Category Archives: Evangelicalism

A High Church Prayer of the Day for Low Church Readers

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Today I present a formal prayer for all of you out there who are informal in your spiritual life. In fact, this day, December 28, 2012, seems to be a good day to consider how church tradition can aid spiritual life.

Let me explain.

Most evangelicals (though not all) are what we sometimes refer to as “non-liturgical” or “low church.”  This means, among other things, that they are more informal in their worship practices, avoid “rituals,” and do not follow the historic church calendar (with the exception of recognizing Christmas and Easter in some way).  This stems from practices advanced by some Protestants during the Reformation who believed that high church traditions and rituals encouraged a works-based theology and made worship something based on outward actions rather than inward matters of the heart.  Calvinists, Pietists, Mennonites, and Quakers moved in this low church direction while Lutherans and Anglicans/Episcopalians tended to maintain liturgical forms of worship.  (Evangelicalism was born from a blend of Calvinist, Pietist and Methodist impulses).

But let me, as a member of a non-liturgical church (Evangelical Friends) put in a word for the high church tradition.  First, we should remember that while it is true that liturgical practices can become empty routines, the same can be said for low church spirituality.  Second, there are riches to be found in the traditions of Christianity.  Following a church calendar, for instance, can focus our attention on biblical passages that we might otherwise pass over rather quickly.  And reciting formal prayers, written by those schooled in solid theology, can help us articulate matters that we have difficulty expressing on our own.

That brings us to today.  Those Christians who follow a high church calendar mark December 28 as a day to remember the children of Bethlehem whom Herod killed in his deranged passion to eliminate Jesus Christ.  In light of the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, it seems especially fitting that we reflect on this event from Matthew 2.

To my recollection, I have only come across one evangelical church that has incorporated this event into their Christmas season.  This church was the Kijabe African Inland Church in Kenya, which included Herod’s slaughter in the Christmas play that their children performed.  That sight of Kikuyu Christian children acting out a slaughter of the boys in Bethlehem suddenly struck me as odd, not because they had included it in their Christmas play, but because I had never seen any other Bible-believing evangelicals in the United States include it.  For whatever reason, most American evangelicals would rather avoid this story at Christmas.  It is, after all, a painful story to recount in a season that we associate with joy, peace and happiness.  And it is difficult to know how to incorporate tragedies such as this in a context of worship.

And here is where church tradition helps us.  By turning our attention to a passage that we are inclined to skip over, and by articulating a prayer that is difficult to express on our own, we can participate in the work of the Kingdom of God in a way that we might otherwise miss.

Even though the birth of Christ brings peace on earth, we still live in a deeply fallen world.  Sometimes, as the Newtown tragedy and Herod’s rage demonstrates, those two realities appear shockingly close together.  So, as we pray for the families in Connecticut who are enduring a very difficult Christmas season, let us also consider the difficulties that beset this world and the source of hope for its redemption.

The version of the following traditional prayer comes from a devotional work by Phyllis Tickle entitled The Divine Hours:  Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime:

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod.  Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and resigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen. 

Revivals, Idolatry and Politics

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I went to a good, old-fashioned revival last week.  I found it interesting that in this age of mega-churches and coffee bars in the foyer and big-screen HD technology, this meeting still had many things that I had seen before in revival meetings.

Consider the following features: it drew a big crowd and opened up with music.  We were told to go out and go door to door to spread the faith in our neighborhoods.  We were told that we shouldn’t be shy to talk to our co-workers and neighbors and friends.  We were told we lived in a broken society and we were part of the solution to set things back down the right path. Then we hit a musical interlude in which a quartet sang “Amazing Grace.”  And finally the main preacher got up and stirred the crowd with an impassioned message, reminding us that we were part of something bigger than ourselves.  Right before the final music, he told us that the greatest hope for earth was….

Wait a minute.  I’m sorry, I got confused.

This wasn’t an evangelical revival.  It was a political rally for Mitt Romney.  (Four blocks away from my house, actually, at the local high school baseball field).

The similarities of the Romney rally to evangelical religious revivals are not merely interesting coincidences.  (And let me just annoy both the die-hard Democrats and die-hard Republicans among you by saying that Obama rallies and Romney rallies are pretty much structured the same way.)

There is a historic connection between political campaigns and revivals.  As early as the 1740s, George Whitefield and other evangelical revivalists pioneered techniques for preaching to large audiences – often outdoors.  By the early 19th century Baptist and Methodist revivalists (like the circuit-riding guy on the horse on my blog masthead) had perfected these methods.  They became so widespread and so effective that politicians picked them up for their own campaigning purposes.  These rallies have been a part of our political culture ever since.

I wonder if this is more than a historic curiosity, though.  This past Sunday, while speaking on a totally different topic, my pastor pointed out that we make idols out of all sorts of things, and we aren’t even aware that we do it.

In the passion of a political campaign, we can make politics and the United States itself into an idol.  It seems to me that the subtle similarities to evangelical revivals can stoke hopes and desires that this candidate, this political party, this policy, this nation will save us from the woes that beset us.

Ponder this:  at the close of his rally the other night (right before the fireworks), Mitt Romney declared that America is the hope for the world.

No.

Jesus Christ is the hope for the world.

Wise political leaders, well-crafted policies and effective governments can bring order to society and limit evils and sins that we humans inflict on one another.  We need to do the best we can to work for good government, which has an important role in this world.  That role, however, is not that of savior.  Politicians, policies and the nation cannot eliminate those evils or sins, nor can they truly save us from them.

American political leaders have long had a habit of slipping into over-the-top rhetoric because it gets American audiences fired up.   We hear it and we don’t even realize that we are asking the United States to take on the role that only Christ can fulfill.  In 2008 Barack Obama declared that “the United States is the last great hope for humanity.”  Sarah Palin proclaimed that “America is the greatest earthly force for good the world has known.” Abraham Lincoln, that kindly, avuncular, home-spun Midwesterner on our penny said “My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.”

How do you like your idolatry?  It comes in tasty Democrat, Republican and historic flavors.

For those of you who want a sophisticated and challenging theological discussion of these things, I would recommend Theopolitical Imagination by William T. Cavanaugh, particularly his essay, “The Myth of the State as Savior.”

Otherwise, ponder (and pray about) this question this election season:  when, where and how do we slip into this kind of idolatry?  And what kind of citizen is Christ calling me to be?

Evangelical Colleges: Politically Captive?

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I’m taking a break from James Bond and Samuel Sharpe to ask some election season questions:

Is the college where I work, Malone University, hopelessly conservative because it is, after all, largely evangelical and requires its professors to abide by a statement of faith?  Or is it hopelessly liberal because it does, after all, have a tendency to employ pointy-headed professors?

Yeah, I get it from both sides.

For instance, a few months ago, I was invited to speak about presidential elections in American history at an event for clients of a financial services company.  In my role as a history professor, I made a few modest historical observations.

I was paired with another speaker who had worked on Capitol Hill.  He essentially laid out possible odds for which party might win the White House and the houses of Congress.  Although he was introduced as a former congressional staffer, the audience was not told that he had worked for Democratic members of Congress.

What I found most interesting was the reaction from the audience.  We both received a range of questions, but a few people singled me out for special attention on one issue.  One woman came up afterwards and asked me what party I supported.  Even though I told her I considered myself an independent, she did not really believe me because, as she said, liberalism was so rampant among college professors.  Several other audience members made comments indicating that they had similar assumptions about my political commitments.

The other speaker, the bona fide blue-state Democrat, did not receive similar comments.

Now, I had tried to be studiously non-partisan. I had given a Republican and a Democrat example from history for every point I made.  I had suggested that audience members ought to find a friend who supports the opposing candidate and have breakfast with them once a week so that they could hear different viewpoints and discuss them in a civil manner.  But it was apparent that some of the conservative members of the audience still looked on me with suspicion because I am, after all, a pointy-headed professor.

Then yesterday I read an Atlantic blog by Conor Friedersdorf that described “epistemic closure.”  This refers, in essence, to people who get all their information about the world from institutions promoting the same worldview.  These folk never encounter opposing viewpoints.  In Friedersdorf’s estimation, conservatives are particularly guilty of this type of close-mindedness and evangelical colleges are part of the problem.  “It’s now theoretically possible to go from evangelical homeschooling to a conservative college where debating abortion is verboten,” he wrote, “to a job at a conservative think tank, reached via a talk-radio-filled commute.”

To be fair to Friedersdorf, he is primarily discussing the role of conservative media.  However, his argument is based upon the claim that conservatives have built cradle-to-grave institutions that are closed off from intellectual diversity.  I am, it appears, part of this epistemic closure.  I do not know if he would believe me if I told him I am an independent.

This is the world I live in.  Greg Miller, a colleague of mine, says that evangelical professors sit on a window sill high up in the ivory tower.  And all the non-evangelical academics in the ivory tower are yelling at us, “jump, jump!”  Meanwhile, down below on the ground, are the members of our evangelical churches.  They are looking up at us teetering on the window sill of the ivory tower.  And they are yelling, “jump, jump!”

So are evangelical colleges close-minded?  There is data to suggest that evangelical colleges are more conservative than other types of institutions.  Inside Higher Ed reported yesterday that the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute released a study that ranks “private, 4-year, other religious” (meaning non-Catholic) colleges as the most conservative of any kind of institution.  (The other categories are “public universities, private universities, public 4-year colleges, private 4-year non-sectarian colleges, and private Catholic 4-year colleges).  I don’t know what percentage of evangelical colleges make up the category of “private, 4-year, other religious” colleges, but since Catholic and non-sectarian colleges fall under different categories, it has to be a large number.  At any rate, it strongly suggests that evangelical colleges are more conservative than other kinds of institutions.

But does that make evangelical colleges close-minded and guilty of “epistemic closure?”

Over at the “Pietist Schoolman” blog, Chris Gehrz, a history professor at Bethel University in Minnesota addressed this question a couple of weeks ago.  He gave evidence and arguments for why institutions in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities do not fit into a category of “right-wing monoliths.”  This fits with my impression of Malone, where I know we have professors from a range of political positions (though I do not know exact numbers.)  Gehrz wrote that “I feel like I’ve heard as many complaints from conservative professors about the lack of right-wing speakers on campus as vice-versa, but I’d also say that most of us are not all that politically partisan and that our students probably aren’t all that certain of how we vote.”

Gehrz admitted, humbly, that this may be wishful thinking.  He pointed out that we need more studies on these sorts of things.  I agree.

So here is the interesting part of the recent UCLA study:  one could conclude that evangelical colleges (or to be more accurate, “private, 4-year, other religious” colleges) are the most politically diverse of all types of institutions of higher education.

Check out the numbers.  In the study, 23% of the professors at these colleges consider themselves to be politically “conservative” and 0.6% consider themselves to be “far right.”  That is 10% higher than any other kind of institution in higher education, which is what makes them conservative, in the eyes of many academics.  But we also find that 29.1 % consider themselves “middle of the road.”   And the study reports that 40% of the professors at these institutions consider themselves “liberal” and 7.4% consider themselves to be “far left.”  This is what makes them liberal, in the eyes of many ordinary evangelicals.

In my eyes, this is what makes them politically diverse.

Or, at least, the most politically diverse kind of college you can find.

Yes, the UCLA study is only a small glimpse into a complicated issue.  For instance, I do not know what institutions get included in the “private, 4-year, religious” category.  And one will need to look more fully at individual evangelical colleges to better determine the extent to which they are guilty of “epistemic closure,” though one should ask the exact same questions about colleges that have large percentages of liberal professors.  The point is that the UCLA study carries more weight than perceptions, which is all that most people have to base their conclusions on at this point.  At the very least, the study suggests that “private, 4-year, other religious” colleges are better than other educational institutions at hiring professors from a range of political positions.  If, however, you want an education that has the narrowest range of political views, you should attend a public university or a private, non-sectarian, 4-year college.

Better yet, choose an evangelical college for its ability to integrate faith and learning.

“Ah, ha!” many academics will say.  That is exactly what makes evangelical colleges guilty of indoctrination, close-mindedness and “epistemic closure.”

I disagree.  But I’d be happy to talk about it and listen to opposing viewpoints.