Revisiting Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, 75 Years On

The following address was given at IRD’s Conference on the 75th Anniversary of Carl F. H. Henry’s “Uneasy Conscience” of American Evangelicalism.

As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.’ Luke 19:41-44

In the summer of 2020, several months into Covid and a month or so after George Floyd’s death, I took out a blank page and wrote four anguished, large words at the top: 

CHURCH, WHERE ARE YOU?

A pharmacy was burning down the street from where I live. There were gunshots in our alleyway. I was watching vastly unequal human experiences of this pandemic – some of us enjoying the reprieve from the demands of meritocratically layered social capital, others having to work in frontline capacities, dying, per surname or neighborhood block, in unfathomable proportions. After the lockdown memes faded and real life got more dire, social media, of course, could not respond to this with any degree of poise, but rather became more and more obnoxious, its seductions to peacock one’s own moral rectitude almost laughable were it not for the terrible vacuum of inspired leadership such Instagram sermons were only too eager to fill. It seemed the only people speaking were either mindless conformists or angry protesters – both unhealthy, both unable to resist the gravity of self.

The desperate words on my part – “CHURCH, WHERE ARE YOU?” – were part accusation, part lament, part exasperation, part sincere plea, but also, at its core, an expression of soul-searching of my own responsibilities as a Christian implicated in the seeming invisibility, or worse, perversion, of this grace-giving organ that should be resounding with truth and love.

What or where WAS this organ known as “the church” anymore? Was it even accurate to speak of the church in our American context as a coherent thing? I understood that local churches – my own included – were being gouged of their incarnate lifeblood through government lockdowns, a first in American history and no small wound. But where was creativity beyond simply the pragmatic pivot to survive – most churches opting to convert the Sunday service into a virtual experience to hold congregants’ attention, but barely speaking about corporate sacrifice in service of the larger polity?

I was longing to see moral leadership emanating with cruciform power. I was longing to see connective tissue woven between churches and police departments and social service agencies and businesses locale to locale. But few of these collaborative, common-good stories rose to the surface; only pious punditry did. Where was the ingenious, Christianly original leadership animated by a tradition that hangs everything on Christ’s open wound, and whose mystical body – us, his disciples – are thus empowered to sight and reach the suffering before our secular friends? Was our own storehouse really so useless, dusty from decades of misguided deposits? Was a reduced Gospel all that Americans had come to know?

***

Insofar as evangelicalism has historically been among the more animated movements giving life to what we moderns think of as “the church,” at its best lending dynamism and spiritual empowerment to the laity, with a particular charism for sharing the Message of the Good News of Jesus Christ and honoring the Scriptures as the most authoritative text, reading Carl Henry’s manifesto back in 1947 has helped explain some of my growing disquiet, disappointment, and sense of alienation from the evangelical world. I am not evangelicalism’s foe, but I am, you might say, a rather perplexed graduate that no longer recognizes the character of its alma mater. Certainly not in its morphing from an adjective connoting sincere discipleship after a historical Person to a noun more obsessed with defending abstract ideas and projecting a cultural-political identity.

I don’t see my more recent alienation as a particularly tragic development, although it is sad. It’s natural, humanly speaking, to feel attached to the key vehicles of one’s formation, of the doorways of grace that led to revelation about truth in one’s life, of introduction to a whole new vista of beauty and a different way of living and thinking, to the interior and exterior disciplines required to nourish that life and mind. I am a Wheaton College grad and so grateful for that liberal arts, whole-person education; I came to Christian faith a couple years earlier in the context of an evangelical youth group while attending Phillips Andover, an aggressively secular high school just north of Boston; I would eventually sing in acapella competitions that drew students from fellowship groups like Intervarsity and Campus Crusade, Athletes in Action and The Asian American Christian Fellowship. My grandfather is a Young Life counselor turned Wycliffe Bible translator working for decades in the jungles of Peru, and remained, to the end of his life three years ago, one of the most compelling witnesses to the transforming love of Jesus Christ that I’ve ever known. My grandmother enjoyed some casual dates with Jim Elliott before Jim met Elizabeth, or Betsy, as my grandmother affectionately calls the evangelical heroine, and my parents have been involved in World Vision and World Relief.

The parachurch ecosystem that was American evangelicalism’s great genius from the mid-20^th century to 2000ish, providing the social architecture for largely middle class white kids to be introduced to the life of faith, this vaunted and distinctively American ecosystem is to be credited with shaping my early years as a Christian learning how to relate to and with God, mostly by meeting a diverse array of exemplars through the various institutions. I’ll never not be grateful.

But something’s happened – or perhaps was always there – in the populist strain of American evangelicalism that brings the Apostle Paul’s words to the Corinthians to mind: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

Why is this? Why do I now feel claustrophobic before a structure of evangelical imagination that feels more immature than discerning, more comfort-seeking than God-fearing, more binary than honest, more joyless than vibrant and attune to the Holy Spirit’s movement in our world?

***

A couple of months ago I was on a podcast with an alum of my alma mater – Wheaton – when the host asked me this question:

How do you straddle the line between championing a Christian viewpoint and getting sidelined or dismissed by the other side?

It was a fairly innocent prompt, but somehow its framing reached me like a distant memory, a stale language of boundary-drawing that I’d forgotten could define the foreground of the missiological frame. These days I get to run a beautiful journal of public theology called Comment that is animated, gratefully and explicitly, by 2,000 years of Christian social thought. I think we’re a pretty rooted bunch – Catholic, Anabaptist, Reformed and Black Church streams flowing through our authors’ engagement of the deep trends of our day. There’s evangelical IN there, again as a kind of adjective describing the seriousness with which we take our Lord and his ongoing redemptive work in our world, but I confess it’s been a while since anyone I see as truly Christlike conceives of being a Christian as an Us Vs Them thing. That turf jostle is just not why I get up in the morning. It’s the image of God, rather, the Imago Dei gracing the firmament of every human being has felt so much more primary in my work and discernment. So much more in the foreground, with big implications for how we behave in a pluralist society.

So anyway, I stumbled around a bit, these couple months ago on this podcast, unsure of how to respond to this well-meaning man, and said something that tried to dislodge the battle frame of the question. I don’t know if whatever I said computed to the mental module listening. But it continued to niggle at me, and as I signed off the virtual podcast studio, I sat for a bit and reflected on why I felt so discombobulated. 

Did I just find the question vaguely dehumanizing, like so much else in our politically and culturally contemptuous culture that seems bent on suggesting that some people are enlightened human candles and others are like rudderless mice simply scratching in the dark “on the other side”? There was something there. But I think what may have really been bothering me was the presumption that the sum total of being a Christian is to hold a series of beliefs, a series of beliefs that somehow makes one superior to others who may not share or see the beauty of those beliefs. I was perplexed by the absence of reference to the fact that for beliefs to be credible they must be embodied in ways and means, in formed lives of virtue and self-giving, of luminous alternative communities, of love to the death.

Somehow his question just felt like a succinct snapshot of what American evangelicalism has become, a mere cognitive set of ascents, as in: “just because you believe in these four spiritual laws, how do you stand firm in those statements before those who don’t share the same credo?” This pharisaical understanding of the life of faith felt so tinny, so tediously downstream from the mainstream cancel culture and boundary-drawing that are strangling this young democratic experiment. The question, and my reaction to it, gave me a clearer window into all the millions joining that amorphous category of “spiritual but not religious,” of “n-o-n-e-s.”

Carl Henry’s Uneasy Conscience from 1947 has helped explain so much of our present to me, of American evangelicalism’s pockmarked face. The book helped explain the surprising dearth of Christians in the tippy-top of public scholarship and serious societal conversation. It explained the regionalism of evangelicalism that is as much a quirk of a country as large and diverse as ours as it is a feature with an “ism” that refuses to be flatlined into one expression: New England Christians’ purity of heart amidst a secular context has a very different timbre than southern Californian swashbuckling bravado than Southern propriety than Midwestern Christian radio.

More soberly, Henry’s book helped explain to me why there would wind up being no evangelicals who would join King in Selma, though Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel would come down, and Fr. Ted Hesburgh of Notre Dame, and Union professor Reinhold Niebuhr, and Greek Orthodox archbishop Iakovos, the Methodist Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell, and the Boston Unitarian Rev. James Reeb, who of course died at the hands of two southern white men who, if they were to be representative of their ilk at the time, were likely faithful church-goers. It helps explain to me why our friends in the Church of Latter-Day Saints have become better known for their moral character and deep commitment to and knowledge of FORMATION and PEOPLEHOOD than have evangelicals. It helps explain that settled tightness in the eyes that you sometimes see – manifesting as a kind of saccharine assurance amongst too many American evangelical women, manifesting as a kind of vetting sieve of “in or out” member-bestowing power amongst evangelical men. Come on, I want to say to the squinty eyes that are answering questions no one is asking. Where is true joy and freedom, that joy and freedom that come from having suffered through the brokenness of our human lives and found Jesus with us all the while?

Most damningly, Henry’s warning helped me accept the reality that I feel acutely, namely, American evangelicalism at its most innocent has since become little more than a quirky subculture, and at its worst no less than a bystander – if not a baptizer – of conspiracy theories, demonization of perceived opponents, and political violence. 

Carl Henry warned all the way back in 1947, “unless the evangelical church experiences a rebirth of apostolic commitment, evangelical Christianity “will be reduced either to a tolerated cult status” or become “a despised and oppressed sect” in America within two generations. Have these words not born out, at least at the level of national reputation, political style and cultural contest? Crucially, Carl Henry understood the unsustainability of a spirituality that banks on one individual private YES to the saving grace of Jesus, with little if any awareness of the relationship of that yes to a robustly public, corporate, for-this-world YES. As he wrote with such remarkably clear eyes after the global cataclysm of World War II, “Where once the redemptive gospel was a world-changing message, now it has narrowed to a world-resisting message.”

WHY IS THIS? What is in the DNA of American evangelicalism such that it has a consistently anemic view of the Kingdom of God, a view that rings more of tribal self-preservation than of Eden restored? Where, in American evangelicalism, is a systematic, CONSTRUCTIVE-FOR-THIS-WORLD vision, one that is necessarily born out of contemplative practice, heterogeneous community, and further-up and further-in friendship with the triune God – Father, Son AND Holy Spirit?

I am asking this question to the theologians in this room, the religious historians and the sociologists. I am, after all, a lowly magazine editor and lay cultural observer who picks up patterns, usually journalistically, from the irreducible, ever fascinating and contradictory landscape of today.

But that qualifier confessed, and from my perch on that landscape, I will tell you that like so much else in the American psyche these days, hope is alive and well in incarnate forms, largely at the local level, where people can be more easily be PRESENT to one another, engage in that DWELLING WITH that Jesus did, in their homes, their blocks, the margins, their pews and what those pews compel in their obeisance to the suffering and the invisible the rest of the week. Not all is lost in the “evangelical” witness, though I don’t hear outsiders – maybe with the exception of Nick Kristof – impressed by the sacrifice and long obediences in the same direction ever using the word “evangelical” to describe the community efforts they most admire.

I get to meet these unsung heroes a lot, God seeming to delight in letting my life be chiseled by the cruciform logic in theirs.

I meet them in places like The Other Side Academy, a life training school in Salt Lake City where ex-offenders once chained to their crimes and addictions find in a community of peer-to-peer, radical accountability a reason to be free and a process that transforms their moral compass.

I meet them in Shreveport, Louisiana, a city which, once riven by race and socioeconomic difference, is now a living reincarnation of Jane Addams’ settlement house movement through the catalytic presence of Community Renewal International, an organization as much as a neighborly logic that is cultivating a contagion of care that knows no damper on its creative breather, and whose founder, 74-year old former pastor Mack McCarter reflects back on this healing tapestry with tears pooling in his eyes, saying, “I’m just so grateful I didn’t miss the Kingdom of God. I could have so easily missed it.”

I meet them in Nyack College, now re-named Alliance, a university in Battery Park, New York City draws its students from the hundreds of storefront churches that line the boroughs beyond Manhattan. A school whose scholastic body is made up of 24% black, 24% Asian, 24% Latino, 16% international, 11% white and 1% indigenous students choose not to express fear that a romanticized Christian heritage is losing ground, but rather live into their stories of exile with humility, faith and hospitality, radiating the demands of a beloved community outward to one of the most powerful cities on earth.

I meet them in the Living Hope Wheelchair Association, a Houston-based community organization of immigrants paralyzed by spinal cord injuries who model the way of accompaniment through suffering, drafting the textbook for what our future of responding to disasters justly will require.

I meet in the cross-racial friendship of Dwan Dandridge and Chris Lambert in Detroit, a black man and a white man who are laboring arm in arm to break down barriers and build bridges in a city scarred by decades of racially charged neglect, government control and whiplash, and a whole heck of a lot of earned mistrust towards perceived power.

I meet them at the Oaks Academy in Indianapolis, a classical, Charlotte-Mason-inspired school serving one of the more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse student bodies in the state with a commitment to relationships and beauty as the foundation for all learning & character formation.

I meet them in Jacob’s Ladder in Atlanta, a pioneering school for kids with severe intellectual disabilities whose compromised neural pathways are being rewired by an all-in marriage of science and love.

I meet them in the San Antonio police department, where the model of two hug-a-thug cops named Ernie Stevens and Joe Smarro is shifting a national policing conversation and foregoing norms around how we deal with crises of mental illness and police brutality. 

I meet them in Together Chicago, a longstanding initiative of collective impact weaving together Christian business leaders, pastors, and community, non-profit, civic and government leaders effectively pursuing a more holistic, place-based approach to the intersecting needs of economic development, education, violence reduction, and faith community mobilization.

I meet them in Sea Dog Theater, whose understanding of feasting, welcome, and the dance between the theater and the curiosity required to play a character is disarming the bundling and quick judgment we Americans do so much of today, charting out a path from the stage to the table, from alienation to reconciliation. 

I meet them in Chico, California, where a long-term recovery group propped up after the Camp Fire of November 2018 devastated the nextdoor town of Paradise, is being led by an Episcopalian priest and Westmont grad who never knew his calling to be a physician of relationships and a strategist to rebuild would flower so late in his vocation. He never knew that crisis and displacement would invite him to his annunciation moment.

I meet them in the Block Project in Seattle, which is building environmental sustainable tiny homes for the exploding homeless population post-pandemic. They invite middle-class residents one by one to host a tiny home in their backyard and host a homeless person for up to two years, helping that person recover dignity and a life, thereby triggering an unprecedented wave of reckoning in communities that would rather be gated, but find themselves surprised by joy instead. 

And on and on and on.

These local exemplars, of all races, service sectors and cognitive particularities have quietly unfurled as blooms of the sacred sector, and these sustain my hope.  They appear, to me, as this gorgeous constellation of lily pads that are less likely to be granted status within the evangelical checklists of yesteryear, but are shining with strength as they follow the gathering and scattering motif that the Hebrew Scriptures and then the New Testament carved out as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. “Evangelical” is in their spirit – a high view of Scripture, all-in lives patterned after Jesus and submitted to his Lordship – but I’m not sure that word “evangelical” really captures their logic. Certainly not their promise.

And they DO need some kind of axle to unite them, to cohere them, so that these sparks of light may fly upward into a fresh and identifiable frame that would puncture our political warfare and surprise with joy. An axle I’m playing with these days is Christian humanism, a tradition that goes all the way back to the hours before Christ was crucified when Pilate said, “Ecce homo!” HERE IS THE MAN. In other words, “Here, in Jesus, is the measure of the true human.” All our works – our art, our political economy, our civics, our virtue formation – it’s all meant to form us into the fullest human there ever was – JESUS, with all the mess of being human, the emotions, the embodied limits; and it’s meant to provide the landscape of common life that works itself out through a thick web of institutions where we engage in dialogue and growth with friends and strangers.

It’s a fresh way of understanding discipleship – the replication process whose fruits we see in the countenances of the saints. Evangelicalism just isn’t providing this kind of discipleship anymore, not at scale, and it doesn’t have the coherence or ecclesial strength to provide a protective canopy. Its theologians over the last 150 years have focused more on Christ’s deity, and its lay people have found its sense of WE in secular politics, not the band of brothers we meet in Galilee. I’m interested in how we DEAL with the drama of guilt and grace in our lives, and on the earth we inhabit. That drama can’t happen in some individualized mechanical formula of “he died for my sins.” The Christian life wasn’t invented by lawyers. No it’s a drama that works itself out in fabrics of care and suffering whereby God enters into every square inch, and heals. Link by link. Prayer by prayer.

And, so, I’m ready to attend the funeral of American evangelicalism. Not with glee, and certainly not without gratitude. But I think some careful eulogies would be helpful to us all, reflections that honor the ways in which American evangelicalism contributed beautifully – even powerfully – towards God’s redemptive history in a 19^th and 20^th century context, and whose ripple effects in people and institutions we continue to see today. But I somehow sense it’s time to craft a new wineskin, one whose canon is laced not just with C.S. Lewis, but with Eugene Peterson and Jacques Maritain, Augustine and Dorothy Day, John Paul II and Pope Francis, Olaudah Equiano and Willie James Jennings, James Cone and Howard Thurman, Dallas Willard and Charles Taylor, AB Simpson and J Allen Miller. One whose songs emanate from communities here and worldwide who have suffered yet obeyed, who have sacrificed and worshipped. One whose lives don’t try to transcend the world, and so make misguided decisions WITHIN the world, but rather, from the example of Christ himself, enmesh ourselves more fully in the mess of this world. Searching out perpetual the ways of Emmanuel, God with us.

~END~

Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and oversees its partner project, Breaking Ground. She is the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast and co-editor of Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year, published in January 2022. From 2016 to 2019 she directed The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a program seeking to help foundations and business leaders strengthen “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. Her path-breaking guidebook, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Renewing our Social and Moral Landscape, was published in 2019. Anne is also a 2020 Emerson Fellow, a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, and a Fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, a Houston-based think tank that explores how cities can drive opportunity for the bulk of their citizens. From 2014 to 2017 Anne worked for Laity Lodge and the H.E. Butt Family Foundation in Texas, and before that, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, World Affairs Journal and The New York Times. She has published widely, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, City Journal, and of course Comment, and serves as a trustee for the Center for Public Justice, the Hyde Park Institute, and the Colangelo Carpenter Innovation Center. Anne spent the formative years of her childhood overseas before earning a bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College (IL) and a master’s degree from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.