A Decades-Old Warning for Evangelical Christians is More Relevant Than Ever

Joseph Loconte on January 23, 2023

This article first appeared in National Review.

In the years after the Second World War, an American theologian delivered a dire forecast about the future of Protestant Christianity. Unless the Evangelical church in America grappled with the great social questions of its time, warned Carl F. H. Henry, it “will be reduced either to a tolerated cult status” or become “a despised and oppressed sect” within two generations. That was in 1947.

Henry’s book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published 75 years ago, challenged the Evangelical church to tackle problems such as racism, materialism, economic injustice, and international aggression. Although himself a thoroughgoing Evangelical, Henry had worked as a reporter for the New York Times and got his Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University. He was attuned to the issues that were shaping America’s future — and that demanded, in his view, a Christian response. “There is no room here for a gospel that is indifferent to the needs of the total man nor of the global man.”

For Henry, the post-war years brought those needs into focus. The 1940s saw the start of the civil-rights movement, as African Americans returned home from war to confront racial segregation; massive labor strikes, including a rail strike that triggered the intervention of federal troops; the formation of the United Nations to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”; and, at the international trials at Nuremberg, the startling revelations of Nazi atrocities.

Yet, as Henry observed, American fundamentalism had adopted habits of thought that isolated the Christian message from the central debates of the modern world. The broader Evangelical movement, he warned, was in danger of making the same mistake. He recalled a meeting with more than 100 Evangelical pastors and asking how many of them, in the previous six months, had preached a sermon addressing problems such as “aggressive warfare,” “racial hatred and intolerance,” or “exploitation of labor.” The result: “Not a single hand was raised in response.”

The church of the apostolic age, Henry explained, transformed the culture of pagan Rome because it offered a compelling and aspirational vision of human life. By contrast, he said, modern fundamentalism had reduced the gospel message to one of condemnation: “Whereas once the redemptive gospel was a world-changing message, now it has narrowed to a world-resisting message.”

You can read the rest of the article here. If you are interested in viewing the Carl Henry Conference which inspired this work (and which IRD was proud to host), you can do so here, here, and here.

  1. Comment by Gary Bebop on January 23, 2023 at 1:23 pm

    The evangelical contemporaries of Carl Henry, such as Billy Graham and Francis Schaeffer (but not limited to them), proclaimed a robust gospel. They were not mute or narrow in preaching the historic message. But they also were discerning enough to know that prescriptive social-justice dogmas would distort and corrupt the gospel and send the mission off on false tangents of utopian and despotic campaigns. look at the abyss of error the mainline has fallen into.

  2. Comment by Sigma on January 23, 2023 at 4:31 pm

    This is an excellent commentary on the plight of evangelicalism at this point in our nation’s history. While the comment above mine talks about how the social gospel was the death of the Mainline, that isn’t exactly true. I went to a small Mainline liberal arts college in the 1990s that was social gospel yet still maintained a Christian ethos. What you have to understand about the mainline the are non-discrimatory when in come to science which leaves the door open for pseudo-science to take root in. The acceptance of evolution and now, sexology as valid scientific claims by the churches has secularized them and made them unpalatable to most people seeking to follow Christianity.

  3. Comment by Gary Bebop on January 23, 2023 at 6:12 pm

    Not only has the mainline, yoked with the woke evangelical elite, fallen into an abyss of error, they continue (absurdly) trying to control the historical narrative for the rest of the world.

  4. Comment by Roger on January 25, 2023 at 5:01 pm

    Princeton University, President, Francis L.Patton in 1888, warned Christians, way back then, ” the only hope of Christianity is in the rehabilitating of the Pauline Theology. It is back, back, back to an Incarnate Christ, and the atoning blood or it is on, on and on to atheism and despair. ” The Gospel is 1 Corinthians 15: 1 – 4. Today not many Pastors are preaching this Gospel of Grace. There is a distinct difference in preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of heaven and the Body of Christ, as Paul preaches.

  5. Comment by Salvatore Anthony Luiso on January 31, 2023 at 4:22 am

    I am unable to read the entire article at the website of *National Review*. Therefore I will only comment on the part of it which is published here.

    I heartily agree that the gospel and those who believe in it should have beneficial effects on the world.

    I do not agree that “The church of the apostolic age [. . .] transformed the culture of pagan Rome because it offered a compelling and aspirational vision of human life”. The Apostolic Age ended around the year 100 A.D.. By then, the church had *begun* to transform “the culture of pagan Rome”–but only barely. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but the vision of human life the apostles presented was of one *within* the church and *after* the return of Christ.

    During the Apostolic Age, the Roman Empire also had the problems of “racism, materialism, economic injustice, and international aggression”, or ones similar to them. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but we have almost no evidence that the apostles addressed them insofar as they existed *outside* the church. They were focused on building the church and keeping her healthy and pure, *not* on changing the world outside the church.

    I don’t know whether it’s true that “modern fundamentalism had reduced the gospel message to one of condemnation”, the truths that the world is fallen, is in rebellion against God, and is under the condemnation of God, are parts of Christian doctrine. Depending on how one defines the gospel, they are either explicitly or implicitly proclaimed with the gospel.

    The redemptive gospel is a “world-changing message”, but it is not like a message that a mere social reformer would deliver. It is also a “world-resisting message”.

    Maybe if I could read the entire article, and had read the entire article, I would agree more with its author.


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