Evangelical Twitter, which I promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked back into (because it’s always like this), was ablaze with fury yesterday after Stephen Wolfe tweeted out the following:
The context of this of course is that “White Evangelicals” as a political demographic or voting block are blamed in every liberal, leftwing, media, or establishment circle as being the holdouts, as a group, against sociological progress in America.
White evangelicals is a reference to a political demographic. I remember when I was in High School I was helping out on a local political campaign and we used to talk about the prospects of different demographics in terms of the candidate’s appeal: white evangelicals, white suburban liberals, the black vote, the hispanic vote, etc.
This is a very common thing to do, as you can see:
Even people like Samuel Sey has used it:
But Stephen Wolfe sought to defend this group, that’s what happened. So now we get this:
James White had a take on this that was typical of the hysteria:
What in the world is he talking about? How do you go from a statement about a political demographic to “divisions within Christ’s Church?” I will explain this in a moment. But one more comment.
Stephen is absolutely correct: in terms of political demographics and statistical aggregation, there is no other voting block in America without which the most Progressive-woke tendencies of the Democratic Party would exercise complete political dominance. Some in response to all this have shown the numbers/polls/voting pattern research on which political demographic groups support the illegality of abortion and gay marriage, and white evangelicals as a polling group (because for half a century, this was a demographic polling group) were the only ones who as a majority took the conservative line.
So how do we explain this?
Why are the “conservative evangelicals” unable to read Stephen Wolfe’s very mild tweet without falling apart? It has to do with the nature of contemporary evangelicalism itself. I have a post I am working on called “Up From Evangelicalism.” It won’t be too long, but it is taking time to make sure it is complete, and succinct. But for now, I’ll answer in this way (also posted to Twitter this morning):
Within the realm of Conservative Evangelicalism we have the 20th Century-Zeitgeist Evangelical; among his many bad habits is to take statements related specifically to the context of the Temporary or Civil Kingdom and without any rationalization whatsoever drag them into context of the Kingdom of Christ where he can declare that such statements have absolutely no room in Christ's Church and reprimand those who make the original observations. This is an easy path to the appearance of pious orthodoxy and Twitter is flooded with masters of this performative art (Owen Strachen is one of these).
The failure to appreciate the classical (so not R2K) distinction between God’s two kingdoms has led the evangelical conservative, moderate, and liberal mainstream to apply certain features that Christ achieved for his church onto the temporal kingdom.
The consequence of this has been to weaken the strength of our political/social order by inappropriately applying themes of grace, universality, invisibility, and eschatological finality in ways completely at odds with the purpose and function of the civil order.
This is how liberalism was baptized by the Evangelical world. Liberalism didn’t permeate the instincts of conservative evangelicals by appealing to enlightenment presuppositions, but rather by applying gospel themes like cultural transcendence, etc outside the eternal kingdom.
It wasn't surprising to see people like Strachan attack Wolfe, but the "this is dumb" tweet from Canon Press was a disappointment. The tweet with the picture of David French And Russell Moore saying they were Wolfe's hope for Western Civ made me cancel my subscription. Which is a shame, because they put out a lot of good content.