Evangelicalism, by James Davison Hunter
Schlossberg, Herbert
F or a number of years now, and with increased intensity since the 1980 election, we have been flooded by the mass media with an unremitting stream of commentary, both friendly and hostile, on the...
...I do not mean that as criticism, but praise, for in regard to morality, there isn't anything new under the sun, and hasn't been since the dawn of time...
...Neo-evangelicalism is admittedly an important segment, but so are such groups as the conservative Lutherans (Missouri Synod, principally), Southern Baptists, charismatics, and those among the neo-Calvinists who haven't joined the evangelical meltdown...
...As a result of all this, he says, evangelicalism is presently reenacting the old liberal retreat from historic Christianity that began a hundred years ago...
...H unter's field of inquiry is only one small segment of the evangelical world, but an important one...
...the growth of "selfist" ideology...
...Herbert Schlossberg is the author of Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson...
...The most serious conceptual difficulty I have with the book is Hunter's notion that in the face of challenge to one's world-view the only response is either conformity or ghettoization...
...Someone ought to do this kind of study with a control group of non-collegians...
...Last year's Tocqueville sesquicentennial was the occasion for numerous learned disquisitions on the French aristocrat's view that there was a close connection between the religious values of American society and its moral character and institutions...
...It will be interesting to see whether the evangelical academic leadership takes Hunter's findings to heart or begins to circle the wagons...
...And Carl F. H. Henry, perhaps the most widely respected of contemporary evangelical theologians, ended his 1986 autobiography with a lament thatevangelicalism had wasted its best opportunities...
...Now James Davison Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, has given us the evidence...
...EVANGELICALISM: THE COMING GENERATION James Davison Hunter/University of Chicago Press/$19.95 Herbert Schlossberg THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 41 How does Hunter account for such slippage in colleges that were supposed to provide some insulation from the corrosive effects of secularism...
...Hence the subtitle of his book—Hunter assumes that the future leadership of evangelicalism is fairly represented by the students and faculty members who responded to his survey...
...But Tocqueville, could he but rise from the dead and visit the University of Virginia, might say to Hunter, "If you had traveled around your country with me a hundred and fifty years ago, you would have seen the real alternative, the one that is embodied in the New Testament idea that Christians are to be the salt of the earth...
...The chapter on the family, written with a co-author, is especially weak in that respect...
...He puts the spotlight on the faculty, which his surveys show to be less orthodox than the students...
...My hypothesis for such a study—hardly revolutionary—would be that the technical training the graduate students receive affects them less than the values of the graduate faculty...
...Arkes is a man who reminds, the supreme compliment for a moral philosopher...
...Anybody whose views on this subject are formed wholly by the media will be quite surprised by this conclusion...
...Not the mere bean counter we expect in an assistant professor of sociology who does survey research, Hunter interprets his material with sympathy and intelligence, and produces from his data a rich and nourishing bean soup...
...In a previous book Hunter addressed the question of why evangelicalism had survived the secularism of the late twentieth century...
...The authors permit themselves, against experience, common sense, and a mountain of evidence, to be persuaded by dubious sources holding that such familial attributes as parental love for children are not human constants, but rather are socially conditioned, the product of nineteenth-century bourgeois sentimentality...
...Arkes himself recognizes this when he says that his book is an effort to "remind" readers of things that were once well known but have been obscured in recent years...
...The students, in turn, pick up not information as much as attitudes and values...
...Besides, how many historians can write sociology...
...In making this point, Hunter uses the marvelously titled work of John Murray Cuddihy, No Offense...
...For those who believed that the evangelicals were animated by the same "traditional" values that had made America great, the ghost of Tocqueville seemed to add his blessing to the current revival, as well as providing a rationale for its continuation...
...Meanwhile, it's good to have such thoughtful work from a young sociologist...
...Or we could have taken the evangelicals at their -word about the virtues of humility, the sure knowledge that pride goeth before a fall, and, observing the rampant hubris among so many leaders in the movement, begun to write it off...
...The soup course is over now, and perhaps when Professor Hunter receives tenure he'll leave the bean counting tolhose still in the nursery and get right to the meat and potatoes...
...And while there are combinations of thought and argument that are new, it is not really an original work...
...If orthodox Christians continue to recover this aspect of their heritage, the apostles of that liberal version of the secular city will be in even more trouble than they are now...
...M ore basic to the matter is the way Hunter targets his questionnaires...
...Hence the erosion that Hunter finds...
...and a watered down commitment to work, the family, and economic freedom, among other manifestations of what Hunter with good reason calls "practical theology...
...For those scientific types who take their exercise in other ways than jumping to conclusions, there wasn't much to go on...
...Of course, some of these groups are harder to locate, let alone survey, than the convenient grouping of the Christian College Consortium and its analogous seminaries...
...Such a view expresses the "cultural mandate" that is gaining a hearing among a growing number of conservative Protestants—although evidently not many in Hunter's sampling—and not a few Catholics as well...
...But social scientists are paid to solve that kind of problem...
...Presumably when King David, a thousand years before Christ, was said to have wept for the life of his son, that was the work of some Victorian redactor tampering with the text...
...Hunter lifts the cover off this bubbling pot and examines what's inside...
...0 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987...
...much waffling on such bellwether ideas of the movement as the doctrine of salvation...
...But there is at least a possibility that progressing from eighteen to twenty-two years of age could account for part of the change even without the college experience...
...Has all the hoopla about the evangelical resurgence had any substance behind it, or have the media duped us again...
...Taking a leaf from the investment adviser's book, we could have assumed the contrarian position that once the story made the headlines the surge had already reached its peak, and that it was therefore time to take a "short" position on evangelicalism and watch it begin its inevitable plunge...
...The publicity has covered the increase in political influence, untold millions given to evangelical ministries, increasing church memberships (along with shrinkage in the mainline churches), burgeoning numbers of day schools, publishers and bookstores galore, thousands of missionaries, and a bewildering variety of expressions, experiences, and personalities—something for almost every taste...
...Yet, when rendered of a book written by a sociologist, the charge of inadequate historical perspective smacks of the ingratitude shown by the owner of a talking dog who complains that the mutt splits his infinitives...
...That is why they react defensively against any expression of conservative Protestantism that might offend the intellectual establishment...
...In fact, they do so with greater precipitousness than their cohorts studying at the state university that he used as a control...
...Thus the evangelical principle, derived from the New Testament, which decries conformity with the regnant cultural system is quietly (perhaps unconsciously) set aside as the faculty seeks the approval of mentors and peers who are actively hostile to their tradition...
...What's inside is a theology weakened by increasing subjectivism...
...Or, even better, several groups which would show us if, say, laborers, retail clerks, and entrepreneurs exhibit similar transformations of outlook...
...Nevertheless the book has deficiencies...
...Some confront the intruding force and some adapt to it, and Hunter characterizes the Christian college faculty as belonging to the latter camp...
...Some of the historical parts display the gassiness of sophomore essays...
...In this one he considers how much difference it all makes...
...One of the book's major themes is the way people within any strong tradition react to social change...
...Either by their silence or overtly, they make peace with those who are at war with everything for, which they stand...
...The short answer, to which his evidence points but which he does not state, is "not much...
...His surveys focus on a group of nine evangelical colleges which are part of the Christian College Consortium and seven seminaries of similar persuasion...
...The results of his study are disturbing for those whose religious commitments are tied to orthodox Christianity...
...He defines the subject of his study as theologically conservative Protestantism, but his respondents all belong to only one segment of that field...
...So that the insecurities, the snobbishness, the fear of being thought unsophisticated weigh heavily on them and influence strongly the way in which they react to the world and instruct their own students...
...The evangelical growth rate has been slowing for years, and the movement's cultural hegemony—that was what impressed Tocqueville so—is rapidly disintegrating...
...F or a number of years now, and with increased intensity since the 1980 election, we have been flooded by the mass media with an unremitting stream of commentary, both friendly and hostile, on the surge of evangelical influence in the United States...
...That is what informed the culture of the early republic and what explains its health...
...First Things isn't light reading, yet it is carefully and elegantly written...
...The liberal establishment has had its own version of this in high gear for much of our century, and that accounts for the social disasters that are in train...
...Hunter's data show not only that the evangelical colleges are unable to arrest the encroachments of secularism, but that the students who study in them are prone to slip from the tenets of their faith...
...That has been the unfortunate assumption of evangelicalism for the last couple of generations...
...I find Hunter completely convincing in his conclusions of the value changes undergone by these students under the tutelage of the faculties, especially inasmuch as he shows the changes proceeding year by year from the freshmen to the seniors...
...Someday we ought to have studies done of the effects of graduate study on those who later become college teachers...
...I think we always had reason to be skeptical about what they were telling us,- even if we didn't know much about the details...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
