End Times for Evangelicals...Continued from page 1

James Emery White

“The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that expunged political and theological moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention are retiring or dying off, too. And in September, when I called a spokesman for the ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James Kennedy, another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I learned that Kennedy had “gone home to the Lord” at 2 a.m. that morning.

“Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors ? including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels ? are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty ? problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.”

Most would agree that contemporary American evangelicalism has been a patchwork quilt of organizations and networks held together by a few central personalities, most notably Billy Graham. Yet the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently discovered that nearly one out of every three Americans under the age of 30 have never even heard of Billy Graham. 

And while younger evangelicals may hold to traditional values, they do not like how those values have been espoused.  In a previous Update, I discussed the research of Steve Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons; how many of many of those outside of the Christian faith, specifically those between the ages of 16-29, think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind. We’re seen as hyper-political, pushy in our beliefs, arrogant, homophobic, hypocritical, and judgmental. What I did not mention is how this is not simply the perception of young “outsiders,” but those inside the church as well. Young Christians are raising the same challenges and concerns to the Christian faith as those outside of the faith.

And younger evangelicals have little interest in the culture wars typified by the

Moral Majority of the 80’s. Rather than critiquing culture, they are more interested in “making” it, engaging it, infiltrating it. So rather than condemning films, they want to make them; rather than simply condemn homosexuality, they want to redemptively embrace homosexuals as people and serve those most impacted by the AIDS pandemic; rather than immediately aligning all things “environmental” with a left-wing conspiracy, they want to go green and combat global warming.