Reaching Out: Secular-Evangelical Dialogue in America, by Martin Davis

Posted on April 7th, 2009 | Filed under Faith and Politics

Like many Protestant churches that are evangelically inclined, mine recently hosted a screening of Ben Stein’s commercially successful docudrama Expelled, which claims to have exposed a conspiracy by the American academic community to suppress evidence that would discredit both Darwin and his evolutionary theory. 

In the wake of that presentation, our church has engaged in a heated, and divisive, discussion over the core of our theological message and the role of scientific learning. On one side stands a group that holds an exclusivist view of the gospel’s salvation message and is fearful of “scientific materialism,” a catch-all term for any philosophy or thought that rejects a supernatural, nee evangelical, explanation for life. On the other side are individuals who see in science not a threat to Christian faith but the logical extension of humanity’s effort to better understand the world we live in—a pursuit made possible by the good minds that God has bestowed upon us.

 

Because our church community has “resolved” this debate by essentially choosing sides and ignoring one-another, I’ve begun to ask a more fundamental question: Can non-Christian learning play a role in the development of American evangelicalism? For millennia, faith and secular learning have worked hand-in-hand, if at times uneasily. Platonism and neo-Platonism are the cornerstones of early Christian doctrine. Humanism drove Martin Luther to the Reformation. And the dense musings of Immanuel Kant shaped theological discussion from the 19^th to the mid-20^th centuries. 

But today’s climate is different. Many evangelicals see in modern secular society not an institution with which to thoughtfully engage, but an enemy to combat. The recent results from the American Religion Identification Survey underscore this tension. Much has been made of the finding that mainline American Protestant Christianity is continuing to decline at a rapid rate, and the equally rapid rise in the number of Americans claiming no faith at all. But often overlooked is the fact that even as mainline churches shrink in number and size, independent, evangelical churches continue to grow. And they’re growing more theologically conservative.

We are increasingly a nation of two minds about faith: either we want to embrace it fully, to the exclusion of all else, or we wish to abandon it altogether. Within academe (I formerly worked as a professor of history), this dichotomy appears oversimplified. Martin E. Marty, my mentor at the University of Chicago, rightly notes that evangelicalism has become too expansive to be reduced to simple definitions. Counter-examples to every definition abound. But for the average parishioner and non-religious citizen, this dichotomy is alive and well. 

And it’s evident in the most basic ways. Books that are huge sellers among average evangelical church-goers are barely, if at all, known among non-Christians—The Shack, and the Left Behind series, to name just two. An underground of Christian-only companies, serving needs as divergent as car repair and sex toys, abounds on the internet and in “Christian Yellow Pages.” And homeschooling, driven mainly by evangelical families wishing to escape a secular education, continues to surge.

Among the growing number of avowed non-religious people, this brand of Christianity doesn’t engage them. It’s not that they don’t care about it; rather, they’d just as soon avoid it as deal with it. The Republican Party, for example, has been troubled for years about how to bridge the divide between its non-religious and evangelical constituents. John McCain’s failed presidential bid with Sarah Palin has re-ignited the non-religious vs. evangelical discussion in the Republican Party and played out publicly in the flagship conservative publication, National Review.

Are the worlds of the avowedly religious and avowedly secular fundamentally alien to one another? Is dialogue between the two possible? The question is more relevant to evangelicals, I would argue, than to non-Christians, simply because to remain a force in American society, evangelicals need non-Christians more than non-Christians need evangelicals. If current trends hold, evangelicalism will become increasingly isolated within society. It is in the interest of evangelicals, therefore, to reach out first.

There are signs that this is happening. An article by evangelical Christian and blogger Michael Spencer in the March 10th Christian Science Monitor entitled "The Coming Evangelical Collapse" has caused a stir in the evangelical world. Spencer notes that “we … find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of faith,” precisely because instead of engaging secular learning we have shut it out and created an “educational system primarily to … talk to [other evangelicals].” Thanks to his work, evangelicals, especially those who identify as “emerging”—a loose-fitting term that includes evangelicals who work to wed gospel and the mainstream cultural ethos—are talking openly about how best to work with the secular world.

Christian filmmaker and critic Craig Detweiller has taken his discourse with secular America public in the form of a film, Purple State of Mind, in which he and his long-time friend, John Marks—an author, former evangelical, and avowed agnostic—wrestle with faith and non-belief in the West. 

My own blog site, Faith and Fumbles, focuses exclusively on this issue, and has published a string of interviews with secular and religious figures, including John Marks, who talk openly about bridging the evangelical secular divide.

Whether these are sparks of hope, or the dying embers of an evangelical-secular dialogue remains to be seen. Many Evangelicals believe that American society is setting a course far from that established by the Founders, that education has become openly hostile to them, and that government protects the rights of all minority groups but theirs.

As evangelicals, we want to reaffirm that our ideas matter. But too often we want these thoughts to matter only so long as those we engage with embrace our thoughts as true and, ultimately, eternally right. If evangelicals and secular Americans are to talk, it’s incumbent upon evangelicals to reach out and to talk openly about faith without the eternal pre-conditions and implicit threat of damnation for those who do not accept our views. There is reason to believe this can happen. But it’s ultimately up to us.

Martin Davis is Editor of the  Faith and Fumbles blog and Founder of Davis Communications.