Mike Huckabee
The Coming Evangelical Collapse
You know, I've never been much of one to read the tea leaves. Generally speaking, I'm often the last one to get the memo about pretty much anything. I generally tend to believe in my own point of view until that awkward moment when reality rudely wakes me up.
But my record isn't all bad. Or even mostly bad. When I was teaching a small group at Southern Baptist Church #1, I saw first hand that modern Christianity was up against a lot of problems.
For one thing, it blew my mind how many of my supposed peers were absolutely ignorant of even the fundamentals of the faith. In the evangelical world, you are free to believe whatever you like about raptures and End Times and things like that but what's non-negotiable are big ticket doctrines such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and other things. I wasn't asking the group members to know the order in which David, Moses, Elijah and Abraham lived (although it wouldn't hurt). I merely sought to give them the core essentials of the faith.
The Catholic Church would say I was trying to catechize them.
However, my efforts were largely for naught. Many of them were incapable of explaining even the basics of what they believe or, heaven help them, why they believe it. The point came where I stopped wondering why they were even bothering to come to church at all and started wondering how long my (then) beloved evangelical Christianity could survive in the face of such alarming ignorance and apathy.
I needn't have worried, of course, because in short order it stopped being my problem. Getting fired publicly has that effect. People so ignorant of their faith and so eager to embrace (rather than engage) the culture couldn't long be counted upon to stand up for evangelicalism. Thus it would be fair to say that by the start of 2010, I was very scared of what evangelicalism might look in ten years' time.
Oddly enough, I ended up helping fulfill that myself what with my journey to the Catholic Church, but I digress.
Apart from not reading the tea leaves, I've also never been one to get swept away with hyperbole and doom-saying. Any fool can predict catastrophe because havoc and mayhem are the natural states of the world. Indeed, the market is strong for predicting future calamities.
Still, when the source article I linked to up top first caused a stir, it was completely off my radar. But I tripped over it not long after I joined the RCIA program about a year ago. And even though the late author freely admits to being no prophet, he outlines an oddly prophetic vision of the problems that have engulfed evangelicalism. It's easy to buy into because I glommed onto it relatively late in the game. Comparing this man's predictions to what has already come to pass, indeed, it is chilling how accurate his vision has been. At least up to now.
To wit: Twenty and thirty years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention pretty much ran the board on all or most social issues. Politicians crossed prominent evangelical pastors and leaders at their own peril. It would be fair to say that evangelicalism enjoyed a cultural and political hegemony that the first century Church could only dream of. And the SBC was not ignorant of this. On the contrary, they rather enjoyed their positions of influence.
Today though, your average sub-35 year old evangelical can easily explain the supposed merits and importance of gay marriage but fails miserably when the subject turns even to simple, no-brainer questions like the names of the four gospel writers found in sacred Scripture. I could end up being proved wrong but I suspect that's no recipe for building a future.
My point is that my generation was raised on dc Talk and told to vote Republican; our parents hoped that just about covered it. Meanwhile, secular (and I daresay more hostile) sources have used mass media to propagandize the youth on the entire liberal agenda and, in so doing, explained WHY those causes are to be protected, justified and legalized.
A good example of what I mean is Rachel Held Evans. She's part of the breed of hipster Christians ("I'm a Christian but not the George W. Bush kind of Christian,") who abandoned evangelicalism in favor of greener, more LGBT-friendly pastures. And what she ended up finding is the Episcopal church, naturally.
As aggravating and Christian-chic as Evans might be, she's hardly unique. Her parents' generation worried about winning that next midterm election while little Rachel and everyone else her age tuned in to the Daily Show. And now that her generation has grown up, what did anybody expect was going to happen?
Now, I confess that I still carry a certain amount of anger and resentment toward evangelicalism because of my negative experiences from 2010. To deny that would be a transparent lie. And in just a few weeks, I'd become obligated to confess that lie. So I'll instead freely admit that part of me can't help feeling (A) partially vindicated for all the fears and concerns I had for the movement's future back in 2009 and 2010 and (B) a little happy that so many of these puffed-up evangelicals are being humbled.
They fell in love with the world. This is what they deserve.
What might that mean for the Catholic Church though? Honestly, I have no idea because, frankly, I've always found it a bit hard to believe that the young people really enjoy liturgy and more traditional expressions of Christianity. Or if they do, it's primarily a superficial fad. What will they do and where will they go when the novelty fades?
Well, the deceased blogger speculated that evangelicalism's inevitable collapse has at least short term benefits for the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. And he may even be right; I wouldn't know. But I could sooner envision the Liberal True-Believers dropping out of Christianity entirely rather than attending churches who have staked their credibility on the sinfulness of homosexual relations, the impossibility of female ordination and other liberal hot buttons.
No matter the outcome, all that's really happening in my view is that Christianity isn't "shrinking" as such so much as the Nominals and In-Name-Only's are abandoning a religion they never truly believed in anyway.
Assuming that process completely or mostly wipes evangelicalism out, the only real player on the table will be two choices- Catholicism and, to whatever degree of viability, Eastern Orthodoxy.
I must admit that it's quite possible that there'd some penitent evangelicals who might come home to the Mother Church in Rome. However, that process would involve a lot of thoughtful consideration and no small amount of pride-swallowing.
Since both of those things are abjectly foreign to most evangelicals, I suspect the immediate beneficiary could be Orthodoxy. And part of me would be okay with that. I don't know what the Church's official position regarding Eastern Orthodoxy is but the Orthodox seem to have valid Orders and valid Sacraments. Is Orthodoxy the full expression of Christian truth? Perhaps not. But it's a lot closer to the mark than the Southern Baptist Convention was on their best day.
Assuming evangelicalism truly does collapse and that it happens in the relatively near future (and, at risk of saying "me too", that appears to be something of an inevitability), I see it as a good thing, ultimately. Christianity in the United States is shrinking, as I said, but what we're losing are those who were never truly invested in the faith to begin with. And they're leaving behind a more obedient and committed Body. And this would likely be a body more unified in faith, purpose and Sacrament than any time in America's history.
Whatever growing (or more aptly shrinking) pains could lie in store, in the end, isn't that a basically positive thing?
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