As the articles in this issue of Modern Reformation suggest, evangelicalism is experiencing a change in seasons: former evangelical statesmen are passing from the scene, new evangelicals don't seem to rally around the same issues and ideas as their forefathers, and it's increasingly difficult (if it was ever really possible) to identify clearly what an evangelical is. If you have any warm feelings at all about evangelicalism, you want some answers: Where is evangelicalism going? Who better to turn to for answers than the individuals whose lives and work helped create and shape evangelicalism. Modern Reformation is honored to include the reflections of these evangelical leaders, pastors, and scholars as we seek to understand our own time and the future of the evangelical expression of Christianity.
The identity crisis of modern evangelicalism defies description. What can we say of a movement (it is a movement?) that has been struggling with an identity crisis for its entire existence? In Victorian England, "evangelical" was used by Charles Spurgeon and others (both within and without the Church of England) to refer to those who stood for the gospel. Even then, there was such value in the word that those of a more liberal persuasion attempted to use it as well. In the United States, the situation was very much the same. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the paragon of Protestant liberalism and the modernist movement, claimed the term for himself and denied that anyone had the right to deny the word to him or those like him. As Spurgeon remarked, "It is mere cant to cry, 'We are evangelical; we are evangelical' and yet decline to say what evangelical means." We cannot say that we were not warned.
When the founders of the "new evangelicalism" coalesced in the 1940s, they chose to reclaim the same contested word in order to define their own movement as a way between liberal Protestant and separatist fundamentalism. They faced trouble from the start.
Now, over a half-century after that movement began, the identity crisis is more acute than ever. There is something inherently unstable about a movement that must define itself in every conversation. Six decades ago, figures such as Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Ockenga attempted to brand the new evangelicalism through flagship centers of influence such as Christianity Today and the National Association of Evangelicals. Institutions such as Wheaton College (Illinois) were seemingly glad to trade the label "fundamentalist" for a kinder and gentler branding. Yet, what the marketers call "brand clarity" did not last long.
The secular world seems to have discovered evangelicals about 1976, when Jimmy Carter became the public face of evangelicalism. When reporters asked what that word meant, they were referred to Billy Graham. Enough said? National newsmagazines declared the "Year of the Evangelical," and reporters were dispatched to exotic assignments like "Jesus People" gatherings and the newly identified "megachurches."
In the 1980s, evangelicals were observed as a newly awakened political force, and politicians want to count everything. Their finding was that, indeed, there were a lot of evangelicals. Where had these people been hiding?
Now, the landscape branded "evangelical" seems to cover a huge spectrum of institutions, churches, movements, and theological proposals. Once again, the label seems to be claimed by any Protestant who resists being identified as either a liberal Protestant or a fundamentalist.
At times, it seems that contemporary evangelicalism represents nothing so much as Gertrude Stein's iconic remark about Burbank, California: "There is no there, there."
In truth, there may be less there there than ever before. For good reason, the movement lacks the unifying institutions of hierarchy and magisterium. There is no evangelical Vatican, no "God Box" on Riverside Drive, no patriarch in Dallas. We are a movement without "brand clarity."
The branding metaphor is especially apt as a good many self-styled evangelicals are more concerned with marketing than with clarity about core beliefs. Given the inclusiveness of the movement, the boundaries are fuzzy at best and are constantly renegotiated. Since there is no central institution maintaining control over evangelical identity, there is no clear center and few clear boundaries.
Statements of evangelical conviction tend to be innocuous-more about minimal description than about bold declaration. The theological statement of the Evangelical Theological Society, for example, is so minimal that some traditional Roman Catholics claim they could sign it in good faith. A recent "Evangelical Manifesto" defined the movement in terms congenial to other traditions. When TIME magazine recently listed the most influential evangelicals, the magazine listed at least two Roman Catholics.
So, would prudence then dictate that the term be abandoned? There is no longer a Whig Party in the United States. Perhaps "evangelicalism" should join that term in the history books.
There is only one vexing problem with that proposal, and it is the same problem that confronted the evangelicals of Victorian England and the new evangelicals in the United States-there is no good replacement for the word. We are stuck with it because there is the enduring problem of a two-party system in American Protestantism. Whatever the terms of preference, there are liberal and conservative visions of Christianity that are, as J. Gresham Machen argued long ago, actually two rival religions.
What many of us mean by the term is that we are not liberal Protestants, not separatist fundamentalists, not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox, and not a quasi-Christian sect. That isn't much, but it's what we remain when the vocabulary is depleted.
Now, the evangelical movement includes seeker-sensitive megachurches, Emergent and emerging churches, charismatics, confessional Protestants, and any number of other variants. The "brand" has enough cultural cache and utility that virtually everyone claims a purchase on it.
In my view, the term is of limited, but undeniably real, usefulness. Most of us will find some other descriptor of greater importance. For confessional believers, being Presbyterian, Baptist, or Lutheran, for example, is more important by far than being identified as "evangelical."
Still, when asked about evangelical identity, I know that I have a stake in this. It is a term we cannot live with and cannot live without. And that, in truth, is the case with the movement, such as it is, as much as with the word.
