Danger Within: How American Evangelical Subculture Undermines Christianity

Daniel Walsh

Aug 20 · 15 min read

For many years I have struggled earnestly to understand my experience within American Evangelicalism, and I have concluded that the subculture created by evangelicals is undermining Christianity. Writing this is painful, but I believe what I have to say is important as I believe I am not alone in neither my experience nor my understanding.

First, some background. I accepted Christ in response to an altar call during a multi-level marketing meeting as a teenager. I wandered around the faith through college and really committed to it in a Fundamentalist baptist church my senior year. After graduating, I was involved in a Reformed baptist church plant in Boston and after a year there began studying at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. I eventually finished a MDiv after serving internships in PCA, Reformed Baptist, and conservative congregational churches, and accepted a full-time role at a PCA church in Nashville.

Growing up outside the evangelical subculture I felt behind when I entered seminary. Over the ensuing ten years I read voraciously, attended conferences, and generally did as much as I could to understand my faith and how I should faithfully practice it. I was heavily influenced by authors like John Stott, but also by contemporary leaders in the subculture like Tim Keller, John Piper, and Mark Dever.

Throughout my time in the pews I worked to understand why things were done the way they were done, why certain books were read, why certain parts of the Bible were stressed over others, why certain celebrities in the subculture were heretical and others orthodox. By and large I accepted these things as truthful and correct because they were mediated by people I trusted. This was true even when things felt off or out of place.

I left full-time ministry in 2014, and since then I have spent considerable time examining what I believe and how that was shaped by American evangelical subculture. My conclusion is that the subculture is causing significant harm to Christianity in the United States and around the world.

Intellectually Shallow

More than 25 years ago Mark Noll argued in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.” What he meant is that the Fundamentalist withdrawal from public life, which began in the 1880s with Darwin and accelerated after the Scopes trial in 1925, decimated the ability for Christians to engage with issues of the day. For decades, American culture was bereft of thoughtful, critical, engaged points of view by leading evangelical Christians.

Although many Christians have taken up the call to be more engaged in so-called secular areas, the sad reality is that Christian engagement with culture has not matured or even developed into something that can meaningfully engage with secular thought. What has evolved instead is a plethora of literature devoted to producing a “Christian view” on an array of topics.

The assertion of this literature is that a Christian view on a topic is as valid as a feminist view, a Marxist view, a Post-structural view or any other such perspective pervasive across academia. In reality, however, the majority of these arguments speak only to evangelical subculture and do not engage in any meaningful way with thoughts or ideologies of the day. Instead of building an evangelical mind, these attempts feed a self-absorbed culture in which the “Christian worldview” is the only reality worth considering.

Consider the following samples of articles from The Gospel Coalition, an organization that tends to focus its efforts on educated, Reformed, evangelical Christians. One can find “Christian views” on removing statues, which classic books to read and why, being a citizen, the economy, and of course many articles about sexuality.

Rather than building a generation of critically engaged intellectual evangelicals, the last 25 years have created innumerable blogs and Christian books often titled “A Christian View of… ” whose audience is an already convinced, dwindling group of adherents to the evangelical subculture.

Intellectual Lights

The dearth of critical engagement with culture and the lack of understanding among educated American evangelicals has expanded the subculture’s bubble by insulating it with a veneer of intellectualism. Popular writers like John Piper, Kevin DeYoung, and others can pontificate about the Christian view of this or that, citing and recycling scripture, and leveraging logic to convince members of the subculture that what they are saying is true and that ideas “out there” are scary.

Much like me, most Christians in the subculture allow these public figures to filter for them the issues of the day rather than engaging the debates and ideas themselves. The assertion that there is a “Christian view” of every topic enables the layperson to rest comfortably within the boundaries of church, Bible study, and VBS with no concerns that the ideas spouted by these public figures may be false, misleading, uncritical, or just lazy.

Within this literature, every issue is boiled down to a basic formula:

1. A cultural issue arises in public media that seems threatening or confusing to a conservative view of the world
2. A popular Christian author publishes a blog, article, or book stating that this issue is the latest challenge to the Christian way of life and threatens the very foundation of the subculture’s values and practices
3. Biblical passages are filtered to find those that can be used best to address the issue of the day
4. That issue is summarily rejected as antithetical to the above Biblical principle and is to be rejected/feared/opposed
5. The solution to making sure the culture changes to view things as Christians do is to evangelize and pray. After all, proponents of these ideas have no merit in and of themselves if they are outside the Christian bubble. The only way to change them is to convert them and/or pray that God converts them

This may sound harsh, but this is the reality that I observe as I look across the American evangelical landscape. There is no place within the subculture for honest debate about the value offered by different points of view on the world. Only if those ideas can be shrouded with a cloak of Christianity can they be heard, and by the time they get there, the ideas are so stripped of their original purpose as to be meaningless.

A clear example of this phenomenon is evident in a recent piece by Kevin DeYoung entitled, “It’s Time for a New Culture War Strategy.” Responding to the recent Supreme Court ruling in Bostock vs. Clayton County in which the court ruled that “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

DeYoung laments the ruling as the latest step in the ongoing march to remove Christianity from America. Like culture warriors of the Moral Majority before him, DeYoung understands the ruling as an attack on conservative Christian values, writing, “Without explicit legal protections, religious institutions with traditional (read: what has been believed for most of Western history) convictions around homosexuality and transgenderism will likely face a torrent of litigation in the years ahead.”

With others in the subculture, DeYoung is particularly insulted that Justice Gorsuch sided with the majority ruling. Repbulican Senators delayed the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice near the end of Obama’s second term hoping for a Republican presidential victory. With Trump’s victory in 2016, many of the 82% of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump did so with the expressed hope of Trump delivering to them “conservative” justices who would judge in line with conservative Christian values. Gorsuch ruled against what many in the subculture believed to be the right side of the issue delivering a sledgehammer strike to the entire apparatus upon which evangelical support for Republicans generally, and Trump specifically, was built.

Reeling from this defeat, DeYoung offers a particularly deranged solution to the culture war that only someone who spends the majority of their life immersed in the evangelical subculture could conjure or understand: have more babies. I truly wish I was kidding, but here are the words of DeYoung,

Here’s a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and disciple them like crazy….Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15)? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children….It’s time for happy warriors who seek to “renew the city” and “win the culture war” by investing in their local church, focusing on the family, and bringing the kingdom to bear on the world, one baby at a time.

In the same article he says he applauds Christians in public service, politics, and the like and believes that Christians need to be engaged in those areas. But when it comes down to it, the solution for DeYoung and for the subculture as a whole, is to retreat into the safe confines of the evangelical subcultural bubble to pray and evangelize. In this case, it is best to retreat deeply until a generation from now when evangelicals can reemerge and win the culture war through brute populational force.

Christian leaders who espouse solutions like this did not learn from the mistakes of the Fundamentalists and they ignore the calling of Mark Noll. Retreating deeper into the subculture will not save the subculture or the culture around it. In many ways, the retreat is a form of surrender that is unfaithful to the God whom they claim to serve.

Intellectual Laziness

The lack of honest intellectual engagement makes the church increasingly irrelevant in America, suffocates members of the subculture, and enables narcissistic leaders to flourish.

Increasingly Irrelevant

Elite America does not care what Christians have to say because evangelical Christians cannot produce anything worth hearing. Representatives of the movement like Russell Moore are only given a voice when issues touch on the subculture, such as the recent Supreme Court ruling discussed above. Nobody outside the subculture knew that Christians were concerned about it, and nobody cared, because it essentially codified federally what was already true in many states.

People like Moore, despite his honest and humble efforts, are not convincing anyone because the subculture is more accurately represented by the Franklin Graham’s and Jerry Falwell Jr.’s of the world. Evangelicals voted 82% for Donald Trump believing he would deliver to them cultural victories in the form of judges. Their worldview was shattered by the recent ruling and their utter lack of intellectual depth was laid bare.

Despite Noll’s call for greater intellectual depth, evangelical subculture has not evolved. What Noll desired and argued for was the growth of public intellectuals like Reinhold and H. Richard Niebhuhr in the 1950s and 1960s, thinkers with deep faith and true intellectual prowess that could speak to both believers and non-believers credibly. Instead, what the subculture has produced are Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Ralph Reed, and Ken Eldred.

While many educated evangelical Christians lament being lumped together with some of these men and roll their eyes everytime Pat Robertson opens his mouth, the truth is most American evangelicals have more in common with them than they realize. So much of the subculture has been boiled down to politics and beliefs on moral issues over the past 40 years that separating orthodox Christian faith from what the subculture promotes through its blogs, bookstores, and conferences is nearly impossible.

The subculture has so thoroughly consumed the market that separating what the Bible teaches from how the subculture instructs Christians to behave is monumentally difficult. Separating from the subculture is particularly difficult because to separate from it is to become “liberal,” and in many cases shunned by fellow members of one’s church community. This is extremely painful and difficult for most people.

Suffocating

The subculture retains its power in myriad ways. The idea of a Christian worldview is one aspect of its power.

Pretending that every issue has a Christian view suffocates thinking within the church. The phrase “christian worldview” is new and coincides with the rise of the Moral Majority and the evangelical right. It has almost nothing to do with actual Biblical scholarship, and everything to do with American conservatives hoping to maintain their way of life through politics.

Below is a chart from Google of the appearance of the phrase “christian worldview” in published literature between 1800 and 2008. Its rapid adoption demonstrates its recent provenance and indicates that it is an invention concurrent with the culture wars raging in the United States since Roe v. Wade in the 1970s.

“christian worldfiew” in published literature 1800–2008 (Google)

Strictly speaking it is not wrong to believe that Christianity offers a particular understanding of the world. In many ways, general and special revelation speak to the unique understanding Christianity offers of why the world is the way it is. Christianity understands the fundamental human problem to be sin and its consequences.

Condensing everything into a Christian worldview creates at least two issues. First, it forces every issue to be stripped and boxed in a way that is relatively simplistic. Second, because condensing complex issues into manageable bits is difficult, responsibility for doing so falls to a Christian elite who have their own agendas.

Let’s consider a couple examples. Although the terminology of Christian worldview is new, the genesis of this way of thinking is found in the late 19th century debates over evolution. Darwin’s theories presented a radically new problem to Christian faith. Arguing that species evolved from more primitive forms undercut the foundational belief in creation and the imago Dei. Because the Bible was not written as a scientific text, Christians worked diligently to reinterpret verses and stories in ways that would answer the evolutionary challenge to creationism.

Responding to evolution created a methodology and a new way of understanding the Bible that now manifests in assertions of Christian views. The prime contemporary example is Christian views on abortion. Again, not being a science manual, the Bible does not directly address the issue, and so Christians must extrapolate from existing verses an argument against it that fits general biblical principles.

Efforts to understand the complex modern world through Scripture written more than 2000 years ago within a radically different cultural context is a laudable task. The problem is that the Bible simply does not speak to every single issue. It was not meant to. I think a key element Christians miss when attempting this sort of discourse is to ignore the gift of reason. Whatever we understand the imago Dei to be, part of it is surely our ability to reason. Because of that gift, proper Christian intellect should be guided by our faith, but it cannot be restricted only to it. Engaging useful arguments and ideas by thinkers outside the bubble is valuable, responsible, and necessary. If Christians want to have a say in the world, their arguments have to say more than they do now. Christian arguments on most topics generally boil down to, “The Bible says so.” There is not an audience for that distilled view of reality outside the subculture.

The second part of this issue is how willingly evangelicals outsource their thinking to local pastors and Christian celebrities. In Bostock vs. Clayton County, for example, very few Christians, honestly very few Americans, understand the Supreme Court, how it functions, and what the meaning of rulings are. In order to appreciate how an issue like that may or may not affect one as a Christian means turning to a source like Kevin DeYoung for a distilled implication of what that ruling means.

This reality gets to the heart of a deep problem within the subculture. If the average evangelical Christian is content to let the issues of the day be explained to them by a select group of “trusted” sources, there is no hope in developing a thoughtful evangelical mind. Instead, the subculture creates a set of guardians for the community that set the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. When these leaders propose wild interpretations or solutions, what tools does the average believer have to fight the distilled truth of trusted advisors?

Narcissism Flourishes

The reality of cultural guardians within the subculture leads to my final point. Narcissism flourishes within the evangelical subculture. Evidence of this reality is apparent from the experiences of many fellow seminarians as well as my own experiences, but it is also documented and discussed in a new book entitled, “When Narcissism Comes to Church.”

Convincing well-meaning, average Christians that there is a Christian view on every issue that can be mediated by church leadership and popular authors communicates that leaders are the ones who can do the hard thinking for people and that those mediated truths are to be adopted as true. The only alternative to the “Christian view” is by default the “secular view” and a secular view on anything is automatically heretical and a slippery slope to disbelief. Any earnest Christian keen to maintain their faith must then ignore those other views and absorb the mediated views of approved Christian leaders.

The constructed assumption of mediated truth enables narcissism to arise, grab power, and wreak havoc across the church landscape. If the world outside the subculture is replete with scary secularists working 24/7 to undue Christianity’s rightful place in America, and the only defense against that enemy is prayer and evangelism as mediated through a Christian worldview, then my local pastor who knows the truth about these things is to be trusted at all cost. Because pastors and elders hold so much power within their congregations, and because narcissists are so good at being charismatic while actually harming countless people within the church, they can flourish under the banner of providing mediated truth to a hungry congregation.

It is hard to know how widespread narcissism is within church leadership, but my own experience and that of many fellow seminary graduates indicates that churches across denominations and states are led by elders and pastors who think far too highly of their own gifts and continue to lead despite leaving a trail of hurt people in their wakes.

As long as American Christians continue to see themselves as victims of a decades-long culture war and filter all of their understanding through popular Christian authors and local pastors rather than reading and appreciating other intellectual currents, the church in America will continue to be an excellent place for narcissists to flourish.

Conclusion

I write all of this for a couple of reasons. One, I write because writing helps me understand and grapple with the pain and confusion I have experienced in my 15 years within the evangelical subculture. I gave significant portions of my life and accumulated student loan debt in order to understand Christianity as deeply as possible and to learn to lead a church that could reach a hurting world.

Now that I am no longer in ministry I wonder what it was all for. I believe that God is in control and that nothing in life is random, and so I wonder again and again what purpose He could possibly have for the education I received and the pain and frustration I experienced. Perhaps speaking into the culture from which I come as an outsider now living outside the United States is part of His purpose.

Two, I write with the hope that there is a better way. Experiencing Christianity outside the United States opens one’s eyes to how self-interested American evangelicalism is. American evangelicals do not think of themselves as inward focused given how much money and resources are given to missions and how lauded within the culture foreign missionaries are. However, the missionary culture partly enables American evangelicals to remain in their bubbles, letting certain people go out and do work abroad instead of honestly learning from faithful brothers and sisters around the world.

I have attended multiple churches in different countries all of which are led by faithful Christians who would pass most evangelical theological tests in the United States. What distinguishes these churches from the subculture is their lack of preoccupation with issues that do not really matter to the cause of the Gospel. They are not preoccupied with Supreme Court cases, saying Merry Christmas, or whether their elected leaders pray or attend church.

In foreign nations, especially in post-Christian ones in which I have lived, Christians care about faithfulness, discipleship, and evangelism. They recognize that their beliefs are out of step with the dominant cultures in which they live but they do not spend time fretting about the loss of some amorphous golden past that never was. Instead, they focus on building community, worshipping God, and learning to live faithfully in their communities.

My experiences of these Christians more faithfully mirrors what the Bible teaches a Christian life should look like. In a fallen world, Christians are called to faithfulness. We are called to understand our faith, to pray, to work, and to think. We are not called to be misled by the foolish distractions of culture wars, nor are we called to long for a golden past age in which Christians had more sway. That past never existed in the way the subculture believes it did. New Jerusalem is the only golden age to which we have to look, and that is a reality for the future, not the past.

It is difficult to write this. While I care about the state of the church in the United States and about the cause of Christianity generally, by writing this and sharing it, I will be dismissed by those I am trying to reach as either a liberal or a heretic. I am neither of these things, but because the subculture reduces everything to binary choices, evangelicals are left without a category in which to put me. This reality deeply saddens me, but it is my belief that other Christians in America feel as I do. Perhaps this will help them feel comfortable speaking, and maybe change will come.

• Evangelicalism
• Christianity

WRITTEN BY

Daniel Walsh

Occasional writer, constant learner. All opinions expressed are my own.