Churchly Shadows & Substance
Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of
Billy Graham
by D. G. Hart
Baker Academic, 2004
(224 pages; $21.99, hardcover)
Recovering Mother Kirk: The Case for Liturgy in the Reformed Tradition
by D. G. Hart
Baker Academic, 2003
(264 pages; $24.99, paperback)
reviewed by Robert W. Patterson
American Evangelicalism’s sharpest critics, questioning whether this popular religious movement can live up to its original promise of recovering a conservative Protestant tradition in America, have repeated the pattern set by the Evangelical founders who put a fresh face on Fundamentalism in the 1940s. In Deconstructing Evangelicalism, his fourth book in less than two years, D. G. Hart questions the very idea of Evangelicalism and appeals to its managers to stop the game they have been playing since the days of Harold John Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry.
“Evangelicalism,” writes Hart, who once directed the Institute for the Study of Evangelicals at Wheaton College and now works for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, “needs to be relinquished as a religious identity because it does not exist. In fact, it is the wax nose of twentieth-century American Protestantism. Behind this proboscis, which has been nipped and tucked by savvy religious leaders, academics, and pollsters, is a face void of any discernable features.” This is not a book for those whose world would fall apart if Evangelical were stricken from the dictionary.
As Hart documents, Evangelicalism would not have been constructed without the labor of his fellow historians, especially the Evangelical historians Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch, who in the last twenty years have rewritten American church history to fit the paradigm that Ockenga invented in setting up the National Association of Evangelicals. In Hart’s mind, his colleagues (and mentors) have been negligent in accepting without question a paradigm designed to harness an infinite array of sideline Protestants—from the Assemblies of God to the Reformed Episcopal Church—into a unified whole. As reflected in a cover story in U.S. News & World Report last December that posits a cohesive Evangelicalism going back to Jonathan Edwards, the paradigm holds popular sway as well.
Hart also faults the sociology guild, as well as pollsters, for inflating the numbers with expansive definitions of what constitutes an Evangelical. Skeptical of public opinion polling because of its connections to marketing and advertising, Hart reveals how pollsters George Gallup, Jr., and George Barna not only served Evangelicals looking for “scientific” validation that their movement is really mainstream, but also contributed to a dilemma lamented even by insiders: a movement so porous, so chameleon-like, so ubiquitous that it confounds scholarly and theological definition.
Writing as a church historian, a rarity these days, Hart sees things that historians of religion are not trained to see. For example, he implies that Evangelicalism, not being a natural or organic community like the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, or even the Southern Baptist Convention, ends up functioning like a rogue church. Even as Evangelicals concede that their movement is not an ecclesiastical body, many are emotionally involved in the construct as if it is. This is the problem that Hart unpacks in the second half of the book, as he argues that Evangelicalism lacks the critical ingredients—polity, creed, and liturgy—that Christians throughout history have needed to sustain themselves this side of glory.
This is the easier side of his argument, as Hart is not the first to observe that Evangelicals—who tend to rally around personalities and para-church organizations—demonstrate only a tertiary interest in cultivating the traditional institutions and formal structures of church life. But he is the first to document how their substitution of biblical inerrancy for a comprehensive confession of faith failed to provide the creedal glue necessary for an authentic religious community. He is also the first to trace to the 1940s Evangelicalism’s liturgical use of generation-specific, top-40 show tunes, a pattern he also finds problematic for sustaining a Christian community across generations.
Hart concludes not only that Evangelicalism is unnecessary, but that Protestants would be far better off without it, as they would be forced to find their identity through ecclesiastical channels—and be what they were prior to the 1940s: good Congregationalists, good Methodists, or good Pentecostals.
They would also return to congregations led by pastors concerned more with shepherding God’s flock than with building coalitions to shape a nation, returning to these pastors “to hear the Word preached, to receive the sacraments, and to hear sound counsel and correction.” Recovering Mother Kirk can help all Protestants—not just his intended Presbyterian audience—who desire a more church-centered, traditional faith independent of the Evangelical project.
Robert W. Patterson is a former Presbyterian minister who is now Research Fellow of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society and writes on domestic policy issues in Washington, D.C.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
22.3—April 2009
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by J. Daryl Charles
30.2—March/April 2017
The Education of Children Takes Generations of Fidelity by W. Ross Blackburn
32.1—January/February 2019
Answers Secular & Religious by Allan C. Carlson
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
