by Randall S. Frederick

Carl Trueman of Westminster Theological Seminary went a step further. His The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (2011) points out one thing Noll seemingly preferred not to address: that even within Evangelicalism, there is no consensus on what an “evangel” (“good news” or Christian gospel) actually is or what “good news” means to the world. One side of Evangelicalism insists that justice could be found through politics, another side looks to law, still another insists that justice is impossible because of the inherent in the heart of all humans; the cult of Evangelicalism has always been riddled with inaccuracies, pulled in different directions for different purposes.

By the start of the Twentieth Century, the fractures had made the entire floe precarious, the contradictions more apparent with every annual convention of splintered denominations. The Southern Baptists have voted on the role and place of women at every meeting for the last three decades. The Methodist Church has split over the role and play of gay people in their churches. Even the Presbyterian Church, a longstanding harbor for women in ministry and gay people who wanted to worship God, finally split over the “place” of gay people in ministry. All churches in America had been infected with a kind of Nationalism that eroded the teachings of Jesus. The exporting of Evangelicalism to the African continent has also exported animosity and suspicion of one’s neighbor. Genocide erupted. Aspiring Fascists gave way to local warlords. Even the Church took a turn, framing the widespread loss of life as demonic activity rather than human evil. In Asia, Evangelicalism appeared in small churches founded on prayer which grew into megachurches that ultimately succumbed to the same greed and megalomania found in America. Europe’s disinterest in Evangelicalism, in hindsight, may have been a telling indictment. The Wesley’s had once lit England ablaze with religiosity but by the Twentieth Century, there were barely embers. The stability of Roman Catholicism prevailed in France, but there was intolerance to soft assurances of Heavenly promise in Germany after the collapse of their economy and the darkness of the human heart had been laid bare. By the Twentieth Century, German Evangelicalism survived only on the vitriol and sarcasm of Martin Luther. It was resurgent in ethno-nationalist groups and White Identitarians, but then it was found to be too soft and crumbled. Evangelicalism finally gave way to Neopaganism. Evangelicalism, as a whole, had rewritten itself for different ends but all found solidarity in oppressing those who were not White, not male, and not heterosexual. The cult had fractured too many times.

While Evangelicalism has always had anti-intellectualism at the core, without a shared history or understanding, it was no longer able to identify the markers that could hold the cult together. An Evangelical would, without this core, fire shots over the bow against one another and justify their attacks as pursuing Truth. Fractures were justified as cult turned against cult, radicalizing and outpacing one another for the most rigorous, doctrinally pure subjectivity.

As Noll and Trueman assert, instead of shared understanding or even the intellectual tradition, Evangelicals could only justify their anti-biblical worldview and un-Christ-like behaviors individually, even privately. They were above and beyond correction, shocked that everyone else failed to see things as clearly as they did individually, even privately. Evangelicals were allowed to treat theology like they did history, buffet-style. What was tasty, even if it was made synthetically with unhealthy properties, they could choose freely to the point of excess. What was inconvenient, though it may have been healthier, they could refuse – and even complain to management for having suggested they try it. Keith Johnson, defending Evangelicalism, writes in Theology as Discipleship (2015) that,

Many Christians believe that the formal study of theology distracts us from the most important activities of the Christian life. Every Christian wants to think and speak about God correctly. But does the formal and organized study of theology help or hinder us in doing so? This is a matter of debate. Even though much sincere effort has been put into the discipline of theology over the centuries, many Christians believe it brings few benefits and many dangers for the church as a whole.

Most of us know people who have lived faithful lives even though they have never formally studied theology; and at the same time, many of us also know or have heard about people who know a lot of theology but live hypocritically or without faith. Such examples prompt the warnings many students receive about theology professors who lead students astray or students who have lost their faith as a result of advanced theological study. Behind many of these warnings is the worry that the discipline of theology unnecessarily complicates the faith by making it more complex and confusing than it needs to be. Paul warned that we should “avoid stupid controversies” about doctrinal matters because they are “unprofitable and worthless” (Titus 3:9).

Because the process of engaging new material inevitably challenges long-held assumptions, exposes faulty patterns of thinking and prompts new and difficult questions, beginning students of theology often find themselves intellectually shaken by their study… Instead of spending time and energy debating complex details, shouldn’t we focus on the central and most clearly understood commandments of the Christian life, such as the task of loving God and neighbor (Luke 10:27)? After all, if one can live faithfully without theological study – and if such study sometimes leads believers down the wrong path by unnecessarily complicating the faith – then it makes sense to invest our time and resources elsewhere. Doesn’t the discipline of theology distract us from the real work of the church, such as praying, worshipping, sharing the gospel and serving others?

Updating The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 2022, Noll writes that while Evangelicals made efforts to create a new center of learning for themselves with schools and seminaries, they failed throughout the Twentieth Century and they continue to fail. Scholars within academia, theologians, historians, ethicists, philosophers, even pastoral leaders all testify that Evangelicalism’s turn toward conservative buffet-style theology is no theology at all. Rather, it is a product of American excess. It is Babylon. Noll writes,

To be sure, something of a revival of intellectual activity has been taking place among evangelical Protestants since World War II. Yet it would be a delusion to conclude that evangelical thinking has progressed very far. Recent gains have been modest. The general impact of Christian thinking on the Evangelicals of North America, much less on learned culture as a whole, is slight. Evangelicals of several types may be taking the first steps in doing what needs to be done to develop a Christian mind, or at least we have begun to talk about what would need to be done for such a mind to develop. But there is a long, long way to go… These Evangelical impulses have never by themselves yielded cohesive, institutionally compact, easily definable, well-coordinated, or clearly demarcated groups of Christians. Rather, the history of these Evangelical impulses has always been marked by shifts in which groups, leaders, institutions, goals, concerns, opponents, and aspirations become more or less visible and more or less influential over time. Institutions that may emphasize evangelical distinctives at one point in time may not do so at another. Yet there have always been denominations, local congregations, and voluntary bodies that served as institutional manifestations of these impulses.

Frighteningly, Noll reminds his readers that though Evangelicals are inconsistent, resistant to factual evidence and show a strong preference for the incredible, “For both the United States and Canada, Evangelicals now constitute the largest and most active component of religious life in North America.” The most contrarian, self-righteous, conspiratorial, and least informed are the ones currently defining what is in the Bible, what deserves attention, and how it is understood. The crisis could not be more dire for religious life in America.

The rapid growth of Evangelicalism from the Seventies to the Aughts is a testament to the low intellectual barrier they set and then continued to lower across four decades. In the Seventies and Eighties, a new generation of Christians “rebelled” against “institutionalized religion”, a playful turn of phrase for both the institutions of religion as well an insult to their parents. The mental and emotional decline of Evangelicals shows a direct relationship with the Baby Boom generation.

Baby Boomers, sociologists now understand, believe in a fast-food style approach to culture. If it is not cheap and easy, it’s too cumbersome. The complexity of life and understanding are inessential to success. In many cases, complexity and thoroughness are complications for success and the short-term (re: “fast food”) approach to life and culture inevitably began to erode tenets of Christianity. Breaking from the cumbersome legacy of the Christian Church – which, after all, had been entangled with weighty matters like nuclear arms, Civil Rights, gender equality, social justice, and the role of the government since World War II – was appealing. If the teachings of Jesus were so important, then it made sense that Jesus wrapped things up quickly in three years. Jesus was rewarded for a promotion because he was able to make things so simple. Paul, whose letters were more complicated, was neutered. His letters were summarized, large sections de-emphasized.

Gradually, Boomers began to cast aside “inessentials” like Church history, theological coherence, and the variety of Christian experience. In place of these, they stripped two thousand years of insight down to a handful of core, yet still undefined, capitalized Truths. One of these was that Jesus only saved those who wanted to be saved. If you had questions, you were fighting against the “simplicity” of the Gospel and maybe didn’t belong. This would require Evangelicals to broaden the terms of salvation, cutting through denominationalism and particularly Reformed theology with its emphasis on total depravity and limited atonement and Catholic theology with its emphasis on rites and sacraments. What mattered, ultimately, was that Jesus Saves.

Instead of embracing personal experience and the inner life, where the mind, the emotions, and the sense reside, Evangelicals began to “fight back” and attack Christians who insisted on textual adherence above personal experiences and feelings. “Faith” was not a feeling, as Evangelicals asserted. It was tradition, as Christians asserted, which was learned. It was textual evidence, Christians asserted, which was shared and held in common for all to see.

Evangelicals, restless Protestants and Catholics alike, began utilizing their underinformed understanding of church history to weaponize the practices of the church: excommunication, heresy trials, and the denial of communion and sacred rites. They made increasingly bewildering claims about the dichotomy of good and evil without scripture, reason, or logic to secure those claims; it was a bizarre twisting of scripture. John’s blessings that believers “in all things prosper and be in health, even as your soul prospers” was directed toward material wealth and hoarding of resources, something shockingly different from the original Christian community who understood “blessing” to be a spiritual experience rather than a financial one, a gift from a generous God rather than a transaction with the Heavenly CEO.

Paul’s description of women in ministry – Priscilla, Aquila, Julia, Chloe – was erased. In the case of Junia, entirely forgotten. Evangelicals like Wayne Grudem, John Piper, and John MacArthur began to “reclaim biblical manhood” by asserting that women were forbidden from all forms of ministry. Again, there were appeals to Babylon and “the whore” Jezebel who told her husband what to do. There was a return to Medievalism. Rejecting Feminism entirely, Evangelicals preferred a strict, literalist readings of Genesis where a woman was the first sinner. This explained why women continued to sin and hold to silly fancies because it was in their nature to be less intelligent and less open to the ways of God. A good wife, a godly wife, had to work to love her husband and keep herself open. Gone were the clear indicators from the Gospels that women were the first to witness Jesus’ resurrection and tell the apostles (yes, even those closest to Jesus during his life) that their Lord and Master was risen from the dead. Women were increasingly, and then intensively, and then authoritatively reminded of their “place” – at home with children (her intellectual equals), silent in church, enslaved to Christ, and obedient to their husbands. Minor characters like Jezebel were metaphorically elevated only to be seen as ghoulish and manipulative. Even Jesus’ mother, Mary, was taken off her throne as the Queen of Heaven; Evangelicals reminded one another that Mary was not special. She was just a breeder. It was a ghoulish preview of the Evangelical political agenda in the decades ahead. Evangelical leaders reminded their churches that women, according to the apostle Paul, would be saved through childbearing. Mary was a nobody, a nothing, and certainly not special. She was a womb. That was the extent of her specialness, a mere luck of the draw. And if anyone wanted to stretch it further, then okay. Mary said “yes.” Good women always said “yes” to men, to God, to authority. They never said no. God forbid.

In the halls of Evangelical bible colleges, future leaders were hypnotized by the constant drumbeat that scientific and biological exploration were “evil”, the findings of “so-called” experts dubious if not evil. Many of their experiments were downright demonic. All forms of education except those authorized by and originating in Evangelical thought – patriarchal, anti-science, and anti-learning without irony – would be denounced as expressions of “Babylon.” Feminists were “Jezebels” and “whores of Babylon.” Education was “Babylon.” Movies were “Babylon.” Science was “Babylon.” Even as Evangelicals tried to replicate Babylon with movies, with educational materials and school board meetings and textbook edits, with women who were trotted out to repeat patriarchal talking points, they called the same things “Babylon.” There could be no equivocation, no exceptions. Evangelicalism was a faith militant.

Whatever ideal Evangelicals claim to have in mind about Babylon, it can’t mean any of this.

Can it?

Outside of the Evangelical orbit, I have come to see and hear the hypocrisy and manipulation of Evangelicalism in a new way. There is nothing wrong with having an ideal, with wanting to make things better in the world. Though I am no longer an Evangelical, I know the pursuit of a good world where Jesus’ teaching about love and generosity and mercy prevail – the Kingdom of God – is still part of who I am, who I always have been. Yet Evangelicalism continues to expose itself as a shared delusion.

Evangelicalism continues to expose itself as abusive, as harmful, as destructive.

It insists that culture is a bad thing and then replicates it.

It insists Muslims are all bad people – after all, look at the repressive regimes of Middle Eastern countries; look at how Muslims treat women – and then replicates it. The Tradwife countercultural movement is a copy and paste from Evangelical thought on the “place” of women in the world – babies, food preparation, only friendships with other women. Just like “ragheads” do “over there.”

Evangelicals claim God only wants to save some people. Conveniently, white men are at the front of that line. Just like the Latter Day Saints, though Evangelicals this is “strange” and a primary example of why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is “a cult.”

The Southern Baptist denomination was founded to support slavery in America. Literally. Not figuratively. To deny the embedded racism, the legacy of their origins, in the face of undeniable evidence from their own founding documents is a perpetuation of the racism upon which their denomination was built. Yet Southern Baptists continue to claim none of this is true. And insist they are not and have never been a racist institution.

The remarkable thing about all of this is no longer the hypocrisy or easy observations, it is not even the cultic practices or the scandals that continue to surround Evangelical leaders like Mark Driscoll and Brian Houston. It is not the “alternative facts” and “alternative narratives” that are forced through television programming, or even the smirking antagonism and outright hatred that defines the cult. The remarkable thing is that Evangelicals claim deception, racism, greed, sexism, sexual immorality, violence, warmongering, and empire are godly – so long as they are the ones doing it.

As for their political influence, this is perhaps the strangest development of all. Christianity, on the whole, takes careful measure to keep the thirst for power at bay. Whenever the faith has been in compact with political power – in Rome, in Geneva, in Salem, in Washington D.C. – violence soon follows. The darkest chapters of Christianity’s history have had to ignore this at times because it is wildly, fundamentally, at odds with the origins of Christianity. Jesus resisted the armed insurrection of the Zealots in his own time. On the last night of his life, he even had to tell his closest friends to put down their swords and reprimanded them. The thought of violence and war was anathema to the teachings of Christ, even if the temptation had always been there at the periphery, crouching at the door. Paul continues this teaching of nonviolence. Suffering, rather than triumphalism and revenge, were to be defining traits of the Christian experience. After all, Paul points out, Jesus suffered to the point of death. As Paul reminds the churches, he had received lashes and jailings himself. His teaching was not theoretical or directed at people who would bear consequences he himself had not suffered already. Nonviolence to the point of personal suffering and even death were to be the defining qualities of the Christian witness to the world. Worse, Paul even encourages Christians to pray for those who are the source of abuse and mistreatment. In his most famous teaching to the Roman church, he writes “as for those who try to make your life a misery, bless them. Don’t curse, bless.”

Such teachings have been removed from Evangelicalism. Personal insult – not abuse, not threat to life, but mere insult – is sufficient for open, armed violence. No less than Franklin Graham (son of evangelist Billy Graham), Jerry Falwell Jr. (son of the radio and televangelist), James Dobson (former host of the radio show Focus on the Family), and Pat Robertson (media entrepreneur and aspiring politician) regularly encouraged Christian audiences to arm themselves and use force where necessary. Their rhetoric “baptized” the violence of Charlottesville and police brutality, baptized the removal of civil rights, baptized the defunding of libraries and public education, baptized physical attacks and murder of gay individuals, baptized the creation of more challenges for the poor, the homeless, and the hopeless. All in the name of love and salvation.

Babylon, for the Evangelicals, is not Babylon at all when it is veneered in Christian Nationalism. Oppression is not oppression when it is Christian Nationalism. Violence is not violence and racism is not racism, on and on because everything done in the name of Jesus is baptized – so long as the “right” people are doing it. Anyone else, anything else is “Babylon.”

Like the original story of Babel itself, the only ones confused by any of this are Evangelicals.

Francis Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals (2017), Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne (2021), Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory (2023) are some of the more recent autopsies of Evangelicalism. All attest to the same thing. Evangelicalism, like the Tower of Babel, has collapsed as a result of confusion and infighting. It is somehow worse, though. Worse than Babel. Babel’s failure is familiar, the challenge of multiple identities, cultures, folkways, and traditions unable to understand one another in pursuit of progress, a upward beyond this present life. Babel is remarkably human. What begins with optimism and ingenuity falls apart with human disagreement, with people who don’t see things the same way and not “speaking the same language.” Evangelicalism’s failure, in contrast, is the binding of terror and oppression into the religion from its start.

Historian Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise (2019) goes further in its explanation of how Evangelicalism was a slaveholder religion. Evangelicalism took the worse parts of Puritanism and racism, “baptizing” them with scripture, and outright lying with false promises of peace, of God’s providence through paternalism, before finally being exposed as constructing oppression through unjust laws, the exploitation of the disadvantaged, the weaponization of salvation, on and on. For Tisby, the chief issue has always been embedded racism. The heroes of the Great Awakening preached a religion of oppression, a slaveholder’s religion. They had slaves themselves. They defined the role of women not as Paul did, in terms of local customs, or as Jesus did, in emancipatory terms. Puritans wrote the script for the Twentieth Century by baptizing all manner of evil in perpetuity, but Evangelicals perverted the Gospel entirely by declaring that which is evil to be good and that which is good to be evil. This shift in meaning is important. It is no small thing because if Jesus is the word of God embodied, as the Gospel of John claimed thousands of years ago and as Evangelicals continue to claim up to today, then the meaning of words matter. They have consequences. Eternal consequences.

Russell Moore, former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, says the shift in language is something with which Evangelicals have always struggled. It is only recently that they have begun to entirely reject the substance and meaning of words. As he writes in Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelicalism (2023), Moore recalls the pastor of his childhood continually claiming that religion could not save people.

Religion would not do, only a relationship, a personal, living faith – not your church’s faith, not your country’s faith, not your family’s faith, but yours. If we were to see the kingdom of God, religion couldn’t get us there, they said. We must be born again.

Some people call it an altar call. Some call it a “Come to Jesus” meeting. We called it an “invitation.” Though we were low-church Mississippi Baptists who thought we didn’t have any ritual or formality, this was part of our liturgy. Every week, at the end of the service, the gospel would be repeated about how God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believed in him would not perish but have everlasting life. Every week, the question, “How do I become a Christian?” was answered with step-by-step guidance, sometimes even with a prayer a person could repeat. Every head would be bowed, every eye would be closed, but sometimes we would be looking around, with everybody praying that this would be the week that Miss Velma’s husband would go down the aisle to accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior.

Every week was an opportunity, not just for the unbelievers but also for all of us. We would ask ourselves: Is there some sin I need to confess today? Do I need to recommit my life to Christ? Is God calling me to “full-time Christian service,” maybe even to be a missionary on the other side of the world? While all these questions – from the pulpit and in our own minds – were being asked, the organ would play quietly in the background hymns we all knew by heart: “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me…” or “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling… calling, oh, sinner, come home…” or “I have decided to follow Jesus… no turning back, no turning back.”

When I was older, I found much to criticize about this weekly revivalism. It could communicate a kind of “pray this prayer after me” transaction that propped up the nominal, cultural Christianity all across the Bible Belt. It could substitute the biblical language of justification and sanctification with sentimental phrases about “Asking Jesus into your heart.” It could become just as much a formality as could praying the rosary or reciting the Nicene Creed. It could reemphasize the sort of individualized Christianity that enabled generations of my ancestors to fight for the enslavement of human beings or to ignore the atrocities of Jim Crow segregation, all with an easy conscience that all was well as long as they repented of the sins the preacher mentioned – personal sins such as getting drunk or playing cards.

As Babel shows, the breakdown in language leads to division and fractures that cannot be overcome. Nations, cities, even individuals fall apart when language is eroded. That is to say, the story of Babel in the Evangelical imagination is of outside threats. Whores and dragons. It is about false religions, puppet governments where the Devil pulls the strings. Babel is never an internal threat. Yet, the story itself indicates that very thing. The story of “the Tower of Babel” begins with people assembling together and there is, at that point, no problem or threat to anyone. Communities work together, expanding the city at the base and building upwards. The problem comes about when “God” seems these unnamed peoples with unknown origins working together; I would suggest this is where we need to begin questioning the text strenuously. It is a remarkable difference from the tone, language, and specificity of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. So much of these books is a detailed accounting of generations, who began whom, whose parents come from which tribe. How large that tribe is now and then, later, how large they are at a different point. The Torah is so specific that it is concerned with how to cut the animals in preparation for sacrifice, with the fabrics of clothing, with the cultural folkways regarding seminal emissions and menstruation. The Torah is so specific – and I do not say this casually or with any measure of glib – that it even has a book called “Numbers.” It is very detailed about regions of the Middle East, towns and tribes, people and their progeny for century after century. It is detailed and thorough, curiously so for an ancient text. The attention to detail is, remarkably, a defining quality of the Torah. Yes, even in Genesis where the authors are moving through several thousand years of legend and lore.

So it is curious, isn’t it? It demands our attention, doesn’t it, when the text deviates from its tone to make such a wide generalization about such an important detail? What happened at Babel? What specifically happened there that would bring nations together and then drive them apart? The author claims that God is threatened by the people. How? Why? In what ways? The marvels of the ancient world are quaint in comparison to those of the modern era. Skyscrapers ascend far, far higher than Babel was ever able. In fact, there is no longer any evidence of such an architectural attempt – if one ever existed at all. So the story is not to be taken literally, at least not in terms of human engineering. Rather, the story is to be taken as “true” about the breakdown of humanity. On this, I would agree with Evangelicals. However, as someone who studies texts (rather than dwelling on evil and wickedness) and as someone who spends a considerable amount of time with self-reflection (rather than pointing the finger at others and condemning them to eternal damnation forever and ever, amen), what stands out to me is the way that the breakdown continues even now. Evangelicals perpetuate a fiction about Babylon and then act confused when history, culture, anthropology, even their own ancient writers and leaders testify that while Babylon was many things, it was not evil. Rather, Evangelicals embody an irony in their ability to continue the collapse and division that began there so long ago.