What's Gone Wrong with American Evangelicalism: Some Notes

I’ve been trying to put my thoughts together on what, precisely, grieves me about American evangelicalism. Here’s what I have, so far.

I was born and raised in conservative/fundamentalist USA evangelicalism. I went to Cedarville University for undergrad, where I studied Bible and Spanish. Then, I went to Beeson Divinity School. Then, I went to Wheaton College Graduate School.

My first misgivings about the evangelicalism started in college. In 2012 or so, I couldn’t help but notice some concerning parallels between the German churches in 1920s-30s and American evangelical Christianity. I stopped calling myself an evangelical in 2016 when it became clear just how many evangelicals voted for Trump.

Some caveats up front

This is not an accusation against every evangelical, pastor, or church. Exceptions exist on every point. I’m speaking in aggregate, about historical trends and institutional patterns. The evangelical leaders responsible for shaping these trends bear the most responsibility.

I’m not writing from superiority. I previously held many of these positions. I grew up in this world and still love many of the people in it.

1. Evangelicals allied themselves with the Republican Party in exchange for political power, and it cost them their prophetic independence.

• Prophets speak truth to power. They don’t supply power with theological cover.
• This alliance goes back to the Moral Majority era but became undeniable with Trump.
• 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016. Then again. Then again.
• At some point it stops being a compromise and becomes a commitment…a revelation of true evangelical values.

2. Evangelicals cast themselves as the persecuted victims in their own story, while the actual vulnerable populations get thrown under the bus.

• There’s a siege mentality: the culture is coming for us, the government is coming for our churches, etc.
• Some of these concerns aren’t baseless, but the posture of victimhood doesn’t fit a movement with this much political influence and money.
• The selectivity is the problem. Evangelicals advocate for the unborn but have adopted right-wing hostility toward the poor, immigrants, LGBTQ people, refugees.
• The evangelical-GOP alliance has come at the expense of the kinds of vulnerable populations the biblical writers and Jesus himself consistently prioritized.
• Note: Even on abortion, the strategy isn’t working.
  • National abortion numbers have gone up since Dobbs, not down, because criminalization without addressing poverty, healthcare, and childcare doesn’t reduce abortions. It punishes the desperate.
  • What does it say about a movement’s priorities when the signature political achievement of a fifty-year campaign produces the opposite of its stated goal, and the movement’s response is to push for more of the same rather than rethink the approach?

3. Evangelical ethics have been reduced to two issues: abortion and gay marriage. Everything else is negotiable.

• The breadth of biblical ethics (care for the poor, welcome of the stranger, peacemaking, economic justice, stewardship of creation) has been collapsed into two litmus tests.
• This is how you get evangelicals who will break fellowship over a pastor’s position on gay marriage but shrug at predatory lending, wage theft, lack of healthcare access, or children separated from their parents at the border.
• The two-issue framework has made it easy to ally with any politician or movement that checks those two boxes, regardless of what else they stand for. It’s how “pro-life, pro-family” became compatible with cruelty toward immigrants, indifference to poverty, and support for a political leader who embodies none of the virtues the church claims to value.
• Meanwhile, the broader biblical vision of neighbor-love, the common good, and human flourishing has been abandoned or outsourced to “the liberals.” Evangelicals have lost any robust public ethic beyond these two issues. Loving your neighbor has been reduced to not affirming their sin. The “common good” is treated as a socialist concept rather than a deeply biblical (and historically Christian) one.

4. The alliance has created dangerous theological blind spots. Evangelicals are trained to spot errors on the left and ignore errors on the right.

• They’ll speak at length about liberal sexual ethics but stay silent about sexual abuse in their own institutions (Ravi Zacharias, the SBC abuse crisis, countless smaller scandals).
• They publish position papers on gender and sexuality while excusing misogyny in their own leadership.
• Some leaders have embraced functional Trinitarian heresy/heterodoxy (the “eternal subordination of the Son”) because it’s useful for complementarian gender theology. When your doctrine of the Trinity bends to serve your politics of gender, something has gone seriously wrong.
• They’ll overlook or explain away the personal conduct of political allies, as long as those allies deliver on the Right issues.
• Idiosyncratic “end times” theology has created its own blind spots.
  • Dispensational premillennialism and a particular brand of Christian Zionism have driven concrete political commitments (unconditional support for the modern state of Israel, skepticism toward peace negotiations, fatalism about environmental stewardship because the world is going to burn anyway) that are treated as biblical mandates but are actually products of a 19th-century interpretive tradition that most of church history would not recognize.
  • These positions get a pass from internal scrutiny because they’re coded as conservative and therefore orthodox.
• Proposal: when the church speaks in the public square, it should be on behalf of others, not for self-preservation. The church should be willing to risk its clout, influence, and standing for the sake of others. The evangelical political project has been overwhelmingly about self-protection.

5. Evangelicalism has an anti-intellectualism problem that makes self-correction almost impossible.

• There is a deep suspicion of scholarship, expertise, and intellectual complexity within large swaths of evangelicalism. Nuance is treated as compromise. Changing your mind is treated as losing your faith.
• This plays out in obvious ways (young earth creationism, hostility to mainstream science) but also in subtler ones.
  • Seminaries and Christian universities that push students to think critically get accused of undermining faith.
  • Scholars who complicate the party line get pushed out.
  • I watched this happen at Cedarville, where a genuinely broadening theological education was dismantled in favor of fundamentalist conformity.
• The anti-intellectualism is selective. Evangelicals are happy to cite scholarship when it supports their positions. It’s only scholarship that challenges their positions that gets labeled “liberal” or “worldly.”
• This creates a closed loop. If the only trustworthy sources are the ones that already agree with you, and if changing your mind is spiritually suspect, then the movement has no mechanism for recognizing when it’s wrong. Every internal critic becomes an enemy. Every external critique becomes persecution.
• The result is a movement that can’t learn from its own history, which is why the patterns in this outline keep repeating.

6. Evangelicals have traded the vocabulary of the kingdom of God for the vocabulary of the American empire.

• Freedom has become “no one can tell me what to do.”
  • This comes from Enlightenment individualism, not from Scripture.
  • Biblical freedom is always freedom for something: serving your neighbor, living in covenant community.
  • Paul says don’t use your freedom for self-indulgence but through love become slaves to one another.
  • The exodus doesn’t end when Israel leaves Egypt. It ends at Sinai, where God gives the law. Freedom from bondage is freedom for faithfulness.
  • American evangelicalism imported the libertarian definition and baptized it.
• Power has become domination.
  • In the Gospels, power looks like a king washing feet and a man on a cross.
  • When evangelical leaders talk about “taking back the culture” or “reclaiming America for God,” that’s the language of conquest, not the cross.
• Justice has become punishment and retribution.
  • In the prophets, justice is overwhelmingly about protection for the vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor.
  • Evangelicals have reduced it to “the guilty get what they deserve.” This retributive framework has infected our theology of hell and atonement too.
• The net effect: we over-individualized and over-privatized the gospel. It became about managing selected personal sins (mostly sexual ones) and believing the right things so you go to heaven when you die. We closed our eyes to the societal and systemic dimensions of the gospel. Social justice is the gospel. It is what the prophets demanded and what Jesus embodied.

7. Evangelicalism’s over-individualized theology has left it unable to see or address racial injustice, and the track record proves it.

The pattern, not the exceptions

• I’m not claiming every evangelical is personally racist. The argument is that evangelicals, despite following a gospel that should make them better on this, have consistently not been. The failure is measured against their own stated commitments.
• I’m not claiming evangelicals are uniquely bad on race compared to other white Americans. The point is that they’re not better, despite claiming to follow a gospel that demands better.

The history:

• Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise documents this pattern across four centuries of American church history. His core argument:
  • while individual Christians sometimes stood against racism, the overwhelming pattern among white American Christians has been complicity, ranging from active endorsement to quiet acceptance.
  • The anti-racists were the exceptions, not the racists.
  • The SBC was founded over slavery, white evangelicals were overwhelmingly on the wrong side of the civil rights movement, and the political infrastructure of the Religious Right has racial threads woven into its origins.
• Tisby’s point is not that any one moment proves the case. It’s that the pattern is relentless.

The theological move that keeps repeating:

• Evangelicalism’s individualistic framework means that sin is personal, salvation is personal, and the gospel is about your individual relationship with God.
  • If sin is only personal, then racism can only be individual prejudice in individual hearts.
  • If racism is only individual, then the solution is only individual repentance and personal relationships.
  • And if the solution is individual, then any framework that looks at systems, institutions, or policies looks like a distraction from the “real” gospel.
• During the civil rights movement, white evangelicals used exactly this logic. Racial discrimination was a heart problem. The gospel, not legislation, was the answer. Christians who pushed for structural change were dismissed as theological liberals who had lost sight of the church’s real mission.
• Today, evangelicals say the same thing about CRT (Critical Race Theory), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), social justice, and systemic racism. The vocabulary has updated. The reflex has not. And in both cases, the people saying “this is a distraction from the gospel” are not the ones bearing the cost of the status quo.
• You don’t need to think CRT is the answer to see the problem. The instinct to reject any structural analysis of race as “un-gospel” has been tested before, on one of the biggest moral questions of the twentieth century, and it failed.

The evidence that nothing much has fundamentally changed:

• American evangelicalism remains one of the most racially segregated spaces in American life.
• The SBC took 150 years to apologize for slavery. When its 2019 annual meeting passed a carefully hedged resolution acknowledging that CRT and intersectionality could be used in a limited way as analytical tools under Scripture’s authority, the backlash was immediate, and within about 18 months the seminary presidents had publicly declared CRT “incompatible” with the denomination’s statement of faith. The denomination didn’t need 150 years to respond to a framework for analyzing racism. It needed less than two.
• When Black leaders have risen to prominence within conservative evangelicalism and then spoken about racial justice, they have consistently been pushed out or marginalized.

Where this leaves me.

• None of this has driven me away from Jesus. The more I see the institutional church distort the gospel, the more compelling the actual gospel becomes. That being said, the problem of ecclesiastical evil is quite serious.
• I stopped calling myself an evangelical in 2016. I can’t pretend the evangelical movement hasn’t lost its way, and I can’t stay silent while the name of Jesus is used to justify indifference or even hostility toward the people he came to serve.
• I’m not asking for agreement on every point above. I’m asking: look at the social and political fruit of USA evangelicalism. Is it good? For the least of these?