Evangelicals Shouldn’t Criticize Evangelicalism (Unless the Evangel Really Matters)
The gospel doesn’t come with a gag order. It calls us to name and repent of idolatries and hypocrisies—especially our own.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
A year or so ago, my friend David French and I were speaking to a group of young congressional staffers on Capitol Hill when one young man, a Republican and an evangelical Christian, asked us why we would criticize what’s happening right now on the Right.
“With all the hostility coming toward Christians from secularism and progressive ideology,” he asked, “why not punch Left instead of Right?”
Quite often, one will hear this sort of complaint from professing evangelical Christians—often in response to some conversation-generating book, such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne or Tim Alberta’s new work The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. These objections are often couched in terms of maintaining the “unity of the church,” usually picturing those evangelicals who dissent from Christian nationalism or white identity politics as betrayers, with an unspoken subtext: “The first rule of Born-Again Club is that we don’t talk about Born-Again Club.”
Sometimes this critique will extend all the way to the series of scandals issuing from American evangelical Christianity, at times with the argument that evangelicals “attacking our own side” on such matters will only cause unbelievers to hate us more and Christians to trust their leaders less.
This argument is akin to the “No Enemies to the Left” policy of some sectors of American progressivism in the middle of the last century toward the Soviet Union and Communist totalitarianism. One might whisper that Joseph Stalin is awful, but saying so publicly would only make the case for authoritarian anti-Communists. ...