Liberals and Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, Oh My!

Particularly in the United States, the so-called "culture wars" being conducted by the Religious Right are ubiquitous and destructive to many minds. Recently, I have encountered younger Christians raised in the Right's milieu who are struggling to find their own articulation of the Christian faith which is both intelligible in today's world and bypasses many of the polarities that using "right" and "left" language tends to introduce into everyday conversation.

There is an unfortunate tendency that I notice when these Christians begin their journeys away from the safety of their backgrounds: everything from the Right gets the label of Fundamentalist, or Fundamentalist and Evangelical are used interchangeably without any sense of the differences between the two movements. To be sure, sometimes the distinctions seem difficult to maintain on the ground, but evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the States tend to have different ethos that should be explored on their own terms.

Evangelical, especially when printed with a lower-case "e," has a long and venerable history within Christianity. The term comes from evangel , a Greek word that usually meant the "good news" associated with the coming of the Roman Empire into your territory! The early Christians subverted the term and used it to mean the counter-imperial "good news" brought by and spoken about Jesus the Messiah, who was crucified under Roman authority but whom God raised from the dead.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, "evangelical" was used to describe a broad coalition of Western Christians who believed that it was their responsibility to bring both the good news that Jesus can save your "immortal soul" and a broadly-based campaign of what we would today call social justice. The Good News, it was believed, brought changes not only to hearts but to how societies treated their most vulnerable members. In my opinion (and it is an opinion), this (admittedly very White and colonial) Christianity tried to maintain respect for members of society who were not Christians by maintaining freedom of worship and the separation of Church and State. Evangelical Christians at this stage often expected that the Gospel would gradually affect the whole world to such an extent that at the return of Christ, the world would be the Kingdom of God, ready to present to Jesus for inspection!

Two major events led to the fracturing of 19th Century Evangelical consensus: World War I and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species . The Great War shattered the positivism of most Christians in the West: if the Gospel was doing what we thought it was doing, why the hell is such a God-awful war going on? Why are Christians and Christian nations shooting at each other? Charles Darwin's explication of gradual evolution upset the general consensus in the Christian world that God created the world more or less as it was roughly six thousand years ago.

Both of these events caused a severe crisis for the broadly-evangelical hermeneutic (world-view and methods of textual interpretation). What authority did the Bible have in the Church? Did Darwin's theory mean that Scripture was wrong? And if Scripture was wrong, was it wrong about major dogmas of the historic Christian tradition, like the divinity of Christ, the virginal conception of Jesus, or his bodily resurrection from the dead?

Modernists wanted to emphasize that Christianity was fully compatible with the latest insights of responsible science. Taking their cues from the anti-supernaturalism of the Enlightenment, they sought to treat the Bible as they would any other book, and also to re-formulate Christian dogmas as important symbols of universal ethical constants. Though there were more moderate "modernists" who simply wanted to perform "lower criticism" of Scripture (for example, establishing the correct text, likely genres of different passages, etc.), many brought much keener ideological interests to their studies. Some modernists (like the Enlightenment philosophes before them) wanted to not only undermine Church tradition, but also to "disprove" the miraculous in Scripture, which would also place Jesus alongside the figures of the other world religions on an equal footing--he would not be the unique revelation of God to humankind, but simply one path to the One God worshiped by religious systems regardless of their contents. The "modernists" became known more popularly as Christian liberals.

The so-called "higher criticism" that sought to "de-mythologize" Scripture was anathema to the Fundamentalists, who felt that they needed to defend the ancient orthodoxy of Christian faith against the onslaught of newfangled and misguided science and human reason. Fundamentalism takes its name from a series of pamphlets penned by lettered theologians in the early 20th Century, and considers five axioms to be essential for correct and "saving" faith:

• The inerrancy of the Bible;
• The "literal" nature of the Biblical accounts, especially regarding Christ's miracles, and the Creation account in Genesis [my quotation marks];
• The Virgin Birth [virginal conception] of Christ;
• The bodily resurrection of Christ; and
• The substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross.

Soon enough, modernists who advocated social justice and higher criticism of the Bible and social justice concerns and fundamentalists who were concerned with Scriptural authority and personal salvation from sin came to loggerheads within many Christian communities. Even Christian university students were affected by the debate. One group of students, in the 1920s, eventually opted for a more modernist position, to the detriment (it seemed to fundamentalists) of proclaiming the uniqueness of Christ and the need for personal change of heart. The students who chose the modernist route became the Student Christian Movement (SCM), and the students who wanted evangelism to focus on personal salvation became known as Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), even though they were one movement before! The two groups, to this day, rarely interact with each other theologically or for social justice work.

Fundamentalism perceived itself as under attack ideologically from Western culture and assumed an increasingly isolationist and anti-intellectual stance: exposition of the "literal word of God," rigid lifestyles that distinguished Christians from "the world," and suspicion of university learning came to define the lived experience of many Christians. Society, under the control of Satan, could contaminate the Church with ungodly ideas and thus gradually conform the Church to an anti-Gospel, anti-Christ lifestyle.

The rancour within fundamentalism, especially in its attempted engagements with modernism, became so strong that a gathering movement of Christians began to search for another option. A couple years after World War II, these Christians began calling themselves neo-Evangelicals. Though they wanted to maintain the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, neo-Evangelicals in various Christian communities actively sought to engage the wider society with the claims of Christianity in intellectually respectable ways. New Evangelicals also rejected the faction-making of fundamentalism in favour of ecumenical (inter-Christian) cooperation in both evangelism (saving souls) and social justice (caring for the poor, etc.) Literal interpretation of Scripture, for these Evangelicals, meant respecting the meaning of the original texts of Scripture to their original audiences--the Bible is not "dictated" from heaven, but written by the perfect inspiration of the Spirit through the minds and hearts of men in their own ways and words, without losing anything that God intended to say to humankind. For some Evangelicals in the contemporary context, the Bible is not necessarily inerrant in matters of history or science, but nevertheless perfectly accomplishes its role as the word of God written and the primary witness to the life of Jesus Christ. Science is, for these evangelicals, an ally of the Bible insofar as it coheres with Biblical truth.

Two contemporary social issues that have figured prominently in my own life illustrate how many Evangelicals approach the Bible and science.

1. Though many Evangelicals are uncomfortable with the theory of evolution, many scholars and pastors now recognize that Genesis 1, for example, is an ancient polemic that praises God's creative and sovereign power over the chaos of the Babylonian pantheon. Despite Fundamentalist protestations to the contrary, Genesis 1 cannot be used to negate the theory of evolution because the text works against being read as a sequence of events that happened over the span of 7 24-hour days. Light and darkness, from Earth's perspective, come from the Sun, but the Sun was created after light and darkness! Genesis 1 also contains a scientific error--the moon is not a "great light," but a reflector of the Sun's light. This "error" is unproblematic when we recognize that in its original context, this passage argued that everything, including the Sun and moon (understood as deities in Ancient Near Eastern myths) was created to honour and worship the true God. Genesis 1 presents a counter-cultural understanding (or "myth") that gives profound dignity to human beings, who are "made in the image of God" as God representatives, rather than out of the refuse of Creation to feed the gods when they are hungry. [Though many Evangelicals maintain a "literal" belief in the existence of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2ff.), one wonders if this is necessary if, as an Evangelical, a reader may conclude that the original audience would not have understood Genesis 2-11 as "historically factual" in the contemporary sense!]
2. Contemporary Evangelicals struggle mightily with the social phenomenon of homosexuality and how to minister to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) people and Christians. Though liberal Christianity often appears to decide that scientific knowledge trumps the Biblical text (because science seems to show that GLBT people are "born that way"), Evangelicals take a more cautious approach. Most Evangelicals conclude that in the original languages and to the original audiences, homosexual behaviours represent a sinful rupture in God's plan for humanity. Though this conclusion is similar to that reached by Fundamentalists, who might often remark, "Can't you read plain English? Homosexuality is an abomination to God!", Evangelicals want to faithfully apply the original meaning of the texts to contemporary questions of sexual ethics in ways that may seem to ambiguous or complex for Fundamentalists. Because historical-grammatical exegesis (in common with liberalism) is part of the Evangelical approach to the Bible, there is a small but growing minority of Evangelicals who conclude that the original texts do not reasonably apply to faithful and consensual adult same-gender/sex relationships. Regardless of their position on the morality of homosexual acts or the goodness of homosexual or trans identities, usually Evangelical Christians try to respect the civil rights of persons who do not agree with them while seeking to maintain a public witness consistent with the teaching of Scripture as they understand it. Thus, Evangelicals in the majority support anti-discrimination legislation for GLBT people, but often resist expanding the definition of marriage in society. This is not an easy position to maintain for many Evangelicals, especially because, as respected scholar Richard Mouw admits in an interview on NPR's Speaking of Faith [the program is called "Broken or Blessed?"], many married evangelicals have no idea what it is to call a gay teen who has never had a romantic partner to celibacy. [Whether this admission alone should be enough to modify Evangelical theology on Biblical grounds is a matter for further serious discussion!]

Readers who lives in the US, particularly, may criticize my distinctions between Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism as, at best, difficult to maintain "in real life." After all, Jerry Falwell (the late controversial Fundamentalist) is said to have (in)famously remarked, "A Fundamentalist is an Evangelical who is angry about something." Some scholars believe that there is a crisis for Evangelicalism emerging in the States, since most people who are Fundamentalists by tradition or hermeneutic also identify themselves as Evangelicals. There is also concern that Evangelical pastors and scholars do not communicate their knowledge and skill-sets effectively to putatively Evangelical lay-people. Nuanced conversation is atypical in the midst of an ideological firefight, especially when the integrity of culture seems to be at stake!

In spite of the differences between Christian liberals, fundamentalists, and evangelicals, I would like to point out the major common factor between them: they are all captive to modernism, the sensibility of the Enlightenment. Everything must be rational and scientifically plausible. Many liberals choose to demonstrate their commitment by holding reports of strange events in Scripture (like fire falling from the sky, virginal conception, or bodily resurrection) as factually impossible but theologically valuable. Fundamentalists believe in such events because the perfection of God's word written will be proven by actual historical events like the return of Christ and progress of science when correctly understood (oddly enough!). Evangelicals tend to claim that believing Christianity coheres with what we can prove about history or science as long as we choose to reject the assumption that deeds of power are impossible. I say these three movements are "captive" to modernity because of the difficulty they are having in speaking to the breakdown of trust in empirical reason and universal laws that we tend to see in today's post-modern culture. Logic and reason have their place even in post-modern times, but they are not self-evident as modernism assumes; rather, every story, including the ones told by science, are not objective, but (one hopes) persuasive and coherent.

In light of the suspicion of Enlightenment reason that the 19th and 20th centuries assumed, it appears that liberalism, fundamentalism, and evangelicalism as they are currently configured might end up breaking down. Until then, it is still useful to know the history of liberalism, fundamentalism, and evangelicalism in the 20th century, and to ask questions that will help us distinguish the assumptions and methods of various Christian movements in the messiness of contemporary politics.

I return to my former fundamentalist friends. In rejecting fundamentalism, there is no inherently persuasive reason why modernism and rigidity should continue to control their approaches to friendship with Jesus or their engagements with Christian tradition. I hope, in my deepest heart, that I am someone who bears good news and doesn't care very much about labels. For myself, I affirm that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, that Jesus' miracles happened, that he was raised bodily to new life, and that the "happenedness" of these things matters. But as much as it rankles my inner modernist Evangelical, I cannot "prove" these things or argue them as cleanly as someone like Josh McDowell. I do know that I trust my own experience of Christ, the Bible's witness to Christ, and the Church's long experience of Christ. Sometimes I cannot explain my belief in terms of Enlightenment epistemology, but I do think I can offer a coherent and persuasive story that offers a satisfying and useful account of the world. What does that make me? I have no idea. Maybe I'll be a Christian when I grow up.