How the Evangelical Left Changed

Considering the difference between liberals and radicals

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Christianity produced a form of government that resolves conflict by debate rather than force. Liberal civil society tolerates even deep disagreements in order to maintain a stable, peaceful way of life. I am opposed to radicalism of every kind because radicals break down civil society in the pursuit of abstract justice. They criminalize those who disagree with them.

How does my political credo apply to the right and the left today? Do I think all partisans are radicals? What is the difference between a progressive and a radical leftist, or a conservative and a radical right-winger? Are there unique dangers for evangelicals at each extreme?

In future posts, I will analyze these issues on the right. For now, let’s consider the many evangelicals who feel at home on the left.

In Britain and Europe, such is the historical norm. British evangelicals were a fixture in the Labour party from the beginning, and most of them did not embrace the Tory Margaret Thatcher. In 1987, I had tea with a punchy old lady in Didcot Baptist Church near Oxford. The billboards from Thatcher’s third thumping election victory were still up. I commented on them, expecting that the lady would be happy, just as most American evangelicals approved of Ronald Reagan. “Oh, I don’t like her!” she said with a growl. But we kept talking.

People forget that American evangelicals before 1977 were neither politically mobilized nor reliable Republicans. They were working class, agrarian, small town folk. They didn’t own stocks. They didn’t like corporations or country clubs. To be sure, evangelicals were offended by the counterculture in the late 1960s and early 70s. But they voted for Jimmy Carter by a narrow margin in 1976.

What changed?

Carter mobilized evangelicals for Republicans when he promoted abortion rights. After 1977, the majority of evangelicals shifted decisively rightward.

But a significant minority of evangelicals were still politically liberal. Abortion and sexuality, they thought, should not eclipse other social concerns like homelessness, racism, and poverty. Tony Campolo, for example, was a leader of the evangelical left for decades, arguing that the Bible had more to say about social equality than Republican activists like Jerry Falwell wanted to admit.

Thus, evangelical churches in the 1980s had both Republicans and Democrats. It is jarring to recall that my pastor in those years debated for the pro-life cause at the local state university and also favored a nuclear freeze. A mixture of stances like that was not unusual in those days.

Such was the comity of the time. There were furious political debates in America, but life was bigger than your opinion of sanctions on South Africa, federal spending, or Gary Hart’s adulteries. People who couldn’t keep this in perspective probably didn’t get a second invitation to dinner. This was even true in Washington. Reagan’s governing majority in Congress included large numbers of Democrats. And after a hard day’s brawling about the Contras, Reagan would socialize with Tip O’Neal, his chief antagonist in the House.

The number of evangelical progressives has steadily grown.

Well into the 2000s, the tensions between evangelical factions made us all bigger people across a range of issues.

However, between roughly 1990 and 2010, there was a murky period of radicalization both on the left and the right. On the evangelical left, radicalization involved a redefinition of Christian faith along postmodernist lines. In the 1990s, Brian McClaren did not just pick up where Campolo’s social positions left off, but advocated reinterpretations of biblical hermeneutics, theology, and ethics. By the 2010s, McClaren was supporting gay marriage as if he had been on a long journey of discovery. Rob Bell was not just an unusually creative church planter. He was leading a deconstruction of doctrine that led him to become a universalist.

Many emergent leaders, as they came to be known, effectively ended dialogue among evangelicals who differed over politics. Devoted activists as they were, they replaced discussion with accusation. If you were not among the cognoscenti fluent in the jargon of critical theory, you weren’t worthy to participate in their cohorts.

Evangelicalism was the handmaiden of historic evils. You had to pick a side.

It wasn’t enough anymore for an evangelical to volunteer at the local homeless shelter, or attend a racially diverse church, or organize a food bank for the hungry. Such hopelessly naïve believers were part of the problem. Hunger was the result of capitalism. Sitting next to a black family in church didn’t absolve you of your racism. As for the homeless, your tough-on-crime voting pattern was nothing but violence against people who wanted to live differently from the white middle class.

The first Facebook-aversion moment I remember predated Donald Trump’s campaign for president.

It was June 26, 2015, the Obergefell decision, when evangelicals were pushing each other on social media either to celebrate the advent of gay marriage or declare the end of Western civilization. Lots of people just stopped scrolling rather than endure the insufferable attitudes of people they thought they knew.

In the 2010s, evangelical students were wide-eyed participants in the Occupy movement, bemoaning the profit motive and calling their parents racist. College ministry leaders in California were hosting “ally training sessions” on behalf of transgender students, accusing you of heteronormativity and other crimes while complaining privately that their right-wing donors wanted to censor them. In my hometown, the director of a prominent homeless ministry, after years of hosting church banquets to raise money, wrote in the newspaper that Christians were hypocrites for . . . owning property.

Treating others as ignorant, greedy bigots is the way to start not a dialogue but a purge.

I am not going to claim that the right’s radicalization was caused by these developments on the left. The right’s departure from civil norms was deep, as I will discuss. Right-wing activism has fueled evangelicals’ cultural paranoia for decades. The radicalization on the right from 1990 to 2010 played its own role in shutting down important conversations.

In this post, I am saying two things.

First, there has always been a liberal-progressive evangelical movement in the U.S. At the church level, conversations between left and right have held extremism in check and moved evangelicals toward greater maturity. I want to see that spirit of deliberation return.

Second, I am saying that the radicalized evangelical left would rather stigmatize thought-crimes than make arguments. Infected with critical theory, they cannot bring themselves to credit their opponents with reasonable goodwill, the quality that liberal civil society depends on. Having abandoned historic Christianity, they are now putting Christ’s name on whatever abstract form of justice their secular allies demand.

To restore the spirit of deliberation, we have to restore the ethics of comity.

Next post: What can evangelical radicals on the left look forward to from their ideological allies? Betrayal.