My Name Is Warren, and I’m a Recovering Evangelical

I am a man who is very reluctantly and grudgingly, step by step, destroying myself so that this nation and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist. It is not a role I would have chosen for myself. I am merely doing the job as I see it. Someone, some way, had to come along and lift off the lid. Someone had to say, “This is what’s inside.” The man who lifts the lid has to testify just as much against himself as against anyone else.

—Whittaker Chambers in Witness

For most of my Christian life, I have considered myself an evangelical. From the time I made a public profession of faith in Christ at age fourteen and for most of my adult life until now, “evangelical” was a label I gladly wore.

The word evangelical was one I liked because it seemed to transcend secular politics and religious denominations. I could claim kin with other evangelicals in denominations different from my own. I could disagree with someone about welfare reform or tax laws, but we could agree on the power of “Christ and him crucified” to save a lost and dying world, a world that includes you and me.

And being something of an amateur linguist, as most writers congenitally are, I appreciated its etymology. The word evangelical came into common usage only recently (in the twentieth century) and suggests the proclamation of the good news of Jesus. The word angel, which means “messenger,” is at the very heart of the word, and at the very heart of my own vision for my life, as both a writer and a Christian. I wanted to be a messenger of good news.

My book is a partial telling of the story of how and why the American evangelical church became the richest, most powerful religious movement in history, while the country in which this movement took place—the United States—sank ever deeper into moral and spiritual confusion. It is also the story of the relationship between the two, of how, in fact, the rise of the modern evangelical church may actually have caused the confusion we now lament.

Excerpted from A Lovers Quarrel with the Evangelical Church by Warren Smith.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Since World War II, there has been a flowering of evangelical activity and parachurch organizations. But something troubling has happened in spite of this growth – and the political and financial power it has created. Overall church attendance is not growing. America’s high divorce rate is just one of many melancholy cultural indicators. Is it possible that the “evangelical movement” has not been an antidote for this decline, but has actually caused this decline in the health and vigor of the true body of Christ? Using solid research and original interviews with some of America’s leading Christian thinkers, journalist and editor Warren Smith examines the condition of the evangelical movement, offering an assessment of what’s gone wrong as it has grown in power and size – and what must be done if it is to be “salt and light” in a culture in need of redemption.

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