There’s Never Been a Better Time to Be an Evangelical Christian
Evangelicalism’s historical emphases on personal renewal and church revival shine precisely in dark days like these.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Just before Christmas, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat responded in his newsletter to the continuing controversy about the Francis papacy in a surprising way.
What was surprising here is not that Douthat, a convert to Catholicism, would write about the church’s stormy politics; he does so all the time. Also not surprising is his almost-despair about the Francis papacy; he is almost surely the most widely read Roman Catholic critic of the pope.
Surprising, though, was his conclusion: that there’s never been a better time to be a Roman Catholic. Over the past year, I’ve come to a similar conclusion: that there’s never been a better time to be an evangelical Christian.
Douthat gets to his conclusion the long way around. He writes about his own conversion into a church led by Pope John Paul II and then Benedict XVI, when the Catholic future seemed to be trending toward even more of the kind of conservative Catholicism that drew Douthat in the first place.
He had come to the Times expecting to be a defender of the church—but then the terrifying scope of the sexual abuse crisis became clear. Then the pope resigned, followed by all of the ambiguity as to where the church would now be headed on matters such as marriage, family, sexuality, and even the authority of the papacy itself.
Douthat poses the anguished question, “Who would choose to be a Catholic at a time like this?”
In this, Douthat argues that conservative Catholics such as himself are perhaps sympathetic to the plight of the more liberalizing Catholics during the John Paul II era, who were often asked, If you don’t like the direction of the church, ...