can anyone defend Evangelicalism?

When I was a student at Cedarville University in Ohio, I had the good fortune of knowing Carl Ruby, the vice president of student life at the time. He was kind to everyone, even me, and that made him a rarity if not quite an anomaly. I remember a handful of professors and staff with a similar degree of affection and respect. They were serious Christians, who encouraged me to think rigorously and compassionately about my faith. (It's not their fault it didn't stick.) None work at Cedarville today. The school was conservative in my time, but it has now veered so far to the right that it has liberated itself from inconveniences like critical inquiry or compassion. Ruby has not. He pastors a church in Springfield, Ohio, where he's an outspoken advocate for the local Haitian community. Lately that's no easy task. Our vice president falsely accused Springfield's Haitian residents of eating household pets; more recently, the Trump administration ended their TPS status and is deporting them back to violence and death. Others come back from immigration appointments shackled with ankle monitors. "It is inhumane," Ruby told The Ohio Capital Journal last week. "It is an insult. It is designed to humiliate, and we want it to stop right now."

I'm not sure that he would like me to single him out as an example of Christian virtue. We'd both agree, probably, that mercy and love are the least of what we owe other people. But I thought of him when I picked up Bonnie Kristian's new book, A Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers. The subtitle is so hyperbolic that I had no idea what to expect from the text, but I did hope it might be interesting, and a break from the norm. There is a lot of bad writing about Evangelicalism by mainstream journalists. Sometimes it verges on conspiracy mongering. Everything is Christian nationalism or the New Apostolic Reformation or the spectral hand of RJ Rushdoony, reaching out from the grave. Or it's gullible. The New York Times specializes in soft-focus profiles of figures like Aaron Renn and Emma Waters. Their convictions get a light sketch, and there's little to no scrutiny paid to their credentials, or their theology, or the material consequences of their activities. Meanwhile, Christians like Ruby or my parents inspire fewer headlines than Doug Wilson or Paula White. On that basis alone, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Kristian's motivations. Evangelicalism is such a broad tradition that it is frustratingly difficult to define, but its global influence means that a serious person must try to understand it. Unfortunately Kristian has no clarity to offer. I'm not going to write a full review, but since she is an editor at Christianity Today, her arguments deserve some attention, even if they are weak.

Within the first few pages she attacks the "mainstream commentariat," and "exvangelicals" specifically, of "contradictory and ungenerous" accusations that can be "outright ignorant, manipulative, or unjust." That criticism would carry more weight if she named the exvangelicals in question, or described their work, but she does not. She says, rightly, that Evangelicalism "has a center as well as edges and extremes," and takes it upon herself to determine who's on the fringe and who isn't. That's her prerogative. The line is subjective, but it does exist and we must locate it somewhere. Still, it's always telling to see where a writer draws it, and why. To Kristian, Doug Wilson "would have to be included in American evangelicalism by any is or isn’t measure," but she prefers a different standard. She writes that "if we think instead about more or less, Wilson is undeniably less," on the outskirts of the faith.

Wilson likes to project an aura of power that does not always line up with reality, and his views are undeniably extreme. He doesn't think women should be able to vote. In Southern Slavery, As It Was, which he co-authored with a founder of the League of the South, he said "the Bible is clear that Christians may own slaves," as long as the enslaver in question "owns them in conformity to Christ’s laws for such situations." (Wilson half-heartedly disavowed portions of the pamphlet, but promotes the work of RL Dabney, a segregationist who fought for the Confederacy.) I don't think most Evangelicals share Wilson's views of slavery and women's suffrage. I'm not sure I would place him in the Evangelical tradition, either. But that doesn't make him "fringe," as Kristian insists. Even if we ignore his ties to the defense secretary, who's turning trans people out of the military and blocking promotions for women and people color, we're still talking about someone who founded a denomination, an accreditation body for Christian schools, a publishing house, a church, and a small college. He's also a prolific writer and debater, but Kristian ignores that along with his influence on the world of classical Christian education.

Ok, sure, an Evangelical might disagree with Wilson on a few key points, but where do their children go to school? Is it accredited, and if so by whom? What's the curriculum and who wrote it? Where did the faculty attend college? What conferences do they attend for professional development? These are important questions to consider before we conclude, as Kristian does, that Wilson is marginal, that he writes books that Evangelicals "overwhelmingly do not buy and makes podcasts they typically do not download." There isn't enough information to support such a sweeping – and exculpatory – statement.

She has a bigger problem with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez and her 2016 book, Jesus and John Wayne. "Du Mez’s tone is consistently skeptical and deliberately adversarial," she complains. But why shouldn't Du Mez sound skeptical? Perhaps she has a good reason for it. Not only is she a historian, she's a Christian who teaches at a Christian college. Agree with her or not, she's an insider. But Kristian accuses her of "mistrust" and says she "characterizes evangelicalism as a consumer culture, discounting the importance of theology and evangelicals’ own accounts of our faith." As a result, "even evangelical production and consumption of 'music, news sources, books, and radio' aligning with our beliefs are suspect," she adds. Jesus and John Wayne is not concerned with the mere existence of "music, news sources, books and radio" but with the ideas they disseminated and the culture they helped create. The analysis has substance that Kristian does not bother to address.

The mask slips more dramatically when she interviews Sun Lee, who owns Olympus Spa in Washington state. Lee is a conservative Christian and tried to ban "transgender-identifying males who haven’t medically transitioned," to borrow Kristian's loaded phrasing. In doing so, he violated a state anti-discrimination law. When the state tried to enforce the statute, Lee sued on religious liberty grounds. Kristian is full of sympathy for Lee but repeatedly misgenders trans women and seems to think of them as a predatory menace. The spa "must invite" them "to wander around the atrium, mingling with nude women and girls as young as thirteen," she complains. I don't expect Kristian to share my position on trans rights, but since she is a journalist, she should at minimum describe the situation fairly and grant trans women the basic courtesy of the correct pronoun. But this isn't a fair or courteous book. Kristian mentions Haven Wilvich, who filed a formal complaint against the spa, but calls her "a male who identifies as a 'nonbinary trans woman.'" Wilvich told local news that she received death threats after her name appeared in court documents, but Kristian omits that in order to make Lee the true victim. Lee, she writes, is "only being punished for daring to live like an evangelical in Washington State."

Is he? If Kristian is upset with sloppy coverage, let's be specific. Not all Evangelicals are MAGA or anti-trans. Instead, Lee belongs to a specific strain of the Evangelical tradition, which is his right, and he is entitled to First Amendment protections. Now we turn to other questions of law and opinion. The law prohibits him from imposing his beliefs on others, which is what he is doing when he turns a select group away from his business because of his personal beliefs. He doesn't get to engage in public commerce and discriminate against the public at the same time. Of course, that's my opinion, but I do suspect that's why he's lost every stage of his court battle until now. (His attorneys have now asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in.) Kristian is welcome to a different opinion, but it's unreasonable for her to express it and then ask the rest of us to pretend it's not damaging. She demands a level of respect and consideration for her co-religionists that she never extends to anyone else. We are to empathize with Jane, who votes for Trump three times because of a "pragmatic settling." Her "biggest question," she tells Kristian, is "what environment is going to protect the innocence of my children?”

Kristian says that Jane is not a hypocrite, and I agree. Jane is making decisions based on a moral calculation, and it is a bad calculation, with bad consequences for the rest of society. She is more worried about trans women in bathrooms than Trump's history of sexual assault. Now Trump is back in power and Renee Good is dead because a federal agent killed her in front of her wife. Good was a Christian, too. Maybe she would have called herself an Evangelical, I don't know. I do know Isaiah 15:20: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" Woe, woe, woe.

On a final note I have to mention that Kristian cites me once, unfavorably. You would not know that unless you checked the endnotes, where there is a link to my work, because she does not mention my name or my background in Evangelicalism, although I discuss it in the story she's quoting. In her book I am simply a writer for New York Magazine. A cultured despiser. I think I am more complicated than that, but what's funnier is the fact that Kristian and I have spoken. Maybe she doesn't remember, but when she was an editor at The Week and I was on staff at The New Republic, she interviewed me for a gig as a columnist. I thought she was nice, if a bit awkward. The Week did not offer me a job, and if they had, I wouldn't have taken it. (The salary was too low.) In any case, it's a questionable choice to go after someone but not by name, while ignoring the full context of their argument. Misleading, in fact! And that disappoints me, on several levels. It's bad journalism in service of a bad argument, and frankly I think it's bad for the church.

Why do I care? It's complicated. Yes, I'm an atheist. If I ever return to an Evangelical church it is because I am dead, and someone has stolen my corpse from my husband. That is my own moral calculation. In fact, a lot of people have a lot of very good reasons to be somewhat less than open-hearted toward voters like Jane. At the same time, I think of the Evangelicals I know, Christians like Carl Ruby and my parents and their friends, and I wish they had better defenders. Someone who is willing to write and think, instead of slapping the reader with a half-cooked spaghetti noodle. Someone who confronts the world as it is and not as she wants it to be. I'll be waiting.