Apocalypse deferred: Evangelical imagination and the decline of White Christian America

Abstract

Two decades ago, in the years on either side of the turn of the millennium, American evangelical culture (i.e., White evangelical culture) was at the apex of its cultural influence and demographic reach, and a certain sense of immanent Apocalypse or victorious revelation of a righteous new order was in the air. There was a sense that America had badly lost its way and that people of faith were being persecuted in this society now under the spell of secular humanism, but that revival was happening and the tide was turning. Since the 1970s, the evangelical subculture had coalesced within a coherent mediasphere that reflected the world back to them in the image of their faith, huge church complexes had sprouted up across suburbia, the Christian Right had given the silent majority a powerful political voice, and sophisticated parachurch organizations such as Focus on the Family were shaping public discourse around key moral ideas. Evangelical girls were embracing their God-given purity, evangelical men were discovering the divine truth of their wild-at-heart masculinity and evangelicals young and old were reveling in thrillers that dramatized the sense that the end of days was at hand and ultimate victory was imminent. A contract with America had been forged to return the nation to its truth, an evangelical president was in the White House leading a crusade against savage infidels who hated America for its freedom, and a Joshua Generation of homeschooled evangelical children had begun to emerge, to finish the blessed reconquest of their nation.

But over the past two decades, that sweet sense of immanent political, cultural, and eschatological triumph has soured. Geopolitical crusades bogged down, purity culture femininity and heroic Christian masculinity collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions in a changing culture, and instead of carrying the banner of cultural conquest the younger generation of White evangelicals have increasingly questioned their elders' priorities and the church itself. The narrative of national decline and evangelical resistance in the face of persecution and oppression had been powerfully mobilizing during the period when it was easy to believe that the decline would soon be reversed, but it acquired a different valence in the period when the dream of the restoration of a White Christian America started to seem less and less possible, at least within the framework of democratic politics and existing institutions. In the wake of America's first Black President, homosexual marriage becoming law of the land, the #MeToo, #ChurchToo, and Black Lives Matter movements, as well as the ascension of Donald Trump, members of the social and political formation Robert Jones calls “White Christian America” increasingly articulated their anxieties around declining influence in new formations of politicized faith structured not around church basement prayer groups, but around Fox News and Facebook, YouTube, Gab, Parler, and Telegram, as well as a dense ecosystem of pundits, influencers and podcasting prophets.

This special issue explores what happened to the cultural seeds that were planted in the triumphal moment of White evangelical America, but that ripened in the grim climate of the Obama/Trump periods and fruited, arguably, in the reactionary Christian authoritarianism on display at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. It looks at what happens when social and “alternative” media offering visions of reality that better conform to the culture's desires and anxieties supplant the local church as a primary filter for faith and fellowship. It looks at what happens when various conspiritualisms (conspiracy + spirituality) appropriate the imaginative resources of evangelical Apocalypticism, making evangelical culture the primary vector for the widespread adoption of conspiratorial ideation within a conservative movement that now centrally understands itself via the trope of embattlement. It looks at what happens when the political agenda favored by a majority of White evangelicals triumphs even while this agenda is increasingly recognized as something that can only be achieved via minoritarian distortions of the electoral system or by overt resistance to traditional political institutions and mechanisms.

Using Moral Foundations Theory, Christopher Douglas looks at how two novels represent two different sets of moral priorities within contemporary evangelicalism. The Shack “stresses the values of care and fairness-as-equality,” while the Left Behind series, and particularly Glorious Appearing “depends on values of loyalty, authority, sanctity, and fairness-as-reciprocity.” The contrast points to the diversity within evangelicalism. Diversity within Evangelicalism does not always mean that there is room for liberal voices. As Jenny Van Houdt suggests, an apocalyptic narrative functions as an effective mobilizing concept that draws together not just different kinds of evangelicals, but different kinds of White conservatives. Fear is packaged in a way that members of diverse ideological commitments become allies with a common, liberal enemy, leading to actions like the January 6 insurrection. Vilifying liberal ideals is a common theme in two other papers as well. Neall Pogue looks at how evangelicals' view of nature shifted away from the predominant acceptance of a stewardship model in the 1970s and 1980s toward what had previously been a minority position, depicting nature, almost uniformly since the early 1990s as something that had to be struggled with, overcome, and brought into the service of human goals, aspirations, and commercial interests. As environmentalists began to challenge these ideas, conservative evangelicals responded by framing those environmentalists and their policies as threats, making environmental concerns a battleground in the ongoing Culture Wars. Jacob Cook examines another significant target in the Culture Wars: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Intersectionality. Cook points out that evangelicals draw on the rhetoric of “worldviews” to help group proponents of CRT with other liberal projects. Worldview language, argues Cook, motivates conservative evangelicals to oppose critical theory, rather than reflect on potentially damaging policies and practices within their own ranks. The result, as Cook concludes, is that some evangelicals are alienated from a larger, predominantly White evangelical culture.

This issue also explores evidence that the crises of the past decades—including the difficult confrontations with histories of racism, sexual abuse, and homophobia—have spawned new forms of culture among people with roots in evangelical traditions, both among people who now identify as “ex-vangelical” and among those who want to continue in some version of their faith tradition even if unwilling—or feeling unwelcome—to identify as “evangelical.” It explores the cultural anxieties and faith-informed aspirations attendant on the demographic decline of “White Christian America” in the past two decades that are manifest in the products and discourses that contemporary North American Evangelical culture and its offshoots produce and consume.

Matthew Mullins examines someone who became a voice for exvangelicals. Singer songwriter David Bazan was a successful evangelical rock star, but he began to question evangelical theology, and just as importantly, the deep connection between evangelicals and conservative politics in the United States. Mullins analyzes the way these doubts began to appear in Bazan's music and chronicles his eventual departure from evangelicalism, even though that faith tradition still informs much of Bazan's life and music. Isaac Sharp chronicles the exodus of another evangelical musician, Christian rap artist Lecrae. Lecrae enjoyed significant popularity within the largely white evangelical cultural community until he began to speak out against racial violence following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012. The backlash he experienced led him to realize that he was not welcome in the evangelical cultural community, and ultimately ceased considering himself an evangelical. Sharp suggests that Lecrae's departure is representative of a larger alienation of Black evangelicals within the White evangelical cultural community. Melodie Roschman examines another group that has been alienated by the evangelical church: trans people. Roschman focuses on trans author Daniel M. Lavery's 2020 memoir Something That May Shock and Discredit You. While the memoir chronicles his difficult childhood in the church, Roschman argues that it subverts the conventions of both trans memoir and evangelical conversion stories. In particular, Rochman looks at the way Lavery reimagines and remixes Biblical stories as a way of coming to terms with his evangelical upbringing and recuperating part of his past. Like Bazan, Lavery acknowledges the continuing influence of evangelicalism in his life but strives to reframe it in a way that compliments his trans identity.

These two groups of papers may appear to set up a dichotomy: a conservative, white evangelical community that actively combats perceived liberal enemies, and a group so disillusioned and alienated by that fight that they feel they have no other choice but to leave evangelicalism. Yet, there are traces of evangelicals who stay in the faith and fight against the conversative, apocalyptic political positions. As Douglas suggests, the fact that The Shack remains popular while presenting an alternative set of moral priorities indicates that there are different paths that evangelicals can take. Both Pogue and Cook point to a small number of evangelicals who find ways of reconciling “liberal” political projects with evangelical beliefs and practices. Karen Prior is another one of those evangelicals. In her paper, Prior tells the story of the #ChurchToo movement, in which women came forward to call out evangelical leaders for perpetrating sexual abuse and covering it up. In the face of the evangelical reaction to the #ChurchToo movement, Prior says she experienced disillusionment, just as many exvangelicals have experienced. While she is sympathetic toward those who have been prompted to leave the faith, she has remained and calls for reform. She provides an important reminder that not everyone who remains an evangelical embraces the political projects of the Religious Right in the culture wars, but that some continue to do the hard work of trying to change evangelicalism from the inside.