Evangephobia: A Hate Crime?

There’s a new phobia sweeping the world – evangephobia: the fear of the evangelical.

I was in a taxi in Chicago a few months ago and the driver asked me if I was one of those “gun-carrying, gloom and doom evangelicals.” It caught me off guard, to be honest. But I wanted to see what would happen, so I said that I was (minus the gun carrying bit).

As we drove on, there was a lot of silence and I could see that this guy was really getting freaked out – physically affected by my response. When we arrived at our destination, I remember standing on the side of the road with a haphazardly-written receipt in my hand thinking that I had just witnessed my first experience with evangephobia.

A Crime?

In an a culture that upholds the the rights of every individual, regardless of skin color, race, place of birth, sexual-orientation, etc., it is often surprising to see such explicit and implicit hate-speech directed toward those who hold an evangelical belief system. In an uber-sensative United Kingdom (where I am currently living), where verbal bullying frequently makes the news, it is interesting to observe the not-so-subtle evangelical phobias inherent in the BBC and other primary media venues. Disguised as neutral, objective journalism, I can’t help but notice the underhanded comments and the demeaning tone of voice that often couples documentaries on Christianity. Recent investigations have revealed such biases.

In the United States, where free speech is legendarily touted, President Obama’s recent signing of the Hate Crime Bill has raised some evangelical eyebrows. Barret Duke told the Baptist Press, “While we should never condone acts of violence against anyone, for whatever reason, including whether or not that person is a homosexual, this bill proposes to prosecute someone based on their belief about homosexuality and therefore makes religious belief a germane issue in this debate.”

What is an Evangelical?

Evangelicalism is, as I have come to know it, a renewal movement within the protestant church that has its origins in the revivals of George Whitefield and John Wesley. The word is used in many ways, but historically, evangelicals have always been a restless people. Restless because they see injustice in the world and they endeavor to fix it. Restless because they respond to the moral laxity around them with a deeper spirituality through spiritual disciplines and self denial.

Evangelicals live in tension between identity and adaptability. On the one hand, she is to be separated from the world – holy, set apart, different. She is the bride of Christ, to use a biblical image, kept pure for the coming of her groom. Therefore, her actions, attitudes and dispositions will be different than that of the worlds.’ On the other hand she is commanded to engage the world, to reform and transform the world through the love of God. In the past, evangelicals have tried to be both of these, often swinging to the extremes.

According to David Bebbington, evangelicals can be defined by four words:

Ian Bradley’s The Call to Seriousness shows that evangelicals in the early part of the 19th century were perceived by the culture as a positive entity. These were the serious minded citizens who wanted to rid their culture of slavery and oppression. These were businessmen, miners, shop-keepers, tailors, and others who held deep convictions about their faith. These were teenagers who showed their parents how to radically abandoned themselves to God, ordinary radicals, as Shane Claiborne would say. Evangelicals were a bible-driven, cross-centered, conversion-oriented, activistic people who gave their lives to the enhancement of humanity and the kingdom of God.

Believing that Jesus demonstrated both a concern for the physical and the spiritual, evangelicals have always retained enough gospel in their social to be “social gospel” driven.

A Loss of Momentum

In the 1950s, the revivalism of evangelicalism in America, as ignited by Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, started to lose momentum. There are many reasons for this – prosperity, apathy, lack of persecution, etc. Subsequently, a great laxity settled over the American church.

Prayer meetings and big tent revivals were replaced with program committee meetings. Pastors gained a new and unfamiliar role as C.E.O. of their multi-million dollar businesses. Mega-churches became the craze, and in many ways, the cultural Christianity that ensued dissolved the identity of the church. We became pigeonholed for what we were against, not for what we stood for. The church looked so much like the world in order to draw the world into the church that it was hard to tell whether it was more than a workout facility, a country club, a swimming pool, a cafe, and so forth.

Enter my generation. A product of the baby boomers, my generation is the Entitled Generation. David Zimmerman’s Deliver Us From Me-Ville speaks to this self-centeredness and anthropocentricity. The massive failure of the evangelical church to reach the marginalized and the disenfranchised, particularly in the city, spawned many splinter groups to recover an authentic form of the Christian faith. Some emerging/emergents seek to recover a “purer” form of Christianity, while others desire a divorce from Christianity altogether.

Yet there is a renewal movement within evangelicalism – younger evangelicalism. Fueled by the works of J. I. Packer, John Piper, Chuck Colson, C. J. Mahaney, Tim Keller, and others, younger evangelicals are taking seriously the core tenants of the Christian faith and appropriating it in fresh and innovated ways. We are reacting to the spiritual laxity of the previous generations. Collin Hanson, author of Young, Restless, and Reformed speaks to this new generation of God-centered, worship-oriented Christians who are restlessly pursuing holiness and Christian identity through spiritual disciplines and social activism.

Yet it will be interesting to see how the world responds to evangelicals in the next thirty years. Will old biases and tired stereotypes resurface? Or to bring up another issue – will it become a federal crime to proclaim evangelical beliefs from the pulpit?

What do you think?

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