Opinion: The crisis in America's evangelical churches calls for spiritual revival, not nostalgia, leading Baptist writes

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American evangelicalism is at a crossroads; it must choose between spiritual revival or continuing in its attempt to recreate the past, and it cannot have it both ways, writes Russell Moore, editor and chief of Christianity Today, in an opinion for The Atlantic.

"The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the church's future. Almost none of them even call themselves 'evangelical' anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories. 'Sometimes I feel like I'm crazy,' one pastor said to me just days ago. 'Does no one see that the church is in crisis?'"

Moore recounts his years as head of the public-policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention: "For years, I dealt with evangelical backlash, including from some of my closest allies and friends, over my opposition to Donald Trump and my views on issues such as racial justice and church sexual abuse. I hardly thought of myself as a 'dissident.' Instead, I believed I was just what I'd always been: a loyal Southern Baptist evangelical trying to apply what I'd learned from children's Sunday school onward about basic Christian morality and justice. Still, I felt like an outcast and a heretic. I felt homeless. And two years ago, I left the Southern Baptist world I loved."

Revival may need to be redefined, Moore suggests: It is "a concept with a long history in American evangelicalism, rooted in the Bible, that says a people who have grown cold and lifeless can be renewed in their faith. It is a kind of resurrection from the dead. . . . Yet the language of revival is now riddled with cynicism, and is associated with some of the worst aspects of American evangelicalism. Entrepreneurial American evangelicalism built a programmatic structure for 'revival'—whether in the spring- and fall-meeting schedules of little Bible Belt churches like the one in which I grew up, or in massive stadium events traveling across the country like rock concerts." Commercialized revival isn't what Moore has in mind, nor does he think returning to "a mythical golden age" is a good choice.

"A generation ago, one evangelical leader said that the goal of the religious right should be 1950s America, just without the sexism and racism. . . . The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous," Moore writes. "Crisis shakes up an old order—ripping apart, as the apostle Paul put it, what's made of 'wood, hay, stubble' (1 Corinthians 3:12). Now every moment is a possible apocalypse—in which what's been around us all the while is revealed—and thus every moment is an hour of decision."

The answer to the crisis is founded in God's recent actions, Moore says: "Those who wish to hold on to the 'Old Time Religion' must recognize that God is doing something new. The old alliances and coalitions are shaking apart. And the sense of disorientation, disillusionment, and political and religious' homelessness' that many Christians feel is not a problem to be overcome but a key part of the process. . . . The insight of evangelical Christianity, at its best, is that any pilgrimage cannot start with a road map of certainty but must begin with the cry of faith that says, like the noble disciple Thomas wrongly labeled as a doubter, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?' (John 14:5)." More says nostalgia "cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there's hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace."