The Next Evangelicalism

by Joe Schafer

A review of The Next Evangelicalism by Soong-Chan Rah (2009, InterVarsity Press)

At the risk of sounding overly harsh, I feel compelled to counterbalance the glowing recommendations this book has received from Philip Jenkins and Scot McKnight (whom I admire) and many others.

Rah’s contention is that the western Church needs to be rescued from its “white cultural captivity” in three key areas: individualism, materialism and racism. This is a serious and important topic.

For the record, I am a white evangelical Protestant (formerly Roman Catholic) with mostly conservative views on political and social issues. But I try very hard to listen respectfully to believers whose theological and political leanings differ from mine. It is my present opinion that the modern evangelical emphasis on having “a personal relationship with Jesus,” when combined with American individualism and our consumer-oriented culture, has produced a hyper-individualized religion that bears little resemblance to the gospel of the kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus and the apostles. I’ve grown weary of hearing Christianity denounced as the religion of “rich white men.” (Recently I witnessed an intelligent university student claim with a straight face that the Bible was written by rich white men.) I believe that the gospel of Christ is the one true antidote to hostility and divisions. Thus it pains me that American churches have been utterly ineffective at knocking down barriers of race, ethnicity and social class, and the current divisions in the body of Christ along racial, denominational and political lines are sinful and scandalous. In short, before picking up this book I already agreed with the author’s premise that, as Christianity continues its global shift to the south and east, evangelical Christians in America need some deep spiritual awakening and cultural-value realignment. I was a low-hanging fruit ready to be picked.

This book provides anecdotal and empirical evidence that Christianity in America is alive and well but its ethnic face is changing. The decline of older white congregations is offset by growth among culturally diverse urban ethnic churches filled with immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Yet this trend is still unseen by many white Christians. No corresponding shifts have been seen in the ethnic composition of faculty at seminaries or among titles and authors at major Christian publishing houses. The growth models popularized by American megachurches and, more recently, the emergent-church movements are predominantly white phenomena, while activities of ethnic congregations are rarely discussed. Everyone presumes that the next generation of Christian leaders will be hip, postmodern white guys with goatees doing church in awesomely creative and cool ways. But in terms of raw numbers, the engine of American church growth lies within the immigrant communities. All of these points are valid, well taken and useful. The author has close ties to immigrant churches and the Christian academe, and he speaks on these matters with credibility and authority.

My difficulties with this book begin when Rah starts his cultural critique of the white American church with respect to individualism (Chapter 1). I concur with his observation that the gospel preached in America – with its emphasis on personal salvation, personal goal fulfillment and therapeutic problem-solving – distorts the message of the New Testament, promotes narcissism and devalues community. Readers with no previous exposure to these points might find them eye-opening and refreshing. But many authors have been making similar arguments in more careful and measured ways. For example, the recent book Uncompromised Faith by S. Michael Craven (2009, NavPress) (which I highly recommend), and the missional church writers from Newbigin onward have been saying these things for years. In comparison, Rah’s analysis strikes me as simplistic and one-sided. He names the problem but fails to name the solution. The antithesis of individualism is collectivism. Individualists believe that a group exists for the benefit of the people within it, whereas collectivists believe that individuals exist for the benefit of the group. Individualism and collectivism are not inherently good or bad, and both are found in the teachings of Christ. A faith that upholds the dignity and worth of the individual is perhaps the best gifts that western Christianity has given to the world. Perhaps what Rah denounces as individualism might better be described as selfishness. But because his discussion lacks nuance, the reader is left wondering if he advocates a shift away from self-centeredness toward some kind of group identification. The Christian cure for selfishness is God-centeredness, but this point is never really made.

Another weakness in Rah’s analysis comes in his discussion of personal versus corporate sin. He correctly notes that many evangelicals define sin in purely private terms, and notions of collective guilt are often lost on them. In his examples of corporate sin (p. 41), he cite three issues that left-leaning Christians feel passionately about — torturing political prisoners, structural poverty and racism – but discussion of the first two is absent. Readers on the liberal side may nod in agreement, but there he is preaching to the choir. Those who lean more to the right – including many of those white Christians he is supposedly trying to reach – would generally agree that torture is immoral but probably disagree over the extent and severity with which it is practiced by agents of the United States. Ditto for structural poverty, a concept which is well known to progressives but difficult to fathom by many who believe that America is, in contrast to much of the rest of the world, a land of great freedom and opportunity. My point here is not to argue for the correctness of those who lean to the right or to the left. My point is that when Rah suggests that a wide swath of American Christians are blind to the reality of corporate sin but makes little effort to illuminate them, readers who do not already agree with Rah will remain profoundly unconvinced.

[On a related note, an outstanding description of structural poverty caused by human sinfulness appears in the recent book Truth and Transformation by Vishal Mangalwadi (2009). As an intellectual Christian from India, he looks at Western culture from the outside and concludes that it was our Christian values -- notably, trust -- that created a climate where business and community could flourish. This book contains a rousing call to transform society by building a church that demonstrates the core values of the gospel. In addition, Mangalwadi's indictment of cultures that do not uphold the dignity of individual human life and oppress women and children is a useful counterbalance to Rah's overbroad denunciations of individualism.]

When Rah tackles western materialism (Chapter 2), I again found myself sympathetic in general but disagreeing with him on many specifics. The degree to which American Christians participate in the never-ending pursuit of belongings, achievement, success, security, and pleasure, is indeed a huge problem for the church. But Rah is too quick to equate consumerism/materialism with the economic system of free enterprise. He indicts the administration of a conservative Christian university for firing a faculty member who deviated from the school’s stated commitment to capitalism (p. 50). He then goes on to state:

The Western, white captivity of the church means that capitalism can be revered as the system closest to God and the consequent rampant materialism and consumerism of the capitalist system become acceptable vices.

I’m sure there are a few conservative Christians (I have not personally met them) who revere capitalism as “the system closest to God.” But many more take a pragmatic approach and support a free economy because they believe that history has shown the alternatives to be worse. Although many have argued that capitalism and greed are inseparable, others would say that the root problem is idolatry, which exists in every culture and economic system. Rah does not raise such arguments; he simply moves on.

When discussing the value systems of American congregations, Rah says, “I could not think of a single reason why a waterfall and a rock garden were more beneficial for a church than using these funds to serve the poor in the community” (p. 51). In some respects, I am inclined to agree. But the same criticism could be leveled at any attempt to beautify any house of worship, and such attempts are hardly peculiar to modern western culture. Is a rock garden or waterfall any more extravagant than mosaic, mural, stained glass or spire? As further evidence of western Christian materialism, Rah cites the resemblance between large megachurch buildings and American shopping malls. Although the imagery is striking (and I am no great fan of megachurches), one could also point out that many evangelical congregations are housed in inexpensive nondescript buildings resembling warehouses that are functional but devoid of artistic merit. By historical standards, the overall trend in American church construction may actually be toward greater frugality, not extravagance. The chapter concludes with the recent admission by leaders of Willow Creek Community Church that their approach to ministry over the last three decades has failed to produce Christians who are spiritually mature. Rah presents this as evidence that western affluenza and the market-driven megachurch model of growth has failed. I found this example odd because, as far as I know, the main issues raised by Willow Creek’s admission were not about numbers or resources but about the church’s philosophy of providing ongoing spiritual services to its members rather than discipling and training them to help them to grow on their own.

Some of the least illuminating parts of this book are the sections on racism. The state of race relations in this country is a raw open wound, but Rah’s analysis contains no healing balm. In today’s climate, discussions of race require sensitivity and empathy. This topic tends to divide people into two camps. One sees racism woven throughout the fabric of society and laments that the majority white culture is simply blind to it. The other camp cites legal protection and affirmative-action policies enacted over four decades as evidence that, for the most part, America has gotten over its racism. Rah belongs to the former and believes that many white Christians belong to the latter. A tactful author would approach the other camp an emissary, speaking to them in terms that they could understand. But Rah remains firmly seated in his own camp, writing on his own terms in his own language.

To his credit, he makes a good case that race is a dubious construct, an invention of Western social history used to justify oppression and slavery. There is only one race, the human race, and this point many white evangelicals would agree. But problems arise when he takes various race-related issues and lumps them together as racism when it seems more accurate and helpful to apply different terms. Certain doctrines of race and racial superiority are peculiar to the West, but xenophobia, ethnocentrism and discrimination are found throughout the world in every period of history. Rah points out the insensitive and condescending attitudes of some white Christians toward their non-white neighbors borne of ignorance. A vivid example of this is the vacation Bible school material full of offensive Asian caricatures (pp. 64-65). In this instance, I suspect that the parties involved would maintain that they meant no harm by it, and they are not racist because they uphold no racist ideology and, in fact, this material represents an appreciation rather than a mocking of Asian culture. To move forward in situations like these, one could grant that insensitive portrayals of nonwhite people and doctrines of white supremacy are offenses of a different magnitude and a different nature; uniting them under the title of racism muddies the waters and is more likely to alienate the offenders than to win them over.

I was also disappointed by Rah’s confounding of slavery as America’s original sin with the obligation of white Christians to repent of corporate racism. Although these issues are related, they are not identical. No serious person today would argue that slavery was not abhorrent, and thousands of white Americans paid for abolition at the ultimate price of their own blood. But who bears the collective guilt of today’s economic disparities is another question. It deserves a serious treatment, but Rah’s analysis lacks balance or nuance. The extent to which heterogeneous population of America today is responsible for acts committed in the past is simply not as obvious as Rah would like it to be. In speaking to Asian-American students at an Ivy League institution (p. 70), he repeats the oft-heard claim that they are beneficiaries of racism because the land on which they were standing was stolen from Native Americans, and the economy in which they thrive was built on the backs of African slaves. He is making a comparison between present reality and an imaginary alternative history in which Native Americans were allowed to keep their land (Which land, specifically? How much of it? Was it always their land, or did they take it from someone else? Should it belong to them and their descendents forever because they came first?) and in which slaves were never brought here from Africa (presumably because there would have been no white settlers here to enslave them). He contends that present-day American Christians would be worse off and would enjoy fewer opportunities had those sinful acts never happened. But the counterfactual history imagined by Rah would have produced a radically different world in which many people here today would not exist, so the imputation of past societal guilt to present-day individuals is problematic. Rah believes that sins of the past have led to many benefits and blessings that we now enjoy. But wouldn’t a past devoid of racism have produced a better world than the present one – better not only for groups that are presently disadvantaged but for everyone? In general, I think the sins of fathers lead to suffering and curse for their children, not privilege and blessing. Noticeably absent from Rah’s analysis is any mention of the sovereignty of God who, despite the utter sinfulness of all mankind, continues to shape events and mold history according to his wisdom and divine purpose.

Personally, I believe that corporate sin is real and that American Christians (all of us) bear collective responsibility for the economic and social health of the entire community. But the imputation of guilt for certain past sins upon certain groups of present-day individuals based on skin color rather than other criteria (sex, ethnicity, income, education, denomination, place of residence, etc.) has always struck me as odd. I continue to remain open to the idea of structural racism. For a long time I have been waiting for a thoughtful Christian to explain it to me in clear language (no jargon, please) with objective evidence, compelling examples and acknowledgment that this is a painful and difficult subject for everyone. But here Rah doesn’t really try. He simply throws out terms like structural racism and then moves on.

A low point comes when Rah recounts his participation in a panel discussion on postmodernity (p. 124). When the topic of globalization came up, the other three panelists (all white) enjoyed a lively exchange, but Rah remained silent. When the moderator noticed this and asked him to comment, he replied, “White people talking to other white people about a problem white people created in the first place – why would I care about that conversation?” To me, this conjured up mental images of some hip instructor at a college campus trying to startle young kids who are unaware of their whiteness. Moments like these may have been poignant and consciousness-raising during the 1970’s. But the image of a seminary professor trying this in 2009 has no shock value whatsoever and merely strikes me as sad. Is condescension any less condescending when it comes from the mouth of one who isn’t white? A great teachable moment was wasted. As I went through this book, that same thought came to me again and again: another teachable moment wasted.

I was also irked by Rah’s jabs at some of the sacred-cow political issues of conservative white Christians. Not because these issues don’t merit discussion, but because in most cases I found his analysis to be amateurish. His consistently negative (and, many would say, unfair) characterizations of the conservatives’ motives betrays a lack of understanding or empathy which makes his arguments fall flat. For example, he chides those who oppose immigration reform (p. 75), and suggests that this stance is rooted in a racist desire to keep America white. Although this may be true in a few cases, many (including myself, and I am not really an opponent of immigration reform) would find the general assertion to be utterly distasteful. He also states that if conservative Christians really cared about stopping abortion, then they ought to embrace immigration reform, because granting citizenship to twelve million illegal immigrants would turn the tide of the abortion debate (p. 75). This assertion is either disingenuous or naive. Political battles always play out within the two-party system. Are most of these new citizens going to vote Republican? Not likely. Are they going to identify themselves as Democrat and then proceed to change the pro-abortion stance of the Democrat party? Again, not likely. Given that abortion policy is largely shaped by the courts, would a shift in public opinion by a few percentage points in one direction or another really lead to dramatic change? This claim just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Occasionally I find a book that strikes me as prophetic. The marks of prophetic writing are, first, conviction and clarity regarding the present sinfulness of the culture and, second, a dramatic vision of the glory of God and a Spirit-inspired strategy on how to move forward. This book contains a bit of the former but not much of the latter. Three chapters at the end are devoted to things that white evangelical Christians should learn from ethnic and immigrant churches. Learning from other parts of the body of Christ is never a bad idea, and the specifics mentioned in these chapters seem helpful. But this advice is doled out in a piecemeal fashion with no grand vision that I could discern. In Chapter 8, we are urged us to consider “holistic evangelism” as practiced in Korean immigrant churches. There is much to admire within Korean immigrant churches, including their prayer and fervor, deep sense of community and generosity toward their members. But to uphold these congregations as exemplary in a book about cultural captivity strikes me as ironic. These churches are not multiethnic and are unlikely to become so. A balanced and fair analysis should also mention some of their peculiar issues and problems that stem from Korean cultural values, including suspicion toward outsiders, pressure toward conformity, age-based hierarchy, infighting and divisions, and so on.

In certain intellectual circles, it is fashionable to denounce all things Western and to romanticize peoples and cultures that are non-Western. Adjectives such as white, middle-class, suburban, and American are now seen as pejorative. Activists’ chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, western culture’s gotta go” have inflamed passions and stifled intelligent and thoughtful discussion. Anyone who wishes to be heard above the background noise of the present culture wars needs an extra helping of balance, fairness, generosity and tact. Because this book is lacking in those areas, I do not think it will convince those who are not already convinced. I am truly surprised by those who have described this book as eye-opening, a paradigm shifter or a game-changer. The author writes as an outsider, never for a moment letting us forget that he remains outside of the American evangelical mainstream. But if his assertion is true, then those notions of mainstream are already obsolete, and non-majority is the new majority. If Rah were to act and write as an insider, showing empathy and identification with the multifaceted and diverse evangelical community to which he does belong, he could reach a wider audience and his voice would become stronger.