2:23–26).”
Moore and others continually give the impression that what is really causing all of our cultural and political woes is not an irreconcilable clash of truth claims but rather an inability to talk things out and work through our differences in a civilized manner. Their takeaways can frequently be boiled down to, “We should just be nicer to each other.”[1]
While Christians should certainly strive to be kind and gracious towards others as much as possible (Col. 4:5–6; 1 Peter 3:13–17), the idea that our societal problems can be solved with sweet words, listening ears, and thoughtful conversations is problematic for at least two reasons. This solution is, at best, a hollow shell of the actual content of the gospel. The Christian message to society is not “let’s be nice” but rather “repent and believe.” If our solution to a society plagued with open rebellion against our Maker is nothing more substantial than what can be heard on a secular children’s show, then we need to stop and reevaluate just how “Christian” our message really is.
Beyond this, there will inevitably be some form of conflict in a society between those who strive to live according to God’s truth and those who openly and actively set themselves in opposition to such truth. This does not mean that Christians will rise up in arms to do physical battle against their opponents (2 Cor. 10:3–6), but it does at times call for something other than “niceness.” We see this repeatedly in Scripture: Old Testament prophets, New Testament apostles, and even Jesus himself would engage in sharp invectives against those who would either oppress or lead astray God’s people (e.g., Ps. 137; Obadiah; Matt. 23; Gal. 5:12; Rev. 18). In fact, Jesus’s command to love our enemies (Matt. 5:44; cf. Phil. 3:18–19) presupposes that we will, in fact, have human enemies, and we fail to love both our enemies and our fellow Christians by pretending otherwise. As Rosaria Butterfield puts it, “We love our enemies, defining both love and enemy as the Bible teaches.”[2]
Doing so, however, requires us to distinguish between the tax collectors and prostitutes who are genuinely seeking Christ on the one hand, and the Pharisaical elites who are actively opposing him on the other. When it comes to cultural influencers and political activists on the Left, progressive-lite evangelicals erroneously tend to treat them like good-faith seekers instead of dangerous wolves.
2. Applying a Double Standard between the Left and the Right
Progressive-lite evangelicals pride themselves on striving for balance and nuance in political and cultural discussions. They regularly exhort Christians not to outright reject those who disagree with them on the Left but instead to see those on that side as ultimately sharing the same end-goals, even if they differ in the methods to achieve them.[3] Instead of actively opposing them, we should give them grace and strive to come to a mutual understanding, or so they say.
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Written by Michael J. Kruger |
Friday, April 7, 2023
For those interested in the formation of the earliest Christian movement, After Jesus Before Christianity will be a fascinating read. It offers a number of provocative claims that will surely elicit reflection and curiosity in the reader. And it does make some helpful points that need to be made: e.g., early Christianity was more diverse than we typically think; women were valued in the early Christian movement. However, time and again, the authors seem to push well beyond what the evidence can bear. 

I think it’s fair to say that the last decade has witnessed a bit of a resurgence of academic interest in early Christianity.
By “early Christianity,” I don’t mean the Christianity represented by the major figures in the fourth and fifth centuries when the church had risen to power—e.g., Athanasius, Constantine, Augustine. Rather, I am referring to the time period immediately after the apostles, mainly the second and third centuries, when Christianity was still in its infancy, struggling to find its way in a hostile Roman world.
Recent books covering this critical time period (and sometimes more periods) include Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity (2011), Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods (2016), my own Christianity at the Crossroads (2017), Bart Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity (2018), and James Edwards, From Christ to Christianity (2021).
So, why all the interest? I think scholars are realizing afresh something that we have always known, namely that the validity of the later (and fuller) version of Christianity is dependent, at least somewhat, upon whether its core features can be traced back to the earlier stages of Christianity.
And if this cannot be done, if it can be shown that there is a radical gap between the two, then we might conclude that the Christianity that arose to dominance is not the “real” Christianity after all. Rather, it is just a man-made construction—born of politics or power or just random chance—that is out of sync with the earlier (and more authentic) version.
Then we might conclude that this earlier (more authentic) version of the faith has been suppressed and forgotten for all these generations. And then we might wish there were scholars brave enough to recover that lost version of the faith for us, restoring it to its proper place.
Well, if someone has such a wish, it can be realized in the latest volume, After Jesus Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements (HarperOne, 2021). It is authored by Erin Vearncombe, Brandon Scott, and Hal Taussig—all writing on behalf of the Westar Institute (effectively the umbrella organization for the well-known Jesus Seminar).
A Bold Thesis
If the foreword by Sue Monk Kidd is any indication, the thesis of this volume certainly does not lack in boldness: “You are about to read a book that possesses the potential to rewrite history, namely, the long-held ‘master-narrative’ of how Christianity came to be” (xi). And what is this “master narrative” the book intends to rewrite? It’s the belief that “‘Christianity’ acted as a unified, continuous early tradition in unbroken line representing a single truth” (3).
In other words, the book aims to show that there is a radical gap between the later version of Christianity and its earlier iterations. While the later version might look stable and unified, the early stage of Christianity was a diverse, vibrant “kaleidoscope” of different views—a mosaic of “many-shaped tiles”—that defy neat categorizations and traditional labels (3).
The authors put it bluntly, “In the first two centuries, what we think of as ‘Christianity’ did not exist” (4).
Walter Bauer Revisited
Of course, anyone familiar with 20th century scholarship on early Christianity will quickly recognize that this overall thesis is not new. Walter Bauer’s 1934 volume, Heresy and Orthodoxy in Earliest Christianity, essentially made these same claims about radical diversity in the earliest centuries, and how “orthodoxy” was merely the result of the stabilization of the church in the 4th/5th century. Indeed, much of modern critical scholarship on early Christianity has been built on the Bauer paradigm (in some form or another).
Now, while Bauer’s thesis has been roundly (and some would say decisively) critiqued, he did get some things right. For one, it is fair to say that these earliest centuries of the Christian faith had a lot more theological-doctrinal diversity than we typically recognize.
And the same is true of the present volume. At a number of points, it rightly recognizes that these early centuries were quite different than the later centuries, and we need to understand those differences better.
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Any institution that potentially competes with the influence of the regime (e.g., families, churches, other private associations or subsidiary units of government) is opposed, usually through subversion rather than open hostility. Thus, the individual is made a fit subject of the regime by a process of emancipating the individual from any non-regime source of authority and alienating the individual from any competing human societies. Culture war flare-ups, like CRT, LGBTQ+ activism and COVID-19 are merely the most visible effects of the deeper tectonic project. 

Part 1: An Explainer
This is part 1 of a series explaining the concept of the regime, how it relates to Christians and their institutions, and how it should be opposed.
Why has the pace of social change increased so rapidly over the last 15 years? Why have all major institutions in society become intellectual monoliths committed to the same shibboleths in policy and practice? Why have the people who comprise these institutions become so cowed, apparently incapable of meaningful dissent or critical thought? How have facially absurd ideas, like COVID-19 hysteria, transgender transitions for minors and ESG investing criteria come to so thoroughly mainstream institutions and crush dissent? The best explanatory framework for these dizzying developments is the idea that a new regime has ascended.
You will encounter this term regime if you spend five minutes on right-wing Twitter or in the pages of New Right publications. The phrase may strike you as odd at first, especially since it is often used to refer to non-governmental actors. But the phrase is vital. It can be defined with precision. It names something real that might otherwise escape notice. And it has incredible explanatory power in deciphering why social “progress,” often facially insane and politically unpopular, has so quickly advanced.
If you want a quick and dirty heuristic for identifying the regime, just look for any institutions that fly its banner – the Progress Flag.
But if you want a more precise understanding of the regime, read on. I propose the following:
A set of public, quasi-public and private actors exercising coordinated power for the purposes of advancing a shared agenda for social and political control.
The definition includes actors typically considered to be part of any regime – i.e., governmental actors – but also much more. And crucially, the regime is not under the control of the electoral process. Now, to be fair, conservatives have long decried how the administrative state inevitably grows and is impervious to reform-minded presidential administrations. Even the most wildly successful conservative administrations succeed only in temporarily halting its growth.  And of course, substantive administrative law is laden with one-way ratchets that quickly facilitate progressive expansion but make rollback of progressive agenda items nearly impossible. So far, this may all sound like a traditional conservative account.
But we must next consider the interactions between formal government actors and quasi-public actors – actors that are technically private, but in fact function under administrative state control because of expansive financial or other regulatory controls. Some of these quasi-public actors are professional associations or other bodies with licensing functions who have de facto monopolies over certain regulatory functions and play a pivotal role in the work of the administrative state (i.e., regulatory rulemakings, adjudications and licensure). Examples include various licensing and accreditation agencies, the American Medical Association and bar associations.  In other cases, the administrative state commandeers quasi-public actors in order to further policy goals through expansive uses of existing statutory authority (e.g., higher education and Title IX, or DEI requirements amongst government contractors).
Finally, this regime expands outward even to actors traditionally considered to be entirely private. In some cases, the regulatory state is the explicit cause of such coordinated action – the SEC, for example, now requires companies to disclose certain ESG metrics and in some states, public companies are even subjected to DEI requirements for their boards or executive teams. In other cases, America’s security apparatus exerts pressure through means that we cannot entirely ascertain, but appear to be effective – the CIA and FBI, for example, now routinely coordinate with social media companies to suppress certain viewpoints and factual reporting. But in most cases, companies voluntarily participate in the social change agenda, walking in lockstep even in cases where doing so demonstrably imperils the bottom line.
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