Evangelicalism: bend or break?

This week in the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer used apocalyptic rhetoric to herald the end-times for Western Evangelicalism. [http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html] Speaking from the inside, he takes an interesting angle on the decline of Evangelical participation and influence he predicts will characterize the immediate future. Rather than the forces of Satan buffeting the righteous cause, Spencer says, the Evangelicals themselves will be hoisted by their own petard, paying for the alliances and strategies they made in the past thirty years. Foremost among the "traps" that Evangelicalism fell into is their association "with the culture war and with political conservatism," a rising tide in the Reagan era but now susceptible to charges of intolerance and superannuation. Spencer writes that in as soon as the next ten years, "Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society."

Spencer's bold claims and grim prophecies do not necessarily follow from his evaluations; he would be safer arguing not the end of Evangelicalism, but the end of "Evangelicalism as we know it." It was Evangelicalism's protean nature that allowed it to latch onto the moral values train in the seventies, and the defining beliefs which characterize Evangelicalism (high view of Scripture, emphases on personal conversion and evangelism) could also be at the center of an identity that finds a better home in a progressive public sphere. If Evangelicalism can exist before the Religious Right, it can exist after the Religious Right. Rather than dooming Evangelicalism to a future of irrelevance, Spencer ought to foresee an Evangelicalism separated from the culture war ideology. Though religiously characterized by dogmatism, the political face of Evangelicalism of the past century has transitioned from cause to cause in an effort to stay vocal, contentious, and vital. Spencer's identification of the crisis facing Evangelicalism is fascinating and could be dead-on, but he fails to see that Evangelicalism is like a river that may bend and flow in different directions, but will not dry up.