What's the difference between Neo-Evangelicalism and regular
Evangelicalism and when did it arise?
It's not an easy question because no one can agree on what
these terms mean. That said, though it's hard to be precise many seem to know
almost intuitively what is meant.
If I were to provide a generalised narrative that is so broad
as to be inaccurate and easily criticised, but still provides a starting
point...
I propose three phases:
1950s-1970s
1970s-1990s
1990s-present
There won't be another phase.
I would posit that Evangelicalism rose out of Fundamentalism
in the late 1940s and 1950s. Billy Graham and others were profoundly disturbed
by the denominational divisions and schisms that had developed as a result of
the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. Right or wrong, The Scopes Trial made
Fundamentalists look foolish.
And the world had profoundly changed with World War II. The
rise of world communism, the Cold War and the nature of the modern technological
society that was rapidly developing meant that Christians had to act. Basically
I would argue that what they really believed was... the Gospel was not enough.
The Church had to be made relevant to the culture, it needed
to have a more powerful and influential voice. Evangelicalism joined forces
with business and politics and began to build alliances that would bring
Evangelicals and the broader Church together to reach the culture.
For the first twenty years (roughly 1950s-1970s) this
movement still sounded pretty Fundamentalist. Graham's sermons were still
fairly Biblical in orientation. But at the same time the groundwork was being
laid for the modern Evangelical-Ecumenical movement. The Church was stirred by
Supreme Court rulings, the youth culture of the 1960s, Vietnam and what seemed
to be American decline.
The focus became increasingly oriented toward the culture and
in order to build numbers and garner funds the net was spread very wide. Graham
was happy to work with Catholics even if this alienated some Fundamentalists
and even other Evangelicals.
This period, which in some ways extended into the 1980s, was
marked by ambivalence. Many Evangelicals were good patriotic Americans and yet
still had some sense of antithesis and Biblical separatism. And yet the quest
for respectability and a place at the table proved a mighty temptation. To put
it another way, they were seduced by power and it came in earnest by the late
1970s.
By then Civil Rights and Nixon had shattered the party divide
that was keeping Evangelicals apart. The shift of the population to the West
also afforded a breaking with old traditional party alignments. Southern
Conservatives left the Democratic Party and the Moral Majority helped to
channel their energies into the Republican Party and the election of Ronald
Reagan.
And yet with this came a broadening in terms of theology, a
desire to find even more of a place and presence in academia, political
think-tanks and machines and certainly the business world. Francis Schaeffer
taught a form of Western Triumphalism, Transformationalism and Dominionism and
this theology along with the ethos of the Capitalist 1980s also began to really
change Evangelicalism.
The tide had turned.
The Fundamentalist flavoured Evangelicalism of the 1950s had
morphed into the Über-Political/Patriotic Evangelicalism of the 1970s.
By the 1990s Evangelicalism was undergoing another
transformation. The prosperity values of the 1980s had been theologised and now
the advent of a Baby Boomer seemingly liberal president (with a feminist wife)
allowed figures like Charles Colson to sound the alarm and spread an even wider
net, formalising the relationships between Evangelicals and Catholics. The
Culture War transcended all doctrinal differences.
The decadent culture of Triumphalist America in the 1990s
infected the Church. Its leaders had taught people their jobs were holy, making
money was godly and the enemies of the Church were not wolves among the sheep
bringing in false doctrine. No, the enemy was Secular Humanism and so opposing
Liberalism in all its forms and manifestations became a moral virtue.
Capitalism and wealth were godly. A high standard of living was taking
Dominion.
This was an era of tremendous amounts of money flowing into
Church ministries and massive projects were undertaken to re-write history and
build ministries focused on celebrity and numbers.
The Billy Graham style of Evangelism no longer excited and
seemed fuddy-duddy and so now a new generation of entertainment and therapy-oriented
Culture Warriors took over. Purpose Driven and Seeker-style Mega-Churches came
to dominate the land.
The net was spread so wide that Charismatics, cultists and
basically anyone who would wage Culture War in the name of Jesus was allowed
within the Evangelical camp.
Evangelical was getting harder to define because
increasingly its numbers and leaders had very little to do with what the term
originally meant.
As another twenty year epoch passed and we entered our
present decade of the 2010s, the term has now come to the point of embracing
people who question the authority and veracity of Scripture. Cultural and
scholarly relevance have led Evangelicals to deny portions of Scripture,
explain it away, and increasingly ethics and values actually quite hostile to
the New Testament are re-packaged, embraced and marketed as Evangelical.
Today these Neo-Evangelicals, born of the 1990s epoch but
coming fully into their own today have led us to the point that women pastors
are praying (without controversy) at the inauguration, homosexuality is largely
accepted if not sometimes embraced, the decadent and anti-Christian values of
Dave Ramsey define the Christian attitude toward money, the buffoonish Duck
Dynasty crew are writing devotionals and Donald Trump is the Christian
candidate.
There won't be another generation of Evangelicals, at least
as it has now been used over the past 40 years in the American context. The
term used to be connected to historic Protestant Christianity. The groundwork
for change in the 1950s meant by the 1980s this reality was coming to an end.
By the 1990s the term was all but dead.
Today in 2017, the term can be declared so nebulous as to no
longer have any meaning. The net has been cast so wide now even political
conservatives in the Bible-denying Mainline Churches are finding common cause
and language with Evangelicals.
Evangelicalism is now entertainment, therapy, indulgent
gluttonous living, politics and the glorification of nationalism and war.
It is apostate.
The greatest irony is that Billy Graham having lived so long
has quite literally lived to see the suicide of the movement he helped to
create. When he dies he will be lauded as the greatest Christian of modern
times.
The state of the Church today is in large part the fruit and
harvest of his work. He is the great False Prophet of Evangelicalism. He is the
pre-eminent Wolf in Sheep's Clothing of the 20th century. He is
unrepentant, blind and in for a shock when he is brought face to face with the
absolute spiritual holocaust he has unleashed. The house Graham built was a pseudo-temple
built on hay and stubble and its already burning. Will anything be left?