Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham

D. G. Hart. Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004. 224 pp. $21.99.

Taking the pulse of evangelicalism has been an expanding cottage industry for the past generation or so now. Deconstructing Evangelicalism is an important installment in a series of works like (to name just three) David Wells's No Place for Truth (1993), Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), and Iain Murray's Evangelicalism Divided (2000).

A clue to the book's message is found in its dedication. It is inscribed to the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary in California where, until recently, Hart served as professor and academic dean. Hart writes of his "wilderness wanderings in Southland." This sounds like he has been doing some soul-searching. Deconstructing Evangelicalism confirms this hypothesis. For even though Hart has been called an evangelical and accepted the label, he now prefers to go by other designations, like "a Presbyterian historian" (p. 9).

The fact is that in Hart's view, "evangelicalism, as a form of Christian identity, needs to be abandoned" (p. 11). This book is an attempt to establish and defend that thesis.

After a surprisingly lengthy introduction that comprises some ten percent of the entire book, Hart traces the "The Making of Evangelicalism." This is a valuable summary of how, in Hart's analysis, the evangelical movement came to occupy a stature and status that now require serious reconsideration. For example, "the construction of an evangelical identity has yielded the conviction that a faith freed from churchly affairs is the conservative expression of Christianity" (p. 60). He believes that the somewhat meteoric rise of the movement resulted to a considerable degree from a kind of dubious collusion by social scientific and historical scholars, many of them evangelicals. Their scholarship generated the appearance of a cohesive ecclesial unity that is not so easy to document when one moves out into the concrete world of (non-)denominations and local congregations - not because there is no unity, but because the sense in which it is "ecclesial" raises serious questions.

It is just such questions that Hart takes up in the second half of the book, "The Unmasking of Evangelicalism." He argues that evangelicalism is rich in external homogeneity ("cameras, bright lights, and microphones" p. 125) but thin in classic church character as seen in doctrinal identity, governance, and rooted liturgical practices. Too much evangelical scholarship has been too narrowly centered under the dictum "no creed but the Bible's inerrancy" (ch. 5). A final "stick of dynamite in the deconstruction of evangelicalism" (p. 174) has been the rise of worship styles unabashedly imitative of popular entertainment forms. It is particularly here that Hart sees evangelical expression as marking a serious break with both the form and substance of Christian worship across millennia and cultures.

This may not be a great book, but it is a good one. Hart knows whereof he speaks, however rightly he interprets the data. His argument that "evangelicalism is not a tradition" (p. 186), because "Christian traditions, unlike evangelicalism, rely on structures of succession and accountability that run counter to popular sovereignty" (p. 187), is compelling. My experience in the evangelical subculture since the 1970s confirms his point. My sense thirty years ago was that "evangelical" stood for vibrant theological truth, the veracity of the gospel, and the Scriptures boldly lived out, in contrast to liberal compromise of the Christian faith, on the one hand, and conservative stifling of the faith, on the other, through sterile tradition that did not change lives. Today I see that, for many, "evangelical" is about emotional expression in highly stylized fashions and enclaves that lags just a few years behind popular media and entertainment forms but tries ever harder to catch up. Truth is not the issue; fervent self-expression with a thin Jesus overlay is.

Where Hart can be faulted is a frequently flippant and belittling characterization of the movement he no longer wishes to be associated with. I take this to be, not a break with the positive features of the movement's core beliefs (few though they be) and practices, but more a rhetorical posture calculated to provoke engagement and maybe even ire. Better to be roundly rejected than simply ignored. Also, Hart can be accused of too little appreciation of the great licks God has struck with the crooked sticks of evangelicalism's institutions and leaders. It is doubtful, humanly speaking, that the current explosion of Christian expression worldwide (cf. Phillip Jenkins, The Next Christendom) would have arisen without the input of evangelical resources, sacrifice, and energy. There are more positives to the movement than Hart affirms, and for that matter more ecclesially-centered evangelicals in the movement than Hart acknowledges. Things are not as bad as Hart makes them seem in many cases.