What the “Handshake Heard Around the World” Means for Evangelicalism
What was true before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump should be all the more obvious now—the church needs wise leaders to help believers comprehend, navigate, address, and respond to the cultural and political chaos of our times. The likelihood that evangelicals will benefit from such leadership without ongoing public and private conversations between men like Doug Wilson and Albert Mohler seems pretty low to me.
So why have evangelicals been deprived of such conversation for so long? The short answer is that for over a decade, SBC elites succumbed to Timothy Keller’s “third-way” attempts to beg off such conversations. Does the presence of Douglas Wilson and Albert Mohler together at NatCon signal abandonment of Keller’s now defunct, ostrich-head-in-the-sand strategy for gospel advance and Christian unity?
One can only hope.
The Third Way Was Always A Dead End
While it is too early to tell, perhaps Albert Mohler’s public engagement with Doug Wilson at NatCon 2024 marks a welcome end to an almost decade-long SBC elite cancelation of Wilson. Southern Baptists need Wilson’s voice in the conversation, and non-Southern Baptist Evangelicals need Mohler’s voice.
In contrast to Timothy Keller and the more Keller-influenced evangelical elites, both of these men have seriously engaged at the intersection of faith, culture, and politics for decades. Most evangelical elites have invested little or nothing in such matters and often seem allergic to such engagement. One consequence is that too many Baptists and other evangelicals share a default wariness for talk about politics mixed with talk about Jesus Christ. It should not surprise us that Russell Moore got so much traction for so long among evangelicals by decrying the Moral Majority and eschewing the culture wars. The fruit of that posture and the rhetoric it produced blossomed most fully in the Timothy Keller-influenced young, restless, and reformed movement.
But, alas, wave after wave of leftward Overton Window lurching demonstrated the inadequacies of Keller’s “third-way” attempts to beg off and hide from the messiness and importance of cultural and political realities. Rather than foster the Christian unity promised, Keller-influenced churches alienated red communities as they succumbed to blue-community sensibilities. They made the rectitude of Christian voting for Democrats an inviolable dogma of evangelical branding and messaging. They repeatedly scrambled to sanitize select components of blue political priorities as “gospel issues” to shield them from the charge of political idolatry repeatedly leveled at red communities. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that woke culture warring on race was A-OK, while support for Trump required the abandonment of the faith and a lapse into idolatry.
The most illuminative accountings for the rise and fall of Keller’s strategy recognize it as the latest evangelical seeker movement. The ministries of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren best epitomize the first two. The Keller iteration differs from these not in fundamental strategy but in the target audience. Hybels and Warren targeted suburban America, while Keller targeted blue America. In each case, management of the Christian brand and message proceeded according to ongoing monitoring of the sensibilities of the target population to minimize upset within those communities.
The result was that no matter the content of these movements’ formal confessional commitments, what they mainly delivered shows up in their ongoing branding, messaging, and, eventually, platforming. Platform gatekeeping prompted the cancelation of voices deemed “unhelpful” not on biblical or theological grounds but on “winsomeness-to-the-target-population” grounds. This Keller-inspired gatekeeping, designed to avoid upset in blue communities, eventually found Voddie Baucham, Carol Swain, Wayne Grudem, Os Guinness, Lee Brand, Tom Ascol, Mike Stone, and Douglass Wilson “unhelpful.”
Do you want to make sense of these cancelations? To do so requires precisely zero recourse to the Bible, the ecumenical creeds, or any robust orthodox evangelical doctrinal standard such as the Westminster Confession or the Baptist Faith & Message. Some were too un-woke. Some publicly supported Trump. Others questioned whether a Christian could, in good conscience, vote for a Democrat for president. The protectiveness at work was not for the Bible, love of neighbor, theological orthodoxy, the environment, thoughtfulness, moral rectitude, or civil discourse—it was for blue sensibilities.
That strategy accounts for John Piper’s false equivalence between Trump’s character and abortion. It accounts for Timothy Keller’s contention that he cannot know for sure which political party’s policies will best reduce the number of abortions. It accounts for the lionizing of a non-practicing gay Anglican priest encouraging evangelicals to make their churches safe spaces for homosexuals to tell their stories. It accounts for Kristen Power’s years of attendance at Redeemer in NYC, sitting under Keller’s preaching and his wife’s teaching without learning that the formal position of the church was against abortion and gay marriage. Sensitivity to blue sensibility produced a safe space for liberal democrats under the banner of centering the gospel.
Real Adult Conversation
What evangelicals need now is robust, ongoing engagement with solid biblical and theological application to all areas of life, but especially, just now, to the political and cultural chaos we inhabit in America. We need to let the shared formal theological consensus that binds Mohler and Wilson, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans work for us to allow for such conversations.
Signs that the Wilson-Mohler talks hold promise were present at NatCon. Mohler said:
“A secular conservatism cannot meet the challenge of the day and an accommodationist Christianity will do no better…It is good to know the challenge we face. It is good to speak honestly. We face the most insidious attacks upon human dignity, the sanctity of life, the goodness of marriage and family, the structures of human society, even the reality of good and evil, the transcendent realities of the good, the beautiful. Our answer to that cannot be less than political. Our answer to that cannot be less than cultural. It cannot be less than strategic. It cannot be less than theological. It is good that we acknowledge that fact.”
For various historical reasons, extant protestant and evangelical resources to help us navigate the chaotic terrain we face are not nearly what they should be. They are not nearly so deep and transferable to incorporation into preaching or to either individual or collective action as they need to be. But neither are they zero.
The array of resources accumulated and growing in Moscow, Idaho, under the leadership of Doug Wilson, is impressive. Tom Ascol at Founders Ministries launched The Institute for Public Theology in 2021. Mark Coppenger has given sustained attention to the intersection of ethics, culture, and theology for decades. An array of serious voices now sound from online outlets such as American Reformer, Mohler and Andrew Walker’s World Opinions, William Wolfe and the Center for Baptist Leadership, Megan Basham at The Daily Wire, the Catholic, Protestant, and evangelical First Things, and the newly launched Clear Truth Media.
Seeker accommodationist strategies for advancing the gospel and cultivating unity in the church have been repeatedly attempted and have failed every time. It’s time to make serious, biblically informed, and theologically deep engagement with all areas of life the norm among evangelical elites, professors, and pastors.
Doug Wilson and Albert Mohler bring sufficient knowledge and command large enough platforms to lead evangelicals in this direction. Moscow, Idaho, already provides an impressive model of what the church and Christian education can look like when these priorities are embraced. Albert Mohler leads the flagship seminary of the largest denomination in North America.
Requisite resources (such as the ones listed above) for effective Christian leadership exist for such a time as this.
Will we be faithful stewards of these resources? Time will tell.
