The American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.
Evangelicals can have revival or nostalgia—but not both.
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The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories. “Sometimes I feel like I’m crazy,” one pastor said to me just days ago. “Does no one see that the Church is in crisis?”
Indeed it is. I am a conservative evangelical—previously the head of the public-policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. For years I dealt with evangelical backlash, including from some of my closest allies and friends, over my opposition to Donald Trump and my views on issues such as racial justice and Church sexual abuse. I hardly thought of myself as a “dissident.” Instead, I believed I was just what I’d always been: a loyal Southern Baptist evangelical trying to apply what I’d learned from children’s Sunday school onward about basic Christian morality and justice. Still, I felt like an outcast and a heretic. I felt homeless. And two years ago, I left the Southern Baptist world I loved.
I know that other evangelicals struggle with similar feelings. I am hard-pressed to think of one congregation that is not divided—or in an adrenal stance of tension about the imminence of division—over the turmoil of the political moment. This should be a time for revival in our churches. Revival is a concept with a long history in American evangelicalism, rooted in the Bible, that says a people who have grown cold and lifeless can be renewed in their faith. It is a kind of resurrection from the dead.
Yet the language of revival is now riddled with cynicism, and is associated with some of the worst aspects of American evangelicalism. Entrepreneurial American evangelicalism built a programmatic structure for “revival”—whether in the spring- and fall-meeting schedules of little Bible Belt churches like the one in which I grew up or in massive stadium events traveling across the country like rock concerts. As The Guardian noted in an editorial after the 2016 presidential election, “In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.”
Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age. A generation ago, one evangelical leader said that the goal of the religious right should be 1950s America, just without the sexism and racism. Today, even those qualifications are evaporating. Surveys show that, when compared with other religious groups and the general population, white evangelicals are the most susceptible to white-nationalist tropes such as the “Great Replacement” theory, and their institutions caricature the most basic commitments to racial justice as “critical race theory.” Denominations that are glacially slow to recognize documented sexual-abuse cover-ups are lightning quick to expel congregations they find to be too affirming of women’s leadership.
However, the confusion of nostalgia with revival is not simply the terrain of MAGA-right evangelicalism. Many mainstream evangelicals assumed that we were all just waiting out a moment of disorder: If we can just get through the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic, the racial-reckoning protests and backlashes, the 2020 presidential election, and the seemingly constant evangelical-leadership sex-and-abuse scandals, we’ll end up safely back in 2015. That’s clearly not happening.
Crisis shakes up an old order—ripping apart, as the apostle Paul put it, what’s made of “wood, hay, stubble” (1 Corinthians 3:12). Now every moment is a possible apocalypse—in which what’s been around us all the while is revealed—and thus every moment is an hour of decision.
The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous. In the supposedly idyllic Christian America of the post–World War II era, the evangelical preacher A. W. Tozer wrote: “It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.” Tozer knew that the confusion of revival with nostalgia could amount to exactly what contemporary psychologists tell us about trauma: What is not repaired is repeated.
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That’s why the crisis before evangelical America is not necessarily bad news. Many people, myself included, lament what we see as the fragmentation of the evangelical movement. People who once led ministries together no longer speak to one another. People who prayed together for decades now say to one another, “I don’t even know who you are anymore!” All of this is in the context of an American culture that also seems to be fragmenting—a process accelerated by the collapse of mediating institutions and the growth of a social-media ecosystem—in ways that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt compared in this magazine to the destruction of the biblical Tower of Babel.
And yet, the problem with the Tower of Babel was not fragmentation. The problem was unity. The builders were united by their own hubris in building something that would ultimately destroy them. The confusion of the languages and the scattering of people were the work of God. The answer was not to reassemble the old architectural plans and start again. The answer instead was in the next chapter—with a lone figure, Abram of Ur, who heard a promise and trekked out into the desert, not knowing where he was going.
The answer to the crisis of credibility facing evangelical America is not fighting a battle for the “soul of evangelicalism,” with one group winning and exiling the losers. John and Charles Wesley did not replace the 18th-century Church of England to create Methodism, but their renewal movement still resonated throughout the world and with other Protestant denominations. Billy Graham was cast out from many of the fundamentalist sectors in which he had learned to preach the Gospel, but he carried the Gospel where his mentors never could.
The answer is instead what it has always been: Those who wish to hold on to the Old Time Religion must recognize that God is doing something new. The old alliances and coalitions are shaking apart. And the sense of disorientation, disillusionment, and political and religious “homelessness” that many Christians feel is not a problem to be overcome but a key part of the process. The insight of evangelical Christianity, at its best, is that any pilgrimage cannot start with a road map of certainty but must begin with the cry of faith that says, like the noble disciple Thomas wrongly labeled as a doubter, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (John 14:5).
Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.
C. S. Lewis noted that the one prayer that God almost never grants is “encore.” Lewis wrote that our nostalgia for the “golden moments in the past” can be nourishing and sustaining, as long as we see them for what they are—memories, not blueprints. “Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths,” Lewis argued. “Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing.”
If evangelicals deny the depths of the crisis in front of us, and simply opt for the sort of public relations that can preserve the coalitions and power structures of yesteryear, we will lose a generation longing to see whether the Gospel is real or just another means to mobilize voters or market to customers. We will find ourselves in one more contest to see what kind of power we can leverage to make that happen—which, as always, will put us on the side of the crucifiers rather than on the side of the Crucified.
Churches must stop the frantic rhetoric and desperate lack of confidence that seek to hold on to the Bible Belt of the past. Instead, those worthy of the word evangelical should nurture the joyous and tranquil fullness of faith that prays for something new, rooted in something very old—namely a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.
That starts not with manifestos and strategic road maps, but with small-scale decisions to reawaken the awe of the God evangelicals proclaim. We must refocus our attention on conversion rather than culture wars and actually read the Bible rather than mine it for passages to win arguments. No individual can change the “evangelical movement” alone. Change comes, first, person by person, then congregation by congregation. If enough of us would embrace this sense of homelessness as our new normal—as where we should have been all along—then we can rekindle a longing for a different Kingdom to call home.
In a country exhausted by the quest to make America great again, perhaps what we need is to make evangelicalism born again.
And, in the end, that’s not a strategy. It’s a prayer.
This article has been adapted from Russell Moore’s forthcoming book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.