Today’s Evangelical Message on College Campuses

There have always been religious organizations on college campuses. Some were quiet and private, while others were loud and boisterous, always ready to tell others about themselves.

In the 1980s, perhaps the most visible student religious groups were evangelical. Not only were evangelical churches represented, but there was Campus Crusade for Christ, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, the Navigators and others.

The word “evangelical” comes from the Greek word “euangelion” -- meaning “good news” -- and was rendered into English as “gospel.” And, that is just what these evangelical groups do through their visibility. They have been sharing the good news -- telling others about the message of salvation that Jesus’ actions have given to all human beings. To be saved, all one had to do was to accept that Jesus had saved them.

Trying to save other people also served as a form of recruitment for evangelical campus groups. When a person was saved, they usually joined one of these religious organizations or a church. Those who did not join rarely remained in their new state of salvation, but returned to their former friends and behavior.

From the late 1960s onward, these evangelical youth groups grew and formed a vibrant part of campus life in many colleges and universities. At the same time, seeds were being sown that, today, a half-century later, are damaging the message of salvation on these campuses.

Under the leadership of Richard Nixon, who was president from 1969 to 1974, the Republican Party brought evangelicals into a new coalition, the “silent majority,” along with many Catholics, through the politicization of abortion. Evangelical and Catholic Christians, who had largely stayed out of politics prior to that time, seized on the issue of abortion’s legalization. As the Republican Party vowed to stamp it out, it gained widespread support of these religious groups.

On the flip side, abortion became a religious issue, with both evangelical and Catholic leaders and churches railing against, making it a topic of sermons and transforming it into the epitome of evil.

From that small beginning, two things happened. Evangelicals became increasingly Republican, and the message of the gospel, the good news of salvation, had to gradually give larger amounts of time to the anti-abortion message.

National polling from the late 1970s onward has measured a growing drop-off in the number of Christians and an increasing body of people unwilling to identify with Christianity. The change was slow at first but, by 2012, the percentage of Americans in this category -- what pollsters call “none of the above” or just “nones” -- had risen to just under 20 percent. Evangelicals themselves, by contrast, had fallen to 19 percent, while Protestants, for the first time in American history, dipped below 50 percent (Pew Research Center, “The Decline of Institutional Religion,” 2013).

If this analysis is correct, the change should have begun about the time that evangelicals became a key part of the Republican Party. That was the moment in which accepting salvation also meant that one had to join, not just an evangelical church but also the Republican Party. Many who were willing to accept Christ were unwilling to accept Republicanism. So, they turned their back on both.

And, the polling shows that people have been making the decision in this manner. The younger one is, the more likely one is to be a none. More than 32 percent (in 2012) of the under-30s were nones, while in the 30-50-year-old range, 21 percent were nones. It is only among the over-50s that 15 percent or fewer are nones.

And, what is the message of campus evangelical organizations today? That the current president is worthy of Christian support. That, despite his moral failings, he is the “evangelicals’ man.” They put him in the White House and continue to support him vociferously, despite his daily tweets providing new reminders of his moral ineptitude.

Even more than in the 1970s and the 1980s, the message of salvation that Jesus enjoined his followers to spread among all the world before he ascended into heaven is being drowned out by political messages. It will be interesting to discover, in the coming decades, what impact this has had on people accepting the salvation that Christianity has taught that Jesus brought.

Donald Trump: The Evangelical Christian’s Choice

Donald Trump was the resounding choice of white Christians who identified themselves as evangelical or as born-again. According to exit polls from the November election taken by a consortium of ABC News, NBC News, CBSNews, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press, fully 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Only people who identified with the Republican Party voted for Donald Trump at a higher percentage. Why? What did he stand for that attracted them so strongly.

            Perhaps Reverend James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and Family Talk radio, summed it up most succinctly. He identified three factors: “the sanctity of human life, the Constitutional guarantees of religious liberty that are being shredded , and the promise by Mr. Trump to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court.”

            The first and third of these are the same point: candidate Trump promised to advance the anti-abortion cause and move to prevent more abortions. The second point refers to Christian opposition to the legal advances made in gay rights in recent years and the steps that have been taken to require everyone to obey the law. In particular, it refers to Christian businesses being sued for refusing to sell their products to gay couples (e.g., wedding cakes) and to government officials who refused issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

            Of course this is not the first time that opposition to abortion and gay rights has motivated evangelical voters. When Richard Nixon ran for the presidency after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, he saw it as an issue that could favor Republicans and led his party to emphasize its opposition. Later, in 1979, Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders founded an organization called the Moral Majority.

            Although the Moral Majority lasted only 10 years, it paved the way for the entrance of evangelicals into political activity. For decades prior, evangelicals as evangelicals had largely stayed away from politics because politicians did not engage with matters that concerned them, such as preaching the gospel and evangelization. Falwell’s organization provided a way for these Christians to see their concerns in “secular” political terms that encouraged them to get involved and to vote.

            The Moral Majority’s platform emphasized three issues that still resonate today: traditional family values, opposition to abortion and opposition to gay legal rights. While most of the organization’s members and contributors were believers, the platform deliberately left out the Christian emphasis on the key teachings of Jesus, in particular, communicating the gospel and salvation, and helping the poor and downtrodden.

            The three issues emphasized by the Moral Majority were key issues of the 2016 election, more than 25 years after its demise. All three swirled around Donald Trump. On the one hand, Trump made clear his opposition to abortion. He said many times that he opposed gay marriage equality, although he was less consistent on that point.

            On the other hand, perhaps the most problematic aspect of Trump for evangelicals was his failure to live up to the picture of a traditional family man or to biblical expectations of a somber and mature male leader of society. It was not just that he had been divorced three times and had committed adultery, it was that his speeches and ongoing “tweets” were often contrary to Christian expectations of moral behavior—especially with regard to his treatment of women and those who opposed him.

            It is clear from the vast majority of votes Trump received from evangelical Christians that in the end this last concern was less important than his position on abortion and gay rights. Evangelicals did not want him to represent Christianity and its beliefs, but to be their champion in the opposition to abortion and to gay marriage.

            Perhaps evangelicals should be congratulated for voting on principle rather than “identity politics.” After all, the Christian in this race was Hilary Clinton, a person who attended church all her life, taught Sunday school for years, and who regularly sought God’s guidance through prayer, both in private and with colleagues and staffers.

            During the coming years, it will be interesting to see how matters play out. Will Donald Trump deliver for his ardent evangelical supporters? Will he come to be seen as their representative, whether as a champion or as a tarnished man? Will the future of evangelical Christianity be strengthened or weakened?
January 2017

Morality: The Face of Public Christianity

September 30, 2015

A non-Christian who read recent newspapers to learn about Christianity might arrive at the following picture. Christianity believes that marriage is between a man and woman, so no marriage between members of the same sex. Christianity believes life begins at conception, so no abortion and no stem cell research. Christianity believes that God created the universe, so evolution should not be taught. Sexual activity belongs in marriage, so no premarital sex.

In this picture, Christianity is about actions that people should or should not do; it is about morality. What is missing from this public Christianity are the religion’s core features. Salvation, Scripture, faith and belief have disappeared from public view. How did this happen?

The story begins in the early 1500s, with the Protestant Reformation. Prior to that, the Christianity of Western Europe was Catholic and centered on community. Based on their doctrinal interpretation of Scripture, Catholicism raised a group of men out of the community to become priests. These priests then mediated between God and the people to bring salvation, forgiveness and blessings from God to the people. The church stood with individuals before God, buffering them in his majestic presence.

Starting in 1517, Martin Luther changed all that. Instead of the church standing with the individual, Luther held that individuals stood alone before God, with only their faith, based on their understanding of Scripture, alongside them.

Despite this theological change, the social reality altered surprisingly little. Individuals still lived in communities and these communities shared a single doctrinal interpretation of Scripture. Individuals did not interpret Scripture on their own, but rather followed their community’s understanding.

Often, these communities were formed around the teachings of influential theologians and leaders. Luther founded the Lutherans; John Calvin founded the Reformed Church and influenced the Puritans; and John Knox organized the Presbyterians. And these are just a few of the communities, the churches, if you will, created from the Reformation.

So, early forms of Protestantism took a similar structure to Catholicism: Each was a community that brought a common interpretation to Scripture which, in turn, led to common social norms (i.e., morality).

The Puritans brought this communally organized Christianity to America, where they established a new community that would help individuals lead moral lives in keeping with the Puritan interpretation of Scripture.

But Luther’s dictum of the individual alone still rang out. When Roger Williams interpreted Scripture for himself in the 1630s, the Massachusetts Puritans expelled him. Williams believed in a radical understanding of Luther’s dictum: The church should be separate from the government so that the church could not use government powers to enforce doctrine and interpretation on individuals.

Williams’ idea become the foundation of America’s religious freedom. By the 1680s, variety was the religious flavor of the era. Formulations of Christian beliefs, called catechisms, proliferated. Puritan preacher Increase Mather thought that “over 500” different catechisms were circulating at the time. Over the next century or more, European immigrants brought in new Protestant denominations and Americans created their own.

By the 1800s, Christians realized all this religious freedom fragmented Christianity and interfered with its ability to accomplish the great deeds needed. So, they banded together into non-denominational organizations to take on moral projects. To accomplish this unity, they overlooked doctrinal features that divided them.

Thus, the great ethical movements of the century were founded: anti-slavery, temperance, women’s suffrage, and missionary projects to evangelize both foreign peoples and the USA’s “unchurched” masses. By the mid-20th century, new non-denominational groups joined with those of a more secular bent in the civil rights and women’s rights movements. The lessons of these movements was that, if the divided Christian populace overlooked matters of doctrine and Scripture interpretation, they could unify on moral issues.

Toward the end of the 20th century, a new alliance of Christians was formed. Since the great moral concerns of slavery and personal civil rights had been resolved (more or less), these groups took up new ones. Thus, the “right to life” movement, for example, took up the cause of the unborn. This brought together an alliance of conservative Protestants, Catholics and Mormons, who were able to overlook their differences on doctrine and Scripture, to unite on what they saw as a great moral concern.

Thus, morality is the great religious unifier, where different religious groups can agree. They may arrive at those moral positions through different doctrinal interpretations of Scripture, even from different versions of Scripture. But, to strengthen their unity, they ignore those differences. The public unity of Christianity, as apparent in American news coverage, comes from morality rather than doctrine.

‘Thinking with the Church’: The Pope Engages the People

Pope Francis is an impressive guy. Impressive not in the sense of his “wow” factor, coolness, charisma or even power, but impressive in his calm inner humility. It is not what he shouts that is gripping, but what he speaks in a whisper (to borrow Frank Bruni’s characterization).

In a recent interview in the Jesuit publication “America,” the Pope characterizes himself as a “sinner.” And then, realizing how that remark will be interpreted, he goes on to say, “This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”

When he thinks about his church -- and as a Jesuit he emphasizes “thinking” -- Pope Francis sees the overwhelming problems it faces. To solve them, he wants to “think with the church,” the “people of God.” Why? Because the people of the church “considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief.” Of course, as a Catholic leader, he means the “‘holy mother, the hierarchical church,’…the church as the people of God, pastors and people together,” not some form of “populism.”

This “thinking with the church,” in the Pope’s view, can and should lead to changes in “human self-understanding.” He spoke of slavery and the death penalty as mistakes from which humanity and the church have learned and changed. And what test indicates when a past understanding is no longer valid? “When it loses sight of the human, or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself.”

In that light, the Pope sees each individual human being as more important than the church’s doctrine. The message of salvation for all should be its front and center, not its doctrinal condemnations. While Pope Francis does not want to change church doctrine, he does want to alter how church leaders present it.

The church has sometimes “locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.” When talking about divorce and remarriage, abortion and homosexuality, he almost turns folksy, giving several anecdotes emphasizing a loving attitude toward individual humans, “sinners” and their life choices.

Instead of condemning sinners, the church should do triage. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds.”

Francis repeats this phrase, “Heal the wounds. Heal the wounds.” The church needs to return to the world and “accompany” the people who live there, wherever they live: in poverty, in sickness or in spiritual need. He points particularly to the bishops, who should not only support the “movements of God” among their flock, but should “accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.”

“Finding new paths” seems to apply to Francis’s thoughts about women and their place in the church. “Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed … the church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church.” He even states, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman … the feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions.”

Unfortunately, the tone has suddenly changed here. No more anecdotes. No love of the individual. Instead, dealing with women directly, the church should create a generalized “theology of women.”

But a theology of women is not what the 2 billion women and men who belong to the Catholic Church need. A “theology of women and men together” would be a better idea, since Catholicism exists in a world that men and women increasingly share as equals.

Most adults have a wide experience of the opposite sex. In marriage, women and men are partners, working together in the most intimate ways: companionably, intellectually, emotionally and sexually. Together, they create and raise families, loving their children with a bond and strength only they can experience.

In today’s workplace, men and women work together more and more: as colleagues, workers, members of a team, as subordinates and as supervisors. Increasingly, over the decades, women and men have grown accustomed to working with each other in these different roles.

A theology is not what is needed, but a practical guide for the relationships and community dynamics of people’s daily lives; a guide through which the hierarchy can learn how church members live their lives, lives that the priestly, celibate commitment to the church prevents them from experiencing directly.

Pope Francis is bold to challenge himself and the church’s leadership to “think with the Church,” with all the people of God. For their sake, I hope he truly sees and enacts the full potential of his goal.

Note: The interview with Pope Francis appears online at America Magazine: http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview.