Picking Up the Line Again
Surviving the Shattering of Denominations
Aaron Renn’s article Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? makes the case that evangelicalism, even if it is doctrinally Protestant, is no longer culturally Protestant in any recognizable fashion. Traditional Protestantism, across essentially all denominations, had a rigorous moral system leading to an extraordinary work ethic. According to Renn and others, this ethic is absent from evangelicalism, leading them to ask, "What went wrong?”
What Renn’s analysis skips over is the genetic connection between evangelicalism and its immediate forerunner - fundamentalism. Renn has written about fundamentalism several times before, so this omission is puzzling. Renn even asserts himself, in a previous article, “Evangelicalism developed, beginning in the 1940s, as an attempt to create a kinder, gentler fundamentalism that could reach the mainstream.”1 I will go a step further and suggest that evangelicalism and fundamentalism are not two separate movements but a maturation of the same movement over the last hundred years.
The motive force for fundamentalism was an attempt to save the church from an encroaching doctrinal liberalism. The “fundamentals” themselves were a set of doctrines that were “fundamental” to Christianity (inerrancy of scripture, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, literal resurrection, and miracles). The Presbyterian church required prospective ministers to affirm these truths in 1910, but rescinded this deliverance shortly after in 1927.2 After this, many conservative, fundamentalist ministers were removed from the denomination. In the Presbyterian church, this was called the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, and, in short, the modernists won. The fundamentalists made a difficult stand and kept their consciences clean, but they were removed from institutional power.
If you’ve spoken to an evangelical in any conservative denomination anywhere in the States, they all carry a version of this narrative around with them in their back pocket: “The liberals have fallen, but we’re keeping the faith the best we can out here.”
So what does this have to do with Renn’s argument?
Suppose you take Renn’s bag of accusations against evangelicalism (that it lacks a work ethic, is populist and consumerist, lacks moral rigor, and is anti-intellectual) and lay them out on fundamentalism. In that case, you see that the work ethic and moral rigor concerns do not align. Fundamentalism was extremely rigorous on moral issues, there was no diminishment of work ethic. These concerns develop after the decline of the fundamentalist movement. What remains is populism and anti-intellectualism, which require reframing.
What happened with the onset of fundamentalism was more than just a doctrinal correction. It was also a shattering of institutional infrastructure and credibility. The fundamentalists didn’t just restart the same denominations again with corrections to the doctrine - they rebooted their denominations with a more anti-institutional character. Many IFB (Independent Fundamentalist Baptist) churches even today will not permit you to take communion unless you are a member of that specific church. Even though many evangelicals would scoff at this narrowness, the nondenominational approach in the evangelical world is the same rejection of denominational and institutional authority. No one tells us what to do.3
Both the populism and the anti-intellectual accusations terminate on the same point - evangelicals and fundamentalists both have no trust in the institution because the elites are always the problem. They kicked us out; they compromised the Bible; they always go liberal; they just get in the way.
The harsh truth is that the experts, the elites, and the ruling class were the problem and ordinary folks are right to reject them.
You heard some echoes of this if you were paying attention during the vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. Vance says:
Governor, you say trust the experts, but those same experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods. They lied about that. They said if we shipped our industrial base off to other countries, to Mexico and elsewhere, it would make the middle class stronger. They were wrong about that. They were wrong about the idea that if we made America less self-reliant, less productive in our own Nation, that it would somehow make us better off. And they were wrong about it. And for the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus, we're not doing it anymore.... This has to stop. And we're not going to stop it by listening to experts. We're going to stop it by listening to common sense wisdom, which is what Donald Trump governed on.4
This was one of the most resonant moments of the debate for a host of normals, including myself.
We are right to reject the religious elites - the problem is that we don’t necessarily have anything solid on the other side. Again, this is reflected in our politics. Trust in institutions was and is at an all-time low (rightfully so), which led to chaos and a search for a workable alternative. Trump was this alternative. Trump is a pragmatist to his bones. Even his most fervent admirers don’t deny his lack of morality, but it doesn’t matter to anyone because he can accomplish something amid chaos.
Of the four accusations Renn mentions, they essentially boil down to two actual issues - anti-institutionalism (populist, anti-intellectual) and moral compromise (work ethic, moral rigor). Fundamentalism makes clear that moral compromise is a symptom, not the root of the problem. The anti-institutionalism came first and produced moral compromise because, without an institution upholding a definite culture and tradition, pragmatism always becomes the order of the day. Pragmatism, when it is the governing virtue, always breeds moral compromise.
In short, fundamentalism rejected institutions because the institutions broke, but they never rebuilt them. Moral compromise was the inevitable result.
Evangelicals are just the inheritors of the ruins and have seen little reason to take up the work of rebuilding them. The institutions were always the problem anyway, right? To compound this, those who have taken up the cause of institution building have almost always advocated moving in a liberal direction,5 so what can we, as conservatives, do?
Often, we decide to build a strong local church, hunker down, and focus on the folks around us. This is a good impulse, or at least a good initial impulse. However, anti-institutionalism still has the same gravity, and it always pulls a morally compromising pragmatism to the forefront, especially in chaotic times. This has not produced excellent outcomes in the evangelical world.
We need to show some resolve in building back the connectional institutions that were torn down - denominational hierarchies, traditions, seminaries, colleges, schools, publications, etc….
We have great preachers.
We have effective organizers.
We have polished media and marketing.
We don’t have churchmen.
You can’t build back anything without churchmen. You can have charismatic, powerful, inspiring, faithful men in great numbers, but without churchmen, you won’t have a church. You will have movements, crisscrossing back and forth across the landscape, hot one moment and cold the next. If any of them last longer than a generation, it’s a minor miracle. Just look at the radical decline of such conservative flagships as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and Acts 29. Our best thinkers and communicators spend their time building their own brands rather than serving the church as an institution, and they’re not crazy to do so. If the institutions will inevitably fall, why invest in them?
I believe the fundamentalists were right: the mainlines are dead. That ship has sailed, it’s not coming back, and it took virtually all our functioning institutions. The ensuing denominational anarchy was probably inevitable, but it has been massively damaging nonetheless. The thread has been cut, Protestantism barely recognizes itself, and the trends are worsening rather than improving.
The command given to the church at Sardis rings true at the moment:
“Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.” Revelation 3:2
We must be led by churchmen who are willing to invest in their denominations, not merely their own churches. We don’t need more conferences, celebrity pastors, reactionary influencers, and oblivious academics. They are all fine in their places, but we’re full up. We need churchmen - solid, steady men, learned in their history and doctrine, moral exemplars, willing to sacrifice their time and glory to build something bigger than their own brand. We need men who know what being a Protestant means experientially, rather than merely as an artifact from the books.
If the main line has been cut, we need to pick it back up, trim off the frayed ends, knot it securely, and pull it tight. The Lord promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church, but he doesn’t promise it will always be pretty.
Lest someone protest, “Congregationalists have always been this way,” we need to recall that early American congregationalism was far more connectional and accountable even than many denominations today. There were high degrees of regional coordination for things like ordination examinations, doctrinal conferences, discipline, and even formal agreements on constitutional documents like the Cambridge Platform. The Puritan Congregationalists would put our evangelical megachurches (and quite a few of our Presbyterian denominations) to shame with their collegiality.
https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/decline-and-renewal-of-the-american-church-extended/ - the misrepresentation of fundamentalism here is gross, and I find it personally horrifying that this thesis is one of the last ideas that Keller brought into the world.