![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thelight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Pete-Buttigieg.jpeg?resize=300%2C169\")
How exactly did the mayor of Indiana\u2019s fourth-largest city bring to the fore a century-old divide over the nature of Protestant Christianity?<\/p>\nWho else thinks that we Evangelicals spend too much time worrying about who is and who isn’t a “true” Christian?<\/p>\n
I believe we would be of more “earthly good” if we focused more on solving problems in the here and now and let God and the Holy Spirit sort out the “heavenly destination.” =)<\/p>\n
How exactly did the mayor of Indiana\u2019s fourth-largest city bring to the fore a century-old divide over the nature of Protestant Christianity?<\/p>\n
In addition to being South Bend\u2019s mayor, Pete Buttigieg is a rising presidential aspirant. He\u2019s also a practicing Episcopalian, and his political moment has hinted at the possibilities of a \u201creligious left\u201d motivated by Christ\u2019s good news to the poor and downtrodden.<\/p>\n
But Buttigieg, a married gay man, has also faced pushback from the evangelical right that not only challenges his candidacy but the legitimacy of the religious tradition to which he belongs.<\/p>\n
One of the voices leading this charge is noted NotNowButMaybeLaterTrumper, Erick Erickson, a radio host and former editor-in-chief of RedState. <\/em>Erickson is a prominent conservative evangelical and is enrolled in a doctoral program at the well-regarded Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity,\u201d Erickson tweeted<\/a>, adding, \u201cBut then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.\u201d<\/p>\n Eleven presidents have been Episcopalian, including Washington, Madison, FDR, and Gerald Ford.<\/p>\n Erickson furthered his comments on the Episcopal Church in a series of now-deleted tweets:<\/p>\n \u201cEpiscopalianism still has a few Christians left. The denomination itself has left the faith\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCan you be in the Episcopalian Church and be a Christian? Absolutely. Is the Episcopal denomination a Christian denomination? Not anymore. It is also dying and statistically, it is very likely the last Episcopalian has been born already.\u201d<\/p>\n The heart of Erickson\u2019s remarks<\/a> is that the Episcopal Church is a thinly Christianized secularism that sold its inheritance for a mess of liberal pottage. Almost as divine punishment, Erickson seems to imply, it has suffered massive demographic collapse.<\/p>\n Or, as Erickson put it,<\/p>\n \u201cEpiscopalianism is to Christianity what Rice Krispies are to rice. It may have once been the latter, but now it\u2019s just a hollowed out puff prone to snapping, crackling, and popping.\u201d<\/p>\n Elsewhere, Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, opined that \u201cyou don\u2019t get to make up your own Christianity. You also don\u2019t get to make up your own Jesus, and in case you missed it, He is explicitly clear on His definition of marriage: \u2018For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Erickson insists that these views are uncontroversial, even common, among serious Christians.<\/p>\n These remarks echo in miniature a moment from the 1992 presidential campaign when George H. W. Bush\u200a\u2014\u200aan Episcopalian\u200a\u2014\u200aattacked the Democratic Party by noting their long party platform \u201cleft out three simple letters: G-O-D<\/a>.\u201d Christian leaders, including the head of the Episcopal Church, chastised Bush for invoking God \u201cto assert the moral superiority of one people over another or one political party over another.\u201d<\/p>\n The tense relationship between conservative evangelicals and the liberal mainline churches\u200a\u2014\u200aincluding the Episcopal Church\u200a\u2014\u200ahas a long history. American evangelicals define Christianity in such a way that excludes many other Christian traditions as misled. This manifests itself theologically, culturally, and politically.<\/p>\n Evangelicals\u2019 relationship with the traditionally preeminent mainline denominations is one of historic rivalry and recent triumphalism. Their theological preoccupations have led many modern evangelicals to connect Christianity with culture war issues to the extent that, as much as they captured the Republican Party, they have been captured by it back.<\/p>\n Erickson\u2019s tweets touch on all of these elements.<\/p>\n \u201cEvangelical\u201d and \u201cliberal\u201d are capacious terms with plenty of exceptions. Broadly speaking, the difference is the gulf in the manner evangelicals and liberals have engaged with modernity.<\/p>\n The first and decisive difference between evangelicals and mainline churches is in their institutional approach to the authority of scripture and how to interpret it. Everything else, including Erickson\u2019s denigration of present Episcopalians, flows from this gulf.<\/p>\n In 18th-century Germany, a group of scholars began treating the Bible as a text open to critical analysis. The \u201chigher biblical critics\u201d claimed to find inconsistencies in the texts and challenged the Bible\u2019s historicity and veracity. When this approach filtered to America it, alongside Darwinism and philosophical pragmatism, rocked the authority of Protestant, Bible-centered Christianity.<\/p>\n Some American Protestants, especially those in prominent pulpits and seminaries in the mainline churches, reassessed elements of Biblical religion to accommodate modern science and historical analysis.<\/p>\n But others continued to insist upon the inerrancy of the Bible. Inerrancy, which has many nuanced formulations, is central to modern evangelicalism. In its simplest form, inerrancy holds that the Bible is the inspired word of God and is therefore free of error (as an example of a nuanced qualification, one account of inerrancy sees it as applying only to to the \u201cautographa,\u201d or original biblical texts, of which our current ones closely approximate but are not identical with). The most conservative iterations insist the Bible is without error not merely in its theological pronouncements but also in its factual claims.<\/p>\n For many evangelicals, biblical inerrancy is the marker of authentic Christianity, hence the proliferation of \u201cBible churches\u201d and Erickson\u2019s key lament that 47 percent of Episcopalians believe the Bible is not the word of God. This unbelief\u200a\u2014\u200awhich could mean many things\u200a\u2014\u200astrikes at biblical inerrancy, the basis of evangelical authority.<\/p>\n One scholar<\/a> links the particular intensity of southern biblical literalism to pre-Civil War conflicts over slavery. Literalism as an interpretive strategy obviously predates antebellum worship in America but white defenders of slavery found no verses that directly condemned slavery and several instances where biblical figures, such as St. Paul, treated slavery neutrally. They concluded that slavery was sanctioned by God and connected their society and mode of biblical interpretation with authentic Christianity. In their view, Abolitionists, were motivated by unbiblical liberalism.<\/p>\n Against the powerful current of theological liberalism of the early 20th century, conservatives produced a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals<\/em>. These pamphlets rebuked higher biblical criticism and the perceived erosion of Christian faith.<\/p>\n The Fundamentalists asserted the reality of the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the inerrancy of Scripture. These claims were, they argued, the bedrock of Christian belief. True Christians could not deny their reality. Christianity without \u201cbelieving in\u201d Christ was no Christianity at all.<\/p>\n Liberal Christians, like Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick, responded that Fundamentalists were cultural aggressors. Liberals weren\u2019t against the Fundamentals, necessarily, Fosdick argued. They opposed making belief in miracles the standard of Christian identity. \u201cThe question is,\u201d Fosdick said, \u201chas anybody a right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him on such points and to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship?\u201d<\/p>\n It is this 300-year-old question\u200a\u2014\u200adoes Christianity require belief in a set of divine and supernatural claims rooted in Scripture?\u2014that animates Erickson\u2019s tweets.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just differences in how to read the Bible that separates evangelicals in their minds from other Christians. They believe they differ from mainline Christians in what the practice of Christian life looks like.<\/p>\n Evangelicals emphasize individual faith and a personal relationship with God, fostered through prayer, service, and Bible reading. Their fear is that something will replace the centrality of the personal relationship with God and distort Christianity. As they see it, it is this personal relationship\u2014ideally, a vibrant and ongoing communion with God throughout one\u2019s life, through highs and lows\u2014that makes possible the administration of God\u2019s saving grace.<\/p>\n For many evangelicals, the great example of misguided Christianity was the \u201cSocial Gospel.\u201d Urban Christians, often from the mainline churches, saw the inequalities and deprivations of the Gilded Age and sought to address them. Theologians of the Social Gospel came to see societal problems as structural sins. The Social Gospellers concluded that instead of saving individual souls, Christ came to redeem society. Or, that the saving of souls happens within a context of, and is sometimes not too different from, the renewing of society. Adherents of the Social Gospel sought to transform society as an act of salvation.<\/p>\n To its critics, however, the Social Gospel lost sight of traditional conceptions of salvation. Conservative Christians alleged that political activism replaced authentic Christian discipleship which, evangelicals maintained, already entailed a concern for social justice.<\/p>\n Evangelical and mainline Christians are increasingly unintelligible to one another. Characterized by intense biblicism, the Born Again experience, and a desire to return to the roots of Christian practice, American evangelicalism is a primitivist movement. True to its Protestant character, evangelicals often define themselves as a righteous minority escaping a spiritually dead shell for a purer faith. Evangelicals look at mainline services as dead formalism leavened by left-wing political commitments. Meanwhile, many mainliners see evangelicals as science deniers who have self-segregated into a subculture governed by a siege mentality rather than Christian love.<\/p>\n Conservative evangelicals believe biblical teachings about faith and morality are clear and timeless. In fact, the extent to which adhering to traditional morality sets evangelicals apart from their worldly peers sometimes reinforces their righteousness against the immorality of the secular world. They believe that any change in teaching, especially on teachings about gender and sexuality, can only be sustained by denying the authority of scripture.<\/p>\n In every case, evangelicals charge that mainline churches sacrificed clear biblical teachings for relevance. We see this in a series of cultural battles from prohibition, through evolution, segregation, school prayer, and LGBTQ rights. The key issue of course is abortion. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainline churches issued statements endorsing an end to strict laws against abortion. It\u2019s Buttigieg\u2019s support for abortion rights alongside his views on sexuality especially that anger Erickson.<\/p>\n Liberal Christians, for their part, contend they treat Scripture reverently. But they argue Christianity\u2019s central teachings must be distinguished from the cultural baggage of the ancient authors of the Bible. To them, the overwhelming arc of Scripture is bent toward love, justice, and mercy\u2014and they insist that the promise of this trajectory is not, as evangelicals claim, indexed to the afterlife, but crucially has a this-wordly dimension to it. Specific passages and episodes must be understood in this light. In many ways, the disagreement between evangelicals and liberals is a clash about what the Bible is and how it must be read.<\/p>\n Critics of the mainline churches alleged the mainliners were secularizing themselves out of existence. During the debate between the Fundamentalists and modernists, a cartoon<\/a> circulated depicting the denial of biblical inerrancy and biblical miracles as inexorable steps toward atheism. In the mid-1960s a theological movement known as \u201cDeath of God theology<\/a>\u201d appeared to confirm evangelicals\u2019 worst fears. Modern Christianity, the loose group of theologians seemed to suggest, required an end to all exclusions and hierarchies, including the exclusive category \u201cChristian.\u201d The truest form of Christianity would die to itself.<\/p>\n The Death of God was a radical movement. But evangelical critics also pointed to high profile Episcopalians like Bishop James Pike who called for \u201cfewer beliefs, more belief.\u201d Although the Episcopal church began heresy procedures repeatedly in the 1960s and censured him in 1966, Pike loomed large in the evangelical view of the Episcopal Church. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was eclipsed by Bishop Shelby Spong as the public face of liberal theology. Spong\u2019s New Christianity for a New World <\/em>pronounced the death of Theistic Christianity entirely while a sitting bishop.<\/p>\n Pike, Spong, and the Death of God, which only represented one strain of theology within the Episcopal Church, dominated and continues to dominate how evangelicals see mainline Christians.<\/p>\n Evangelicals saw Pike and Spong as effectively saying the quiet part loud: Episcopalians gave up meaningful Christianity long ago\u200a\u2014\u200aPike and Spong just admitted it. When in 2013 the Episcopal Church\u2019s Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori reframed a biblical miracle as a patriarchal act of oppression, evangelicals thought it was the ghosts of Pike and Spong at the highest level of the church.<\/p>\n However, Erickson is wrong to assume this is the totality of the Episcopal Church. The new Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, appears to have a much more traditional perspective on the death and resurrection of Christ.<\/p>\n But if Pike and Spong aren\u2019t necessarily representative, mainline churches have downplayed the exclusive saving power of Christianity and rigorous conceptions of salvation. This past Easter Saturday, Reverend Serene Jones, president of the liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York, rejected the Virgin Birth and questioned the Resurrection in an interview<\/a> with The New York Times<\/em>. \u201cFor Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession,\u201d she said, \u201cthat seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.\u201d<\/p>\n Evangelicals, alongside Catholics and even many within the mainline tradition, wonder whether faith really is stronger than that. They respond to Rev. Jones with the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:14: \u201cAnd if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain\u201d (ESV).<\/p>\n In the struggle for the soul of America, evangelicals see mainline churches and leaders like Jones and Schori as the pseudo-Christian face of \u201csecular humanism.\u201d Historians suggest the mainline churches shaped our tolerant and pluralistic culture. Evangelicals ask whether this is a uniquely Christian contribution to society.<\/p>\n Since a cultural peak in the 1950s, mainline churches have experienced a dramatic decline in status and adherents. Mainline churches have very low retention rates. Today, only 55 percent of people raised in the mainline churches continue to identify with those churches into adulthood.<\/p>\n To evangelicals this demographic decline as proof positive of the mainline churches\u2019 abandonment of orthodox Christianity. By emphasizing civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, and liberal culture war positions, the evangelical argument runs, mainline churches lost sight of God and reaped the whirlwind.<\/p>\n Memories of these historic conflicts inform evangelicals\u2019 views of mainliners. Erickson approaches the Episcopal Church with a mix of theological dismissal and demographic triumphalism. But this triumphalism is undercut by a broader angst about evangelicals\u2019 future status in America.<\/p>\n And of course, the theological and cultural clash between evangelicals and the mainline has become part of the national political architecture.<\/p>\n Many mainline churches have been politically liberal. Meanwhile, conservative evangelicals have formed an alliance with the Republican Party. As the GOP sought to peel voters from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s, Republicans like Richard Nixon courted evangelicals through social signaling and, eventually, opposition to abortion.<\/p>\n As the Religious Right became a powerful part of the GOP in the 1980s and 1990s they enforced positions on abortion and Christian profession within the party.<\/p>\n At the same time, the Republican Party has also captured evangelicals. They have nowhere else to go. A great many evangelicals equate Republican positions on \u201cfamily values,\u201d but also welfare, taxes, and war, with orthodox Christianity. This is something Ben Shapiro, who is not an evangelical himself but whose positions map pretty securely onto a standard evangelical profile of political engagement, more or less communicated in this tweet:<\/p>\n Erickson famously opposed Donald Trump\u2019s candidacy. Yet 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump and Erickson recently offered his support for the president. To evangelical voters, the GOP and its presidential candidate may be flawed, but the Democratic Party is full of the entire range of conservative Christian demonology: feminists, LGBTQ+ and abortion rights activists, Muslims, atheists, and opponents of Israel.<\/p>\n As far as Buttigieg\u2019s faith goes, Erickson might heed the words of Jesus Christ. When his disciples told him another man was performing miracles in his name, Jesus replied \u201cDo not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Joshua Tait is a columnist for Arc Digital. Read more of his <\/em><\/strong>work<\/em><\/strong><\/a> and follow him on <\/em><\/strong>Twitter<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This content was originally published here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n