The Next Evangelicalism

Book Review (Soong-Chan Rah)

I first encountered Soong-Chan Rah is his writing on Lament, and the way he connects the book of Lamentations to a prophetic critique of US race relations.

This is a slightly earlier book, which is sub-titled "Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity". I'd call this book a hopeful critique from within Evangelicalism.

Why the "next" Evangelicalism?

Well, as Rah writes, "the reality of twenty-first-century American Christianity—the white churches are in decline while the immigrant, ethnic and multiethnic churches are flourishing."

Global Christianity is growing, and Christianity in the US is growing : among non-whites. But white Christianity is in steady decline. Whereas there is a vibrancy and vitality to immigrant, ethnic, and multi-ethnic churches, the broader leadership of Evangelicalism in America is overwhelmingly white. This is tellingly evident in seminary faculty, where only 12% are people of colour.

The book moves through its critique in three parts. The first part is devoted to analysis the particular aspects that make up the "Western, White Cultural Captivity of the Church". Rah begins with an analysis of the place of individualism in western culture, and how individualism is endemic to fundamentalism and its offspring - US evangelicalism.

The danger of the Western, white captivity of the church is an excessive individualism and personalism that reflects the narcissism of American culture rather than the redemptive power of the gospel message. p33

This manifests as a gospel package that is largely designed around a therapeutic ministering to an individual's needs, not a community calling to kingdom living. It highlights individual sin, dealt with by individual repentance and individual salvation, all between the individual and God; in doing so it neglects and sidelines collective sin, guilt, repentance, and salvation.

He then turns to Consumerism and Materialism. I think this is a really telling chapter. It's relatively easy, in my experience, to find churches and preachers preaching against these things, but when we look at our lives and what we do, how much do we differ from our neighbours? How much are we actually shaped by a resistance to an overwhelming cultural vortex of materialism and consumerism? And how much of broader church culture, specifically white western church culture, is far more beholden to these factors than it provides any substantive resistance to them? Insofar as being a 'good citizen' means being a productive worker and a diligent consumer and loyal spender, to drive the Economy, capitalism and its twin offsprings of consumerism and materalism, find little deep objection in western Christianities. Rah also takes aim at the practices of 'church shopping' - another symptom of our consumer mindset, and of measuring success in numbers or finance, both products of a capitalist approach to church.

Rah's third target is Racism, specifically systematic racism. I won't go through this whole argument, as it finds echoes in other things I've read and commented on. But I will say this - it's refreshing and challenging in equal measures to hear Korean-Americans talk about this issue and both sides of the experience - that is both being subject to racial discrimination, and benefiting from racist structures. Rah writes, "When we claim that we are not complicit in the corporate sin of racism, we fail to grasp how being a beneficiary of an unjust system yields a culpability for those that benefit from that system. " (p70) That's true for Asian-Americans who arrived in the US after 1965, and it's equally true for the vast majority of Australians who are not descendants of colonial settlers, but all of whom benefit from the corporate legacy of our sinful colonialist past (and present).

Part 2 of Rah's book looks at three other aspects about how Evangelicalism operates in a way that extends, embeds, is pervaded with, and lives and breathes its white-western captivity. He tackles both the Church Growth movement and Megachurches, the Emergent Church, and Cultural Imperialism. The first is interesting both historically and sociologically - the way that the CG movement took McGavran's analysis of church growth in India, and then (mis)applied this as a recipe for evangelism in the west, in a way beholden to individualism, materialism, and racism. I particularly found Rah's treatment of Doug and Judy Hall's primary vs secondary culture analysis, and application of this to CG and urban mission, an enlightening perspective. Rah gives short-shrift to the Emergent church, basically calling it post-modernist church for white evangelicals, without many genuine attempts at engaging ethnic and minority diversity. E.g., "reading through works on Christian approaches to postmodernity reveals that diversity is referred to, but very rarely applied" (117) and "The focus of pluralism seems to be about competing worldviews offered by other religions, but no part of the book (McLaren's) addresses how nonwhite Christians will influence American evangelicalism" (117). The chapter on Imperialism deals with how US missions work still exports white western church culture, as much as anything that is truly Christianity. In a later chapter he writes,

If you are a white Christian wanting to be a missionary in this day and age, and you have never had a nonwhite mentor, then you will not be a missionary. You will be a colonialist. Instead of taking the gospel message into the world, you will take an Americanized version of the gospel. p162

Part 3 is about how we might move forward, how the western church, or US evangelicalism in particular, might genuinely and honestly face these challenges, be prepared to cede its racial hegemony, and what a better tomorrow might look like. That's why this is a book of hopeful critique. Rah talks through the contrast between a theology of celebration and a theology of suffering (foreshadowing some of the material in his Lament book); these two are quite distinct, the former is endemic for the white church, the church of the "haves", the latter is second-nature to the "have-nots", but actually we need both. We need the resources of both sides to live in the tension of now and not-yet. But in particular, the white church needs to listen to the Native American churches, the African-American churches, and the ethnic, multi-ethnic, and minority churches growing rapidly day by day. There is treatment here of immigrant churches as holistic communities, something else most white-western churches have lost. And then the lessons to be learn from second and third generation immigrants, and bi-cultural and tri-cultural people and churches, how this enriches us and equips us to face the demographic shifts of the future, the changing face of both society, and church.

One of the persistent myths of evangelicalism is that it's culture-free, a steadfast holding to a plain reading of the Bible, historic Christian orthodoxy, sound truth, the riches of the Protestant tradition, and so on. That is always, ever, and only a half-truth at best. Today I was listening to an interview with Justo González, a Cuban-American historian and theologian. And he said that he was happy to call his theology Latino theology, as long as we called "normal theology" "white male theology". All theology, and church traditions, are contextual and contextualised. This doesn't reduce them to hopeless subjectivism, but simply recognising this fact is the first step in opening our horizons to engage in the kind of critique that Rah is offering. This is a welcome critique and, as I've said a few times now, a hopeful one. Many, however, will be slow to heed it.