This
special edition of The Galli Report is not a definitive report on
the topic announced above, but a number of recent articles tell us
at least something about our current state.
As
far as pure numbers go, minority evangelicals continue to grow, as
white evangelicals continue to shrink, so that "1 in 3 American
Evangelicals Is Now a Person of Color."
The American religious landscape has undergone dramatic changes in the last decade, and is more diverse today than at any time since modern sociological measurements began," reported PRRI on its 2016 American Values Atlas, based on more than 101,000 bilingual surveys between January 2016 and January 2017. In fact, the number of nonwhite Protestants has grown so large that the group has surpassed white mainline Protestants and has nearly caught up with white evangelical Protestants.
In
fact, minority issues are driving the conversation among us more than
ever—right now, mainly immigration, racism, and national
politics. These three come together in the controversies surrounding
President Trump's evangelical advisory board. After Charlottesville,
many condemned members for not resigning after
Trump's ambiguous remarks about the riot. When to remain and when to
resign such commissions is more complex for
evangelicals than critics allow. Many remain, yes, because they
want to publicly support Trump and his policies. Others remain for
pastoral reasons—because they want to be able to speak to
the president about their pressing issues and hopefully shape his
views.
Tony
Suarez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference
(NHCLC) is one of the latter, and his boss, Sammy Rodriguez, president
of NHCLC, is not reticent to criticize
the president. Regarding Trump's rescinding of DACA, Rodriguez
"directly communicated to his disappointment" to the president and
publicly said, "Hundreds of thousands of Hispanic young people will be
overcome with fear and grief today."
As
readers of this Report know, we continue to be divided over how to
negotiate the many issues surrounding race, including what to do with
statues that honor Confederate leaders (I've received more feedback on
these posts than any other since I started this Report!). The larger
point is that as a movement, we're more open about our political and
social disagreements than ever, which is good. It nearly goes without
saying that we could use a little more charitable listening to one
another.
Another controversial issue is human sexuality. The
recent Nashville Statement
was an attempt at clarifying evangelical distinctives on this topic,
but it only managed to muddy the waters and divide evangelicals
among themselves—and raise a firestorm of protest from those
outside the movement. I found the most helpful responses to come from
Matthew Lee Anderson at
Mere Orthodoxy and Mark
Yarhouse on his blog.
The
Nashville Statement furor is not just about human sexuality but
also
evangelical identity. We are a reform movement that wants to be
relevant to the times and faithful to the gospel, and that means
we'll constantly worrying whether in the interest of relevancy
we're
watering down the gospel, or in the interests of the gospel, we
are
speaking in ways that our culture doesn't understand. I'm of the
view that this is a healthy tension. During such controversies,
some
believe that the rift between the parties signals an unbridgeable
divide. But this sort of dispute has been with us since the Great
Awakening, when we divided over whether the revivals were
excessive
emotionalism or extraordinary movements of the Spirit. Today,
nearly all evangelicals affirm the traditional orthodox sexuality as
taught
in Scripture, and now we're trying to fine tune how to talk about
that and how we deal with that in our churches.
In
sum: There was a time not long ago when evangelicals were criticized
for being overly concerned about sexuality and other private matters
and disengaged from social and political issues. That is no longer
the case. It's a both/and world for us right now.
One
redeeming feature of the movement is our willingness to not take
ourselves seriously all the time (the ongoing temptation of reform
movements). Thus the continuing popularity of evangelical satire,
from The Wittenburg Door to The Babylon Bee to John Crist videos, like "How It's Made: Christian
Music."
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Grace and peace,
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Monday, September 11, 2017
The State of Evangelical Christianity
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