Despising and Defending Evangelicalism After 9/11
This week, America will remember 9/11. We are still wrestling with the full impact of that day. Like many Americans, I recall the shock of watching the planes crash into the towers, and then searching for any piece of news as the third plane hit the Pentagon and a fourth went down in rural Pennsylvania. Seeing the towers collapse on my television while first responders fought to save lives and people ran in every direction, I felt a surge of anger, then grief, then pride—all of which congealed into a strong sense of patriotism. That day launched a thousand responses—politically, militarily, culturally, religiously—the effects of which remain to this day.
These recollections were not only prompted by the upcoming national day of observance but also by Bonnie Kristian’s recently published book In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers. Kristian addresses critiques of evangelicalism offered since 2019. These critiques, however, are part of a longer narrative shaped by 9/11.
It was not only what 9/11 unleashed in the American psyche that affected Protestantism, it was how it altered what had come before. Christian nationalism and the new atheism erupted at the very time that the Emergent/Emerging Church (EEC) movement was unfolding in response to the postmodern turn. No wonder older millennials like Rachel Held Evans started questioning their evangelical upbringing. While Evans is no longer with us, the entire exvangelical movement is filled with those same millennials who grew up in the nineties and rejected what they saw in the wake of 9/11.
We need to see what created the context for the cultured despisers of evangelicalism that Kristian takes on. Before we do, however, it’s important to see what Kristian is doing.
Against Evangelicalism’s Children
Kristian’s book is not a defense of doctrine so much as a portrait of evangelicalism as “a movement, a tradition, a manner of worshiping Christ.” Evangelicalism is a common culture with a shared set of beliefs and practices. In Kristian’s words, “It’s a vibe.” The focus on culture allows Kristian to talk about the center and edges of the movement, even if the edges are blurry.
The book is instructive not only for what Kristian says, but for what she chooses to omit, and who she counts as evangelicalism’s cultured despisers. Through her interviews, she compares evangelical people against what evangelical and former evangelical writers and scholars say about them. With the exception of Katherine Stewart, the cultured despisers often have some background in evangelicalism.
Her argument centers on critics of evangelicalism in the Trump era. She moves from Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers (2020) and Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise (2019) through Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne (2020), Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism (2021), and Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2021) before turning to Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (2023) and Matthew Taylor’s The Violent Take It By Force (2024). Along the way, she covers Sam Perry’s co-authored volumes on Christian nationalism and Peter Wehner’s articles about the corruption of evangelicalism.
While Kristian recognizes that a movement as large as seventy-eight million will always have its problems, she asks the reader to think in terms of the evangelical center and the edge. Some evangelicals live on the fringe, but most exist somewhere near the center. Some of the evidence compiled by these critics fixate on fringe figures such as Doug Wilson, whose twenty-five-thousand-member denomination is a drop in the evangelical ocean. Critics of evangelicalism often fall into the fallacy of assuming that what is true for a part (and a small part at that) is true for the whole.
After Kristian criticizes the critics, she draws portraits of everyday evangelicals to deal with five objections leveled against the movement: 1) that evangelicals operate out of a self-serving political tribalism and therefore are deeply insincere; 2) that evangelicals do bad things because their beliefs are fundamentally bad; 3) that even if their beliefs are good, they are hypocritical; 4) that evangelicals need to stop imposing their beliefs on others and keep them private; 5) that evangelicals may express their beliefs in public if they stay out of politics entirely.
Kristian shows that some of the charges could easily apply to any group, such as Du Mez’s claim that evangelicals bestow authority on one another by defending evangelical pastors and endorsing evangelical books. This is common practice within any movement or discipline. She also demonstrates how some critics over generalize when they equate Christian nationalism with most forms of political engagement.
Rather than claim that the arguments offered by her cultured despisers entirely miss the mark, Kristian concludes that their rhetoric outstrips the evidence.
There is a larger context that helps explain what’s happening with these critiques beyond the Trump era. While it is true that scholars are still trying to explain why evangelicals have supported Trump, the history before Trump is crucial.
The Challenge of 9/11
The 9/11 attacks ignited a set of responses that impacted evangelicalism. The first was the perceived connection between al-Qaeda’s Islamic terrorism and American fundamentalism. This claim was made almost immediately in a reissued edition of Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God (2001). Armstrong argued that “for almost a century, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been developing a militant form of piety whose objective is to drag God and religion from the sidelines, to which they have been relegated in modern secular culture, and bring them back to center stage.” It was an argument for a naked public square—religious persons who wish to bring their religion into the public square are fundamentalists.
Armstrong went on to link “the apocalypse of September 11” to fundamentalism. The ideological connection between fundamentalism of all sorts, 9/11, and political engagement seeded the soil for the new atheism and the charges of Christian nationalism against the Bush administration, both of which sprouted in 2006.
One can trace the beginning of the new atheism to Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (2004), in which he claimed that religion is the root of most historical injustice in order to make a larger philosophical claim that religious dogma itself drives humanity to the abyss. Evangelical beliefs are harmful because all religion is evil and promotes evil.
Everything exploded in 2006 when Harris published his Letter to a Christian Nation alongside books by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens followed in 2007 with God is Not Great. By the end of the year, all four had recorded a conversation that went viral and made them known as “The Four Horsemen.” The new atheism grew until it peaked between 2009 and 2014. Even though it splintered over internal divisions and external critiques, especially that morality required an objective ground outside of humanity to counter the forces of terrorism, the damage had been done.
The connection between fundamentalism and 9/11 also unleashed the first round of books claiming that the Bush administration wanted to create a theocracy. Michelle Goldberg titled her afterword in Kingdom Coming (2006) “Solidarity,” to make it clear that liberals espousing humanism, modernity, reason, and progress must stand together against the fundamentalism and tribalism that connect Christian nationalists and Islamic extremists.
While the charges of Christian nationalism went underground during the Obama administration, they returned with a vengeance after Trump’s election. With his fellow sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Philip Gorski, Sam Perry dusted off the arguments and wedded them to social identity theory, in which an individual internalizes group dynamics so that a person’s self-understanding stems from group membership. This is one reason why they portray Christian nationalism as a “deep story.” It’s an identity-forming story—a mythic narrative—that claims America was founded as a Christian nation by white men who were traditional Christians. The conflation of political engagement with Christian nationalism is the natural evolution of the arguments that Goldberg and other secular journalists made.
Evangelical Debates After 9/11
The new atheists and secular journalists raised questions that deepened a debate within evangelicalism over how to articulate the faith. In the 1990s, evangelicals had been debating how to deal with postmodernism as a philosophical and cultural turn. Out of these debates came the Emergent/Emerging Church (EEC).
Brian McLaren was a major voice in this sphere. He wrote The Church on the Other Side (2000) on ministry in a postmodern context, Finding Faith (1999), and A New Kind of Christian (2001). In these early works, McLaren offered an approach to the faith from the perspective of a fellow seeker who had questions. He rejected defenses of Christianity as part of modernity, opting to help his readers discover “how to search for and find a faith that is real.” Espousing scripture as story and evangelism as conversation and friendship, McLaren argued that the end of this search meant learning to be a Christian in a new way, rather than the version of Christianity he had inherited and was now questioning.
McLaren belonged to a larger group of evangelicals who formed the EEC movement to protest existing ministry paradigms. As Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, many in the EEC wanted to resurrect the intimate coffee house Christianity and the small group characteristic of the Jesus Movement in the seventies. McLaren himself had come to faith as part of the Jesus Movement.
The term emergence referred to seekers together on a journey of self-discovery. Through questions and conversation, identity emerges in the slow process of transformation. It also referred to the emergence of a new church and new way of practicing Christianity, like new growth in an old forest. Within this environment, there was permission to question and deconstruct in order to reconstruct. The emphasis on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, a way of living and being Christian, resulted in a lot of experiments in being the church.
At its best, the EEC movement took Richard Foster and Dallas Willard’s emphasis on spirituality and formation and placed it into a communal and relational setting that offered the freedom to question as part of the journey of salvation. As Tony Jones made clear in The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (2008), they had experienced the seeker sensitive approach offered at Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek Church or Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, and found it theologically thin.
In the wake of 9/11, however, a sense of urgency about this project opened the door to rethinking evangelical beliefs. In the collection of essays, An Emergent Manifesto of Hope (2007), Chris Erdman suggested that EEC pastors understood the post-Christian, postmodern, and post-9/11 world as being in a “situation of emergency.” Likening it to Karl Barth’s theology after WWI, he claimed that “we want to ‘begin all over again,’ to work in a state of ‘constant emergency’ in order to subvert and convert so many ‘distorted ideas about theology’ that hold the church captive.”
This rethinking of the faith gave rise to a slow but steady move into liberal Protestantism. It started in McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity (2010), Rob Bell’s Love Wins (2011), and Tony Jones’s A Better Atonement (2012). All three writers consistently contrasted fundamentalism with what they saw as a more mature view of the faith. The God of the fundamentalists, McLaren insisted, was a competitive warrior who superficially demanded technical perfection while leaving aside social justice. The fundamentalist vision of God was male, violent, and deterministic.
Central to the debate was the question of divine violence and hospitality. 9/11 had brought this into focus in a way that put satisfaction theories of the atonement and traditional Reformed views of God front and center. As Hans Boersma wrote in Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross (2004), “The Reformed tradition, which continues to be my home, has especially been accused of complicity with violence.” The pacifist Anabaptist approach articulated by John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas got a fresh hearing.
In addition, the open theism claim that God was loving, relational, and open to the future because he did not know the future gained a greater hold. In Clark Pinnock’s words, God was the “most moved mover” who entered the world in love and allowed the world to impact him. Humanity cooperates with God to bring the future into being. The older view of God as simple and impassible became fundamentally pagan.
The debates about God and atonement took on a new intensity after 9/11. The Anabaptist theologian J. Denny Weaver argued against Anselm and the satisfaction view of atonement, proposing instead what he called a “narrative Christus victor” view of the atonement in which Christ conquers through non-violent resistance demonstrated in his full surrender to the cross. Weaver drew upon feminist, womanist, and black liberationist perspectives to fill out the particulars. In subsequent works, he decried Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell’s post 9/11 rhetoric of divine judgment and violence.
Du Mez took the basic criticisms articulated in the wake of 9/11 and placed them into a historical narrative centered on the figure of John Wayne. The criticisms of a masculine God were reframed through the lens of culture and gender studies. In an ironic twist, Peter Wehner supported the very policies of the Bush administration that Du Mez thought expressed the militancy of a male patriarchy.
Another irony is that Matthew Taylor covered Peter Wagner as the key voice in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). While Taylor is correct to associate him with NAR, Wagner was also an open theist who believed that restoring the offices of apostle and prophet would enable a renewed church to bring about the future kingdom. Wagner agreed with the criticisms leveled by Pinnock and EEC spokespersons, but not their approach to mission. Taylor’s work undermines Tisby’s and Butler’s strongest claims about evangelicalism being intrinsically racist or sexist. The NAR was and is multiethnic and egalitarian.
It should not be surprising that during the immediate post-9/11 context period, older millennials started to question their evangelical faith. It was not simply the late Rachel Held Evans’ Faith Unraveled (2010)—it was Blake Chastain coining the term exvangelical (2016) to describe himself and others who ended up leaving evangelicalism. Deconversion and deconstruction narratives became the order of the day. Chastain recounted in 2022 that “we’ve seen the pushback of the emergent church and the post-evangelicals of the new millennium — the swell of popular writers like Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey and Jen Hatmaker often questioning evangelical teachings on sexuality, race and gender — and today’s Extremely Online™ exvangelicals, deconstructors and decolonizers.”
The debate in evangelicalism after 9/11 informed the cultured despisers targeted by Kristian. It was partly a continuation of the debate within Reformed theology. Indeed, the young, restless, and Reformed movement unfolded at the same time and partly in reaction to the EEC movement. During the years that Tony Jones toured emergent congregations to write his dispatches, Colin Hanson went on his own journey to discover that R. C. Sproul and John Piper were creating a new generation of pastors who combined Reformed theology with the new approach of emergent churches.
Trump’s election did not start these debates. Several of Kristian’s opponents came out of Reformed circles. Alberta, Tisby, Du Mez, and Wehner are either Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed. Their primary targets were fellow Reformed Christians, but they extrapolated from this small group to evangelicalism as a whole. They also echoed the criticisms and concerns found among open theists, EEC pastors, and Anabaptists. By returning to the context immediately after 9/11, we can see how the cultured despisers are also the children of the very evangelical world they criticize.
