Evangelical Bait and Switch

A friend sent me a document recently entitled An Evangelical Manifesto. It was composed by some well-known Evangelicals leaders like author Os Guinness and Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Seminary.

The manifesto is addressed both to fellow believers and to the wider world. It's purpose is to clarify what it means to be an Evangelical and to clear up misconceptions about the role of Evangelicals in public life.

Early on, the authors of the manifesto outline seven traits that should characterize the Evangelical community. The fifth trait really caught my eye.

The fifth trait is that "... the Evangelical message ... is overwhelmingly positive ..." While acknowledging that Evangelicals must sometimes make strong judgments about things that are false or unjust or evil, the authors believe that "... first and foremost we Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything.

They continue, "The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism. It is a colossal Yes to life and human aspirations and an emphatic No only to what contradicts our true destiny as human beings made in the image of God."

Sign me up! That sounds really good. After all, the authors are trying, in part, to address the public perceptions of Evangelicals and that perception, rightly or wrongly, is that we are grumpy, self-righteous killjoys. Anything that calls Evangelicalism to proclaim a positive message is welcome.

But my warm feelings toward the manifesto did not last. Just three pages later, the authors begin an all out assault on their fellow Evangelicals. In twelve lengthy paragraphs that begin with the phrase, "All too often we have ________ ", they outline a seemingly endless list of moral failures and misguided agendas that have characterized the Evangelical community in the Western world. According to the authors, Evangelicals have:

• Replaced Biblical truths with therapeutic techniques.


• Turned worship into entertainment.


• Substituted growth in human potential for Christian discipleship.


• Measured success by growth in numbers instead of growth in character.


• Practiced a "vapid" (dull, insipid) spirituality.


• Catered to felt needs instead of real needs.


• Preached a feel-good gospel of health and wealth and human potential instead of a gospel of sacrifice and suffering.


• Claimed to govern our lives by Biblical standards but we live lives that are shaped more by our sinful preferences.


• Used worldly techniques and methods to grow our churches.


• Failed to demonstrate the unity of the Body of Christ by ever increasing splits into denominations and factions that end up at war with each other.


• Denied the supernatural in our everyday lives and lived more like secularists and atheists and rarely claim to have encountered or experienced God.


• Attacked the evils and injustices committed by others (like abortion) but condoned our own sins like materialism and consumerism.


• Failed to see how the doctrine of creation requires us to be good stewards of the environment and the earth.


• Valued individualism rather than a sense of community.


• Become anti-intellectual and given the world the impression that there is a conflict between faith and science [this seems to be directed against those Evangelicals who are anti-evolution and/or 6-Day Creationists or Intelligent Design advocates].


• Practiced defacto racism by having churches that are largely segregated.


• Catered to the rich and powerful and failed to take care of the poor and marginalized.


• Been more concerned with being relevant than in proclaiming the truth.

Believe it or not, I've actually left a few items out of the list above just because I could not think of a brief way of expressing some of the complaints!

Now, is it just me, or do these two aspects of the manifesto seem completely at odds with one another?

On the one hand, the authors want people, especially those outside of the Evangelical community, to know that we Evangelicals are a positive bunch who proclaim the good news of grace and forgiveness and liberation. On the other hand, if you are part of our community, they want you to know that you are guilty of a long list of failures and shortcomings and they will be only too happy to point them out to you both loudly and frequently.

It seems like a sort of bait and switch. "Come join us. We believe in grace and forgiveness and the fulfillment of human aspirations", they say. But, "Now that you have joined up, may we speak frankly with you about what a total screw up you are?"

Some might say these two thoughts are NOT incompatible at all. Forgiveness, it can be argued, presupposes recognition of our wrong doing along with confession and repentance.

But the attitude betrayed by the laundry list of sins approach employed by the authors of the manifesto seems so contrary to the Jesus I see in the gospels. It seems unlike the way Jesus deals with the woman at the well and the woman caught in adultery and the man with a legion of demons. A man born blind, a sure sign of some serious sin in Jesus' day, is not castigated but healed.

In fact, the only time Jesus seems to react as harshly to moral failures as the authors of the manifesto do is when he is dealing with people who are like the authors -- with the Pharisees and Sadducees and Scribes who were the authors and professional clergy and seminary presidents of his day. Their pious attitudes are really a cover for self-righteousness. Jesus sees through it and nails them.

And this brings me to the aspect of this whole issue that bugs me. I find it hard to believe that the authors of the manifesto feel that they themselves are guilty of any of the long list of sins which they identify. They are not remorseful over their own sins; they are upset with the sins of others.

C. S. Lewis observed this phenomenon in his day in a slightly different context and wrote about it in an essay entitle The Dangers of National Repentance. He points out that many Christians in the post-WWII era were calling on England to repent of her sins related to the recently concluded war.

The idea of national repentance, Lewis says, seems like an edifying contrast to the national self-righteousness which England is said to have exercised in entering WWII. He notes that young Christians, especially recent college graduates and first year seminary students, were attracted to this idea in large numbers. They were willing to believe that England bore some guilt for the events that led to the war and were ready to admit their share in that guilt.

But Lewis finds it difficult to determine what their share of the guilt might be. Most of the young advocates of national repentance were children when England made decisions that led to the war. What exactly are they repenting of?

Lewis points out that England is not a natural agent but a civil society. To speak of England's actions is to speak of the actions of those who ran the British Government. To repent of England's actions is to repent of the actions of other individuals -- people like a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet member.

Lewis concludes that "The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn form the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing -- but, first, of denouncing -- the conduct of others."

If these young advocates of national repentance realized this and applied the law of charity (Jesus admonition about the speck in your neighbor's eye versus the log in your own eye), all would be well. But the young national penitent calls the government not "they" but "we". They will say, "Let us repent of our national sins." but what they really mean is "Let us attribute to our neighbor in the Cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy."

This escape from personal repentance into the pleasure of condemning others is attractive to all of us. It is doubly attractive, Lewis says, to the young British intellectual of post-WWII Britain.

He points out that a typical working class Englishman over 40 was raised to love his country and repenting of England's sins for such a person would truly by costly and difficult. But the young British intellectual has been raised to distrust his country. All of the arts, literature and politics he has read have encouraged him to be angry and resentful of his own country.

So, when they say that "we British people" should repent, they are not mortifying, but actually indulging, their ruling passion. And they are ignoring the communal sins that are rampant in their own community -- their contempt for the uneducated, their readiness to suspect evil in others, their self-righteousness, their breaches of the Fifth Commandment.

What Lewis points out about the dangers of national repentance applies equally to the corporate repentance that is being urged by the authors of the manifesto. I find it so hard to believe that they see themselves as guilty of this laundry list of sins. As I scan down the list of contributors, they mostly seem to be highly educated elites who have spent their careers writing and speaking about their vision of Evangelicalism -- a vision that sees Evangelicalism as consistently misguided and in need of the reforms that they urge upon us.

And yet, I find myself conflicted. I've read books by a lot of the authors of the manifesto and have found them helpful. Dallas Willard in particular has been very insightful at times. I don't want to castigate them and treat them in the same way that they seem to be treating others.

But I guess I'd like them to read the C. S. Lewis essay on the dangers of national/corporate repentance and see if they think it has any application to themselves. I'd like to urge them to read the New Testament and see if any of their own attitudes are similar the the Pharisees of Jesus day.

And, if the authors of the manifesto truly feel that they themselves have been guilty of the sins they identify, it would be more helpful if they would repent of them personally. It would be especially helpful if they would do this quietly and privately and only let us know about it by starting their own church or community that reflects the attitudes and actions that they feel should characterize a truly Evangelical group. Show us its goodness and holiness and invite us into this positive, affirming, welcoming message of grace and forgiveness. They would then be living up to their own "fifth trait" of Evangelicalism.

For others, I heartily recommend the C. S. Lewis essay discussed above. I tried to find it online so I could give you a link to it. I could not find the text of the essay online but you can find it in the book entitled God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Read The Dangers of National Repentance along with the 47 other Lewis essays in that volume. I think your spiritual life will be much more enriched than it ever would be by reading and following the advice of the manifesto.

As always, your comments, especially those in disagreement with my reflections on the manifesto, are welcomed and encouraged.