“Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday,” wrote evangelist Franklin Graham in a post on Facebook a week after the January 6 insurrectionist storming of the United States Capitol. For Graham, breaking faith with Trump was to break faith with God. “It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”¹ A year later, former Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore wrote a very different reflection on the insurrection attempt for Christianity Today. He commented on the juxtaposition of “a makeshift gallows constructed to threaten the murder of the vice president of the United States” and “a sign, held above that angry crowd, that read, ‘Jesus Saves.’” The coexistence of these two images in the same riotous mob, he pointed out, was not an anomalous occurrence but reflective of a larger dynamic in American evangelicalism, and thus the images were “the sign not of a post-Christian culture but of a post-Christian Christianity, not of a secularizing society but of a paganizing church.”²

These divergent evangelical interpretations of the religious politics surrounding the events of January 6 represent two sides of an ongoing contest over the boundaries of Christianity. For Graham, allegiance to the policies and values of the Trump administration represents a true faith committed to the tenets of the gospel as he understands it. For Moore, the same allegiance represents a “post-Christian Christianity,” a Christianity that is paradoxically no longer Christian. Moore here uses the term “Christianity” as a sociological category referring to those who identify as Christian, while the adjective “Christian” is a normative category referring to those who are genuinely within the boundaries of the faith. What those precise boundaries are, however, and who gets to determine them, remains unclear, and that ambiguity is at the heart of the matter.

The situation of January 6 is only the starkest example of an increasingly acute problem – namely, how to clarify who is truly Christian in an age where differences proliferate at an even faster rate than (Gordon) Moore’s law. The Trump presidency accelerated and exacerbated these differences. In 2015, for instance, Russell Moore wrote a piece in response to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision to legalize same-gender marriage in which he defined true Christianity in terms of those who hold to “thousands of years of definition of the most foundational unit of society,” which assumes that it makes sense to think of marriage as a transhistorical norm across vastly different historical periods and cultural contexts. In case readers might miss his point, Moore stated that marriage is “bound up with the gospel itself,” so that one’s position on this issue determines whether a person is inside or outside the circle of authentic faith. Christians, he claimed, “must embody a gospel marriage culture,” here joining “gospel” and “marriage” into a single theological agglomerate that one either accepts or rejects in toto. Because American society has rejected this “gospel marriage culture,” true Christians are “strangers and exiles in American culture.”³

At the time Moore wrote this piece, the cultural battle lines were relatively clear: conservative Christians, primarily evangelicals, marched in relative lockstep in support of a cultural agenda defined at least publicly by abortion and marriage. A little more than a year later, however, Trump was in control of the party and new lines were being drawn, with new definitions of who was truly Christian and who was now apostate. While the rapidity with which these boundaries change may reflect our cultural moment, the questions themselves are very old – long predating the rise of the Christian Right.

Eighty years before the apocalyptic fervor of January 6, amid the global apocalyptic anxieties of the Second World War, C. S. Lewis delivered a series of broadcasts on the BBC on what he called “mere Christianity,” a term he used to describe the ecumenical hallway connecting the various rooms that represent the different ecclesial traditions. For Lewis this “mereness” was fundamentally doctrinal in nature; it consisted in a set of beliefs to which all Christians must assent. This set of essential beliefs included the triune nature of God, the creation of human beings with free will, the human need for redemption, the incarnation of God’s Son in Jesus Christ, and the universal moral law that God has established. Lewis’s answer, however, was just one among many proposed during his generation. At the same time Lewis was giving these wartime broadcasts that eventually became Mere Christianity, Germans were beginning to debate Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologizing, first proposed in 1941, which represented a starkly different approach to the essence of Christianity. Whereas Lewis emphasized doctrine, Bultmann emphasized the existential relationship between the individual and God that precedes not only doctrine but all rational and linguistic formulation. Instead of “mere Christianity” – a term that denotes an established religious community – Bultmann spoke of the “kerygma,” which refers to something that is both historically and experientially prior to the explicit emergence of the Christian religion.

Lewis and Bultmann were such galvanizing and polarizing figures that they were often treated as virtuosos isolated from their larger historical context, but like today’s scholars and preachers proclaiming what is or is not genuinely Christian, both were participating in a very old tradition in Christian theology: the tradition of defining the core of Christianity, the essence of the faith. In a way, this tradition is older than Christianity itself, going back to when the Jerusalem Council decided what status gentiles had within the nascent Jesus movement and what gentiles had to do in order to be included within the family of Abraham. Since then, every creed and confessional document, every reform movement, every church schism has been an effort to clarify precisely what is essential to Christian faith – though the rise of modernity, as future chapters will show, has irrevocably transformed this tradition .

In the early centuries of Christianity, the rule of faith (regula fidei) arose as a way of codifying the key points of belief that differentiated Christians from pagans, and over time theological elaboration on these points, combined with political factionalism, resulted in councils and creeds that differentiated the “orthodox” from those who were anathematized as heretics. While the definition of orthodoxy became increasingly complex over the centuries, resulting in more and more fractures and the suppression of movements that demurred from the dominant interpretation, the core tenets of the regula fidei remained intact as a fairly reliable summary of what we might call “basic Christianity.”

All of that changed with the modern period (especially by the late seventeenth century), as new understandings of the world and new views about human knowing resulted in disputes about Christianity’s normative doctrines and texts – indeed about the very notion of normativity itself. Philosophers and theologians across the spectrum embarked on a quest for the essence of Christianity. The result was the proliferation of diverse accounts of what defines a Christian. For some, this gave license to depart from the traditional regula fidei, or at least to interpret the rule in unprecedented ways. For others, modernity was a crisis that had to be managed. The rise of skeptical philosophies, scientific discoveries, and historical criticism led to a conservative reaction, a doubling down on the tradition in an effort to protect the faith from change.

Moments of social crisis – whether a divisive political crisis in the case of Graham and Moore, or a war in the case of Lewis and Bultmann, or the rise of Enlightenment science in the case of modern theology more generally – have a way of posing existential questions of identity. Who belongs? Who does not? Who is an ally and who is an enemy? What is truly important to me, and what is inessential?

The crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. As Trump and the Republican base made masks and vaccines a partisan issue, First Things editor R. R. Reno made the response to the pandemic a mark of religious identity. People concerned with following mask mandates and social distancing guidelines are those who follow the “false god” of trying to prolong “physical life,” while the “true Christians” are those who manifest a calm indifference to illness and death. Reno writes, according to Jason Vickers, as if he is among the shrinking remnant, the “last Christians in America.” ⁴ Similarly, Colorado Republican Congressional representative Lauren Boebert claimed in June 2022 that “the enemy” (meaning Satan) used the pandemic to get Christians to meet virtually rather than in-person, suggesting that true believers are those who resist public health mandates.⁵

While questions about religious identity have been a staple feature of religion in modernity, the explosion of this problem in the public consciousness has occurred at the same time that traditional narratives (e.g., Christian salvation history, American exceptionalism), categories (e.g., gender and sexual binaries), and organizations (e.g., mainline denominations, labor unions, political parties, public universities, arts and culture groups) have been weakened or come under attack, opening space for new understandings of individual and group identity. Questions about identity (who are we? what do we believe?) and boundaries (who belongs?) have become pressing for many people, especially as the institutions that used to provide the answers are increasingly no longer in a position to do so. If we use Avner Greif’s definition of an institution as “a system of rules, beliefs, norms, and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior,” then it makes sense that our current situation of institutional crisis would lead to a quest for clarifying and reinforcing the norms and beliefs that people perceive as being under threat or in need of recovery.⁶

The conservative movement, in both its religious and political manifestations, can be understood as the attempt to (re)construct the system of rules that represent its imagined institutional ideal.⁷ The increased use of religious statements or declarations in recent decades may be seen in part as a response to the weakening of churches and other institutions as the source of religious identity and social norms. Conservative statements – such as the Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation (1975), the Manhattan Declaration (2009), and the Nashville Statement (2017) – are notable for the way they attempt to stake out new boundary markers of orthodoxy around issues about which traditional sources of religious identity, such as the classic confessions of faith, have little or nothing to say, including secularism, abortion, gender roles, sexual identity, and same-gender marriage. These declarations, and the myriad theological and political writings that support them, are efforts to graft such cultural issues onto the traditional rule of faith, in effect jury-rigging an expanded account of Christian orthodoxy in order to leverage the weight of Christian tradition against those deemed outside the bounds of authentic faith .

Operating within these efforts to renegotiate and reinforce the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy is the logic of whiteness and the theopolitics of purity that it demands. Of all the institutions facing crisis, white supremacy is arguably the fundamental institution within Western society, the glue holding the others together – but it is also the one that has come under most sustained attack. A key reason why abortion, gender, and sexuality are the center of conversation today is that, except for isolated pockets, religious leaders across the board acknowledge that white supremacy is morally indefensible as a narrative binding a community together. The philosopher Michael Monahan points out that “whiteness, as a category, demands clear boundaries and distinctions, and when those boundaries and distinctions become fuzzy or indeterminate, something is bound to give way. Either the boundary will shift or the challenge to that boundary will be removed.”⁸ To be sure, there have been and continue to be efforts to remove the challenges to white supremacy, but by and large religious communities have instead shifted the boundary to accommodate the public rejection of whiteness as an explicit governing norm. This shift does not mean that whiteness is not still integral to the entire structure. Whiteness functions precisely as an invisible norm, so that a person ends up “thinking whitely” while thinking, for instance, about the need to evangelize one’s community in order to stem the tide of secularism and restore Christian America.⁹ The constant anxiety over protecting true Christianity – along with related purities, such as true Americanism, true masculinity, and the like – makes sense once it is seen as a manifestation of the anxiety over racial purity, intellectually laundered through whatever new boundary is deemed culturally acceptable and institutionally usable for the purpose of defining authentic religious identity.

Rather than attempt to demonstrate that racial boundary-making is at play in each battleground over true Christianity, this study instead focuses on the underlying logic of orthodoxy itself: the idea that religious identity is true when it strictly upholds a tradition in unbroken continuity with the past. To be sure, Christian orthodoxy was bound up with racial purity from its origins in antisemitism, as John Gager, J. Kameron Carter, Jonathan Boyarin, Magda Teter, and others have documented.¹⁰ That story, however important, is beyond the scope of the one I tell here. The aim of this work is to make sense of today’s disputes over Protestant Christian identity by examining how the boundaries of Christianity have shifted in modernity, especially in recent decades, as conservatives have latched on to new or redefined marks of orthodoxy in an effort to counter modernity and protect their understanding of the truth.

The story of American Protestantism’s right-wing turn – a story that is not limited to American evangelicalism but includes large swaths of mainline Protestantism as well – is one that still needs telling, and this book aims to fulfill part of that need. The primary purpose of this work is to redescribe our current disputes as a contest over the rule, essence, or identity (any term will suffice) of Christianity. Doing so enables us to see how popular religious discourse today regarding what “true Christians” should (or should not) believe and do is a continuation of a much older conversation about what constitutes the genuine rule of faith. Placing today’s disputes in the context of that long history shows that Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, has been struggling for centuries with an identity crisis. While it has roots in the Reformation, the crisis began in earnest with liberal theologians seeking to adjust to the challenges of the Enlightenment, continued with mainline Protestants grappling with modern historical research and new political institutions, and has reached a fever pitch in today’s fractured and rapidly changing society.

The analysis of this crisis has been its own academic cottage industry for a long time. We can divide the conversation along three lines. The first line focuses on the normative question of how to define the group identity of Christianity, what theologians used to call the essence of Christianity. While theologians have been wrestling with this since the second century, Christians since the early Enlightenment have faced the problem under very different historical circumstances, in which choosing what to believe became a real possibility for the masses. The development of liberal democracy drove theologians to ask whether and how orthodoxy was compatible with a democratic society.¹¹ The normative problem became especially acute in the twentieth century, not only because of increasing divisions in the church but also because the world shrank through imperial conquest and technological advancements, forcing global religious diversity to become a pressing concern to those in the West. Responding to Adolf von Harnack’s landmark lectures in 1899–1900 on the essence of Christianity, Ernst Troeltsch wrote a groundbreaking essay in 1903 on the idea of the Christian essence, showing the complexity and ambiguity of the concept. In what may seem self-evident today, Troeltsch recognized that what “for one person belongs in the development of the essence is for another a disruption of the continuity,” and thus every conception of Christianity is “very strongly conditioned by personal attitudes to it in the present and by the consequent conception of its future.”¹² Later scholars, like Hans Wagenhammer and Stephen Sykes, surveyed the history of how monastics, ministers, and theologians have developed their divergent views on the identity of Christianity, showing how disagreement is basic to elite discourse about Christianity, thus raising difficult questions about what it could mean to speak about Christian unity or continuity.¹³ The concept of “identity” itself, as it is used today, is of recent vintage, originating in the postwar psychology of Erik Erikson, as Gerald Izenberg has documented.¹⁴ “Identity” now does most of the work that “essence” did for earlier, mostly European generations of thinkers, and whereas essence-talk was largely restricted to the academic elite, identity-talk has become culturally ubiquitous in the West.

The second line of thought regarding the Christian identity crisis focuses on the broad historical conditions of this question and tends to be carried out by historians, philosophers, and theorists intent on understanding how we got into this position. Much of this literature is concerned with the question of modernity and how the Enlightenment has transformed what it means to have a religious identity. Critical theorists like Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Gil Anidjar have argued that the rise of the nation-state in modernity has brought about a secularism that is not the absence of religion but rather the state’s sovereign power to regulate what it considers true religion, a power governed by what Mahmood calls “the fundamental centrality of Christian norms, values, and sensibilities.”¹⁵ More recently, Jocelyne Cesari has shown that the adoption of the nation-state outside of the West brought with it the secular/religious distinction, but that the relation between religion and nation-state is much more complex than theorists have allowed .¹⁶ Catholic and Anglo-Catholic scholars, such as Alasdair C. MacIntyre, John Milbank, and Brad S. Gregory, have constructed a very different declension narrative, in which modernity – whether the fault of pre-Reformation, Reformation, or later Enlightenment thinkers – brings about the loss of something considered essential, such as medieval metaphysics, natural law ethics, or a vision of society not defined by relativism and secularism.¹⁷ Charles Taylor has left an especially imposing literature on this topic in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, books that provide a genealogy of modernity’s “immanent frame,” characterized by what he calls the interior self’s “buffered identity,” referring to the boundary between the self and the other (including anything supernatural) that makes autonomous life possible.¹⁸ Like Taylor, but in a way less prone to a declension narrative, Ethan Shagan explains in The Birth of Modern Belief how the very idea of belief changed in the wake of the Reformation, as Protestants transformed belief into something arduous and unbearable, in which “true believers … battle their unbelief and ultimately persevere against it.”¹⁹ By burdening people with the weight of belief, the authoritarian project of the Reformation eventually collapsed in on itself, giving rise to the modern account of belief as personal judgment or subjective opinion.

The third line of thought focuses on more recent historical developments in North America, especially mainline Protestantism and American evangelicalism. The literature here is too vast to summarize, but a central question animating much of the work in recent decades is to what extent amorphous movements like evangelicalism can be given a clear definition that demarcates in advance who does and does not belong. Complicating this question is the “observer-participant dilemma,” referring to the danger that comes when historians of evangelicalism are also practicing evangelicals themselves.²⁰ The result has been a tendency toward definitions of evangelicalism that highlight what some want evangelicalism to be – an offshoot of orthodox Protestant Christianity defined by traditional doctrines and practices – as opposed to what it actually is, namely, an apocalyptic offshoot of American culture defined by networks of corporate influence and political power.²¹ Compared to evangelicalism, mainline ecumenical Protestants have attracted far less attention, in part because they have been less ostentatious and were easily overlooked compared to the much more interesting and scandalous story of evangelicalism’s meteoric rise. This has changed in recent years, as historians have begun to examine the role mainline, ecumenical Christians played in the transformation of American culture and politics.²² Most notably for the purposes of this book, David Hollinger, in his recent work on Christianity’s American Fate, explores the often parasitic relationship between the ecumenicals (his term for mainline Protestants) and evangelicals. He points out that evangelicalism “gained standing as a point-by-point response to the modernizing initiatives of ecumenicals,” while mainline liberals “struggled to maintain and clarify their Christian identity,” thus paving the way for liberalism’s decline and conservatism’s ascendancy.²³

These three literatures tend not to talk to one another. One reason for this is that the modern evangelical and liberal Protestant movements have typically not been understood as theological efforts to propose novel definitions of the rule of faith or essence of Christianity. The historical literature certainly examines their theologies, but these theologies are treated in relative isolation from the longer history of modern theology in which they are embedded – a history that requires understanding how the social and philosophical conditions of modernity posed a challenge to Christianity. As different as the likes of Ernst Troeltsch, Charles Taylor, and Kristin Kobes Du Mez are, the present work integrates these literatures by looking at the Christian Right as a reactionary contribution to the theological quest for the identity of Christianity, one that defines this identity in terms of historic Christian culture.²⁴ In other words, the increasing efforts to establish a normative “historic Christianity” in the late twentieth century are not simply continuations of some unchanged Christian identity, but instead they are constructions of a Christian essence no less modern than the liberal counterparts against which they are reacting. Through its project of “militant nostalgia,” the Christian Right anxiously seeks to make Christianity great again – and thereby make America great again – by enforcing a vision of church and society that reflects its imagined version of what Christianity was and so ought to be today.²⁵

To better understand this dynamic, and the difficult questions regarding identity and boundary-making that they raise, I want to (re-)turn to the clearest example of this dilemma in recent years: the fallout from the evangelical support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election and the subsequent debate over whether we can call someone a “fake Christian.”

The Problem of Evangelical Gerrymandering

“It’s an overwhelming number,” observed historian and activist Jemar Tisby, referring to what has become the most cited statistic in recent discussions of religion and politics.²⁶ According to exit polls analyzed by the Pew Research Center, 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election – and again in 2020.²⁷ This partisan alignment of American evangelicals was right in line with, and even higher than, previous elections. Compared to the estimated 68 percent of evangelicals who voted for George W. Bush in 2000, the 78 percent for Bush in 2004, the 74 percent for John McCain in 2008, and the 78 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012, the numbers in 2016 reveal that Trump strengthened rather than disrupted the alliance between evangelicals and the Republican Party.²⁸

The 2016 election numbers elicited a collective outcry for explanation. Trump of course had his gaggle of court evangelicals who flocked to his defense at every turn and championed his cause – witness Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Eric Metaxas. But there were also prominent figures who criticized him, and the court evangelicals themselves demanded an explanation. How was it possible for the same voting bloc that claimed to represent “values voters,” the “moral majority,” and people who were purportedly “pro-life” – how could those same people vote en masse for a man who bragged about sexual assault and was openly and unapologetically racist and xenophobic? The hypocrisy was hardly new, but Trump’s behavior was no longer cloaked in civil religious pieties and democratic rhetoric about American unity and progress. There was no disguising the dissonance. The evangelical allegiance to Trump revealed a stark double-standard and demanded a reckoning .

For those who identified as evangelical but were appalled by the support for Trump, the instinctive reaction was to deny that Trump supporters were true evangelicals. They were “fake Christians.” Numerous posts on social media claimed that supporting Trump disqualified a person from being a Christian. The two were incompatible, like oil and water. The hashtag #FakeChristians was and remains a popular way to denounce evangelical Trump supporters by excluding them from the ranks of Christianity.²⁹ In December 2017, people pointed to a LifeWay Research poll that differentiated between evangelical self-identification and evangelical beliefs. According to their analysis, a quarter of Americans consider themselves evangelical, but less than half (45 percent) of those who self-identify as evangelical strongly agree with “core evangelical beliefs.”³⁰ (More on those beliefs later.) The survey provided ample ammunition for those looking for a way to protect the evangelical label. Who are these Trump-supporting evangelicals? They must be those with weak or unorthodox beliefs, those who have diluted their faith in compromise with the secular world. One problem with that interpretation, however, were the survey data showing that the white evangelicals who were most supportive of Trump also attended church most regularly.³¹

Others took a slightly different tack. Recognizing that Trump supporters were sincere Christians supported by churches led by respected Christian ministers, they did not argue that these people were fake evangelicals but instead that they belonged to a fake evangelicalism. The movement as a whole, rather than individual actors, had gone astray. Evangelicalism had been hijacked by politics. The historian Thomas Kidd is the prime example of this tendency among public evangelical scholars. In his book, Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis, Kidd acknowledges that he is “a #NeverTrump evangelical” who believes “something has gone terribly wrong in much of white evangelical culture,” though he remains “as committed as ever to historic evangelical beliefs and practices.”³² The contemporary “crisis of evangelicalism,” he argues, began in the 1950s when white evangelicals began to align themselves with the Republican Party, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower. Evangelicalism was politicized, thus leading it astray toward the raw pursuit of political power. But this argument alone is not enough for Kidd, because taken at face value it would still call into question anyone’s enduring commitment to evangelicalism today. Kidd does not merely want to call for a renewal of evangelicalism; he also seeks to defend people (like himself) who identify as evangelical. In addition to his historical argument, therefore, Kidd claims “there is a major gap between what much of evangelicalism entails in everyday practice and what evangelicalism appears to be in media coverage,” and he criticizes pollsters and media outlets for ignoring this gap. Even if the public image of evangelicalism has been conflated with white Republican politics, Kidd argues that “evangelicalism in practice remains an ethnically and politically diverse movement” defined by its historic beliefs and practices.³³

But what are these “historic evangelical beliefs and practices”? Kidd defines evangelicalism primarily in terms of the conversion experience of being “born again,” supported by ancillary beliefs in the authority of the Bible as the Word of God and the significance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.³⁴ Kidd’s description thus overlaps with David Bebbington’s well-known four-point definition of evangelicalism, often referred to as the Bebbington Quadrilateral: (1) biblicism (the Bible as the infallible Word of God), (2) crucicentrism (the atoning work of Christ on the cross); (3) conversionism (human beings need to be born again to receive salvation); and (4) activism (faith expresses itself in mission and service).³⁵ Kidd grants greater importance to conversion than Bebbington, but overall there is a lot of similarity. The National Association of Evangelicals uses the Quadrilateral to define what makes someone an evangelical, and it forms the basis for the LifeWay Research survey’s “core evangelical beliefs.”³⁶ Alan Jacobs, formerly Kidd’s colleague at Baylor University before Kidd went to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2022, wrote an article on the latter’s book, elaborating on the historical analysis and offering his own reflections. While acknowledging that “it would be difficult to do much better” than Kidd’s definition, Jacobs also points to Timothy Larsen’s five-point definition of evangelicalism, which Larsen says his colleagues have dubbed the “Larsen Pentagon.”³⁷ Larsen retains Bebbington’s points but adds theological orthodoxy and a historical connection to the Great Awakenings as additional marks of evangelicalism.

Appealing to “historic evangelical beliefs” isolated from the sociocultural context of those beliefs – what we might call prescriptive evangelicalism – ends up doing a lot of rhetorical work. By defining evangelicalism in terms of a handful of core doctrines, Kidd and others can disavow those evangelicals they find distasteful by claiming their beliefs and practices do not line up with “true evangelicalism.”³⁸ The prescribed theological beliefs articulated by the Bebbington Quadrilateral and Larsen Pentagon are abstract, immeasurable qualities that one can redefine at a moment’s notice in response to whatever or whoever the person wielding them finds problematic today. These definitions are “normative, not descriptive,” and thus take historically contested concepts and render them “eternal and ahistorical,” resulting in something “very useful for theological partisans who want to adjudicate who is or is not a ‘real evangelical,’” but useless to anyone seeking to understand historical figures.³⁹ For instance, Larsen’s first point in his definition states that an evangelical is an “orthodox Protestant,” but orthodoxy is one of the most contested terms in Christian history. Even for those who accept that orthodoxy is definable and achievable within history – and I will dispute this in a later chapter – the term has no universally accepted meaning. Like the term “fundamentalist,” which tends to mean, as Alvin Plantinga points out, that “stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine,”⁴⁰ the word “orthodox” generally means “a person whose theological opinions are admirable and correct.” As the historian Timothy Gloege points out, the goalpost-shifting flexibility of these categories allows #NeverTrump evangelicals “to state (or strongly infer) that only unconverted, ‘nominal,’ evangelicals supported Trump,” while Trump-supporting evangelicals use the same categories to argue that their #NeverTrump rivals were not truly converted to the faith, lacking in genuine faithfulness. Claiming that something as broad as holding the Bible to be authoritative counts as evangelical is like “a political scientist defining Republicans as ‘those who take the Constitution seriously.’” Gloege insightfully names this practice of (re)defining formal theological labels to suit one’s purposes “evangelical gerrymandering.”⁴¹

But Kidd and other evangelical apologists are also able to claim that those who share those beliefs and practices, even if they have little to no voice within American evangelicalism, represent the diversity of the movement. By virtue of theological affinity alone, Black, Latinx, Asian (and Asian American), and Majority World Christians – all of whom tend to hold more conservative theological positions – are lumped under the label of “evangelical,” so that evangelicalism now appears to be a global, multiethnic body of Christians who have far less connection to white American culture and Republican politics. Kristin Kobes Du Mez points out that defining evangelicalism in terms of theological convictions means that “racism necessarily diminishes as a defining feature of the movement” and “the significance of American nationalism to evangelical identity diminishes as well.”⁴² Theology allows evangelicals to “defin[e] away their embarrassing spiritual kin,” while at the same time giving the evangelical brand an instant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion makeover.⁴³ But just because white evangelicals want to include their BIPOC theological kin does not mean the feeling is mutual. As a 2015 LifeWay Research survey found, only 25 percent of African Americans who held all four points of evangelical belief identified themselves as evangelicals.⁴⁴

As both tendencies (i.e., exclusion of the bad and inclusion of the good) attest, the biggest problem with theological definitions of evangelicalism – as well as Christianity more generally, or any other religious community – is the way they render the religion or movement under consideration essentially benign and inherently good. No Christian claims to believe a doctrine that is intrinsically and self-evidently harmful, and therefore any reference to toxic Christian behavior must be “fake Christianity,” a departure from the goodness that characterizes “real religion.” The reflexive association of “Christian” with “good” only serves to reinforce what Chrissy Stroop calls “Christian supremacism,” which views Christianity as morally superior and perpetuates Christian privilege – the way white supremacism views white people as superior and perpetuates white privilege.⁴⁵ Given the way all text-based religions involve competing interpretations and often contradictory claims, Stroop rightly argues that “there is no such thing as a singular, timeless ‘pure’ form of any religion,” and thus “we must accept that there are a wide variety of Christian communities with competing theological claims.” ⁴⁶ There is no Christianity; there are only Christianities.

Given the many problems with prescriptive accounts of evangelicalism, like those proposed by Bebbington, Kidd, and Larsen, scholars in the fields of history and sociology have sought alternative definitions of evangelicalism that are historically grounded and, in some cases, empirically testable. They are more interested in descriptive, rather than prescriptive, evangelicalism. As a rule, scholars begin from the conviction that “Christianity is what Christians do in the world,” which shifts the discourse away from what adherents think Christianity ought to be and toward what Christianity actually is in the world.⁴⁷ A definition of a religious community must therefore attend to its cultural formation and historical development, as opposed to a purportedly timeless set of principles. Gloege identifies four criteria for such a definition, applicable to any movement:

1. 1. It should indicate a historical starting point.

2. 2. It should give some idea of why the movement emerged when and where it did.

3. 3. It should identify some recognizable point of continuity.

4. 4. It should accommodate change over time.⁴⁸

By and large, theological definitions fail at all four, including even the third criterion, given the many disagreements over how to define basic theological terms. To his credit, Larsen addresses the first criterion in the second point of his Pentagon when he says that an evangelical “stands in the tradition of the global Christian networks arising from the eighteenth-century revival movements associated with John Wesley and George Whitefield.”⁴⁹ But on its own this statement is a bit like defining a word in terms of its etymology. Locating the meaning of something in its point of origin alone falls prey to the genetic fallacy and gives very little guidance for understanding that term or movement today.

Gloege alternatively proposes defining evangelicalism as “the application of enlightenment ideas about self and society to Protestantism,” which has the virtue of encompassing Larsen’s point about the revivals, while also giving scholars a fixed point that makes sense of origin, continuity, and development.⁵⁰ Gloege’s definition does not dismiss theology entirely, but he refocuses the attention away from the formal doctrinal categories and onto the material content of these doctrines and the sociohistorical context for their formation. Instead of a set of contested theological terms, he identifies a set of historically situated ideas about self and society shaped by the Enlightenment that Protestants embraced in their efforts to reform Christianity and influence society . Du Mez likewise argues that “evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.” Du Mez does not set culture and theology against each other but instead advises readers to “treat the interplay between the two as what ultimately defines evangelicalism.”⁵¹ Such nuanced historical claims may lack the checkbox-simplicity that pollsters and journalists crave, but they have the benefit of accuracy and the capacity to explain religious phenomena. Daniel Silliman takes a simple, empirical approach when he argues that evangelicalism should be understood as a discourse community defined by networks of trust and communication. In short, evangelicalism can be understood best by asking, “Who liked Billy Graham?”⁵² Likewise, Anthea Butler puts the matter much more bluntly when she forcefully counters “the evangelical historians who claim that the 81 percent of evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 aren’t really evangelicals. they are. The historians just wish fervently that they weren’t.”⁵³

Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

The so-called crisis in American evangelicalism exposed by Donald Trump’s presidency was in fact a crisis in our understanding of Christianity as such, one that is hardly unique to this moment in history. The controversy belongs to a much longer conversation regarding who is or is not a “true Christian,” a conversation that arguably goes back to the very origins of the religion but took on special significance in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Over the past 200 years, the issue has exploded as new faiths and new interpretations have proliferated, especially on the soil of the United States. The revivals mentioned by Larsen set in motion an unprecedented religious diversification that continues to reverberate. Today this religious pluralism, including Christian pluralism, is further complicated by stark binary and partisan divisions between liberal and conservative, similar to the way sectional divisions cleaved Christian denominations in the nineteenth-century lead-up to the Civil War. Can one be an evangelical and a social justice warrior? Can one be a Democrat and Roman Catholic? Can one follow Jesus and join the American military? Is a Mormon a Christian? Is Protestantism compatible with Pentecostalism? Questions like these have become part of the daily discourse as people wrestle with questions about identity, norms, and boundaries.

Two camps emerged in the evangelical crisis – one concerned with protecting the normative tradition and another concerned with respecting historical diversity and complexity. Borrowing from the “language wars” over English usage, we can describe these camps as prescriptivism and descriptivism. “A prescriptivist,” according to Henry Hitchings, “dictates how people should speak and write, whereas a descriptivist avoids passing judgements and provides explanation and analysis.”⁵⁴ Translated from linguistics to religion, the labels mean something like the following: a religious prescriptivist decides how people should believe and practice their faith, whereas a religious descriptivist explains and analyzes why people believe and practice what they do. Put another way, a religious prescriptivist defines normative religion, while a religious descriptivist examines lived religion. Ultimately, as David Foster Wallace explored in his essay on the “Usage Wars,” the distinction between the two sides is a political one, reflecting the vexed relationship “between Authority and Democracy,” between tradition and egalitarianism.⁵⁵ Just as democracy, as the will of the people, changes in its policy outcomes as the people change in their political views, so too descriptivism, whether linguistic or religious, means that the language or religion in question changes as the people who use that language alter their practices. In contrast to this, linguistic and religious prescriptivism seeks to preserve the authority and tradition of the “right” way to speak and believe, regardless of what the people are doing .

We can unpack these two positions further. The descriptivist camp argues that “Christianity” is whatever people who describe themselves as Christian do. This camp tends to be populated by journalists and historians, those who understand their role as faithfully recording the behavior of humans in all their peculiarity. Descriptivists may be practicing Christians themselves, but this fact is irrelevant to their work. Indeed, in many cases it would be detrimental to their work if their personal beliefs entered the picture in some way that obviously biased the analysis. In this sense, the descriptivist camp includes those scholars of religion or biblical studies who see themselves primarily as disinterested historians who parse the details of the texts and communities under investigation without regard for their authority and significance to people today. The early Christianity scholar Paula Fredriksen gave classic expression to this descriptive neutrality when she asked whether “a historically constituted Jesus or Paul – or Moses or David or Isaiah or Rabbi Akiva; or Mohammed, for that matter – [is] theologically usable for current communities.” To which she replied: “I do not know. That is up to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologians. I speak here, again, only as a historian – and as only a historian.”⁵⁶

The prescriptivist camp argues instead that “Christianity” is defined by a set of norms regarding what constitutes authentic Christian faith. Christianity is not whatever Christians do but is instead a tradition of belief and practice that has norms and boundaries. A person can deviate from those norms and step outside those boundaries, in which case that person is no longer recognized as participating in the tradition. There are various ways of understanding this relationship between the individual believer and the normative tradition. Kevin Hector speaks of tradition as a process of mutual recognition, in which each person is recognized by others in a community as “going on in the same way” as those before, a phrase he takes from Robert Brandom.⁵⁷ Communal recognition aims to prevent the problem of assuming that one particular interpretation of the tradition is inherently normative, despite the fact there are other equally valid contenders – something Brandom calls the “gerrymandering problem.”⁵⁸ This mutual recognition can develop over time as the tradition is mediated through successive generations and responds to new developments, but it is always possible for someone no longer to be recognizable as “going on in the same way,” in which case such a person is outside the community and outside the tradition. Hector’s is thus a sociohistorical account of prescriptivism that understands the norms as socially mediated and communally determined, rather than as hierarchically imposed from on top, or as given once and for all in some timelessly valid text.

However we understand these norms, and I will come back to these matters later, the point is that prescriptivism can take a variety of forms, and the purpose of this work is to critique some forms in favor of others. What all forms of prescriptivism hold in common is an interest not merely in what Christians have done but in what they should do. The focus of prescriptivists is on normative, rather than purely historical, Christianity. If descriptivists, to borrow Bruce Lincoln’s terminology, analyze “truth-claims” and “regimes of truth,” then prescriptivists speak of “truths” themselves, as understood by their religious community.⁵⁹ Prescriptivists tend to be theologians, philosophers, and religious leaders, those who see themselves tasked with the responsibility of clarifying the norms and boundaries of the tradition and, if necessary, guarding the tradition from distortion, corruption, or misunderstanding.

The divide between the two camps is not only political but also moral. The descriptivist objection to the prescriptivists is that the latter’s normative definitions provide an easy way out of dealing with the violent, abusive, and unjust history of Christian practice. The prescriptivist, as I described above with respect to white evangelicalism, can simply point to the defining norms and claim, “Those people are not true Christians,” or somewhat less fallaciously, “True Christianity does not support those actions.” As Gloege put it so aptly, prescriptivism too often means “never having to say you’re sorry.”⁶⁰ Prescriptivists who use the norms in this way not only avoid any moral responsibility for the tradition, but they also effectively erase the experiences of those they do not like who believe themselves to be authentic representatives of the tradition . The #NeverTrump evangelical may call evangelical participants at a Trump rally “fake Christians,” but those participants certainly think they are Christian, and they more than likely belong to a community that recognizes them as authentically embodying the faith. Denying their experience may be cathartic for the Trump critic, but such a move tries to solve a theological dilemma by committing a moral transgression – not unlike the way a researcher tries to reconcile contradictory data by simply falsifying the results.

The descriptivist challenge to prescriptivism has far-reaching consequences. Many Christians have used (and continue to use) prescriptivism to avoid the hard work of listening to those who have been marginalized and abused by Christians, only to have their stories dismissed because people can explain away what happened as the work of “bad apples” who apparently no longer represent what the religion stands for, as if what a religion “stands for” is so clear cut and self-evident. And the issue is not limited to infractions caused by individuals. History is littered with the radioactive waste of systemic injustices instigated, sustained, and defended by religious piety, including among other things the enslavement and genocide of nonwhite, non-European people, the subjugation of women, and the suppression of LGBTQ persons and experiences. It is impossible to construe such actions as the work of “fake Christians,” as if only the abolitionists were really Christian. (Moreover, this alone would hardly get Christianity out of trouble, since those same abolitionists were often misogynistic or opposed to desegregation and miscegenation.) The attempt to justify those harmful and violent actions by appealing to the change in Christian consensus later, as if future progress retroactively absolves the past of any complicity, is yet another effort to escape reckoning with the damage caused by the Christian tradition – not merely in its misuse but precisely in its proper, intended use.⁶¹ The prescriptivists have much to answer for, and the work to be done is vast in scope.

It is important to note that the descriptivists have also not escaped critique. Some academics have focused their critical perspective on descriptivist scholars of religion, arguing that their purportedly neutral categories smuggle in prescriptivist norms of their own. Anthropologist Susan Harding points out that the modern concept of religion “is as much prescriptive as it is descriptive” in the way it centers theological beliefs and views politics as secular and therefore external to religious practice. According to Harding, this notion of religion is a “gerrymandered concept” that “polices the boundary of what counts as legitimate religion,” viewing certain kinds of religious politicking as authentic and acceptable, while rejecting others as unacceptable.⁶² In other words, gerrymandering is not a problem only for evangelical prescriptivists. L. Benjamin Rolsky goes further and criticizes the way journalists, historians, and sociologists of American religion have analyzed conservative Protestantism through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right,” a narrative that says more about the interpreters than it does about the people being interpreted. In talking about conservative Protestants in essentialist terms as a unified “New Christian Right,” scholars and journalists “have been responsible for producing the very subjects that they are seeking to understand and in some ways discredit.” Rolsky implies that a more genuinely descriptive approach would drop the label of “new” and recognize that people are less ideologically unified than journalists would have us believe.⁶³ The lesson for prescriptivists is to be forthright about one’s norms and not assume any account of prescriptive faith to be self-evident or universally held, much less hide norms under the veneer of descriptive objectivity. Scholars who are also practicing Christians have to be rigorous in carefully delineating when they are speaking descriptively and when they are speaking prescriptively, lest they accidentally confuse the two and run the risk of unwittingly promoting Christian supremacy.⁶⁴

Despite the dangers associated with it, we cannot abandon prescriptivism – nor should we want to. If all we had was descriptivism we would have no grounds for hope, no means by which to steer religion in a more just and peaceful direction. Without prescriptivism, Frederick Douglass would be unable to declare his condemnation of “slaveholding religion” in the appendix to his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. … Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.” If Douglass were speaking descriptively, his statement would be both false and dangerous. His talk about “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ” could be used to ignore how Christianity, particularly in the United States, became an enslaving religion. But Douglass is speaking prescriptively, in terms of what is normative in Christian faith, and these norms allow him to condemn the “Christianity of this land” as a fraudulent misnomer.⁶⁵ We need norms if we are going to create a liberating future. Boundaries are already implied when we speak about injustice. We can neither belong to a tradition nor modify the tradition in emancipatory ways without having some account of what is prescribed. The question is not whether to have a normative Christianity but rather what these norms ought to be and how to interpret them. Articulating those norms – what we might call the rule of faith or the essence of Christianity – does not have to mean believing that they and they alone represent “true Christianity.” By expressing the norms and making them public, we open up a discursive space to discuss, analyze, and interrogate them – and perhaps to discard them altogether in search for new norms that hold more promise for the future.

We also need to think differently about norms themselves. For prescriptive Christianity to avoid causing further damage, it must relinquish the assumption that any norms worthy of the name must be held universally and remain immutable over time. Much of the defensiveness associated with prescriptive Christianity stems from this presupposition. If the norms are seen as timelessly valid, then Christianity is directly identical with its present norms and any attack on those norms is an attack on Christianity itself. It becomes necessary for many at that point to deflect criticism about the harmful consequences of Christianity, or else risk having the entire faith collapse like a house of cards. An extreme example of this is the Protestant evangelical who identifies Christianity with the norm of biblical inerrancy and finds their faith in ruins after encountering historical-critical scholarship. Those who have abandoned evangelicalism often speak about “deconstructing” their faith – a metaphor that indicates how tightly connected the faith was to the set of norms that were prescribed for them. But the need to rethink what normativity means in Christianity is hardly unique to those leaving evangelicalism; it is a task for any Christian who seeks to make their norms accountable to the weight of historical trauma.

Many Christians, however, including many evangelicals, have not felt the moral weight of the past or the need to rethink what it means to adhere to a normative, prescriptive Christianity. Indeed, they have felt just the opposite. For them, the very cultural changes that have, among other things, brought these historical injustices and inequities to light pose a threat to Christianity and demand the fortification of its norms. Prescriptivism has become more than a way to ensure the continuity of tradition; now it often serves to recover and reinforce a lost cultural identity. Prescriptivism, for many, has become a way to make Christianity great again.

Christian Prescriptivism in an Age of Anxiety

The Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) is known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning long poem, The Age of Anxiety. Written in the waning months of the Second World War, the work is a drama starring four characters dealing with the anxieties of wartime and a rapidly changing world. Over the course of a long night of drinking and sex, they wrestle with these anxieties – the horror of necessity and the boredom of freedom – before being “reclaimed by the actual world” and forced to face “another long day of servitude to wilful authority and blind accident.”⁶⁶ This was hardly the first or the last time Auden explored the anxieties provoked by the modern world. He concluded his earlier Christmas oratorio, “For the Time Being,” with a chorus to the Christ child that tells the audience: “Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety.”⁶⁷ An earlier chorus in the same poem hymned Caesar as the great conqueror of seven kingdoms, those being the kingdoms of Abstract Idea, Natural Cause, Infinite Number, Credit Exchange, Inorganic Giants, Organic Dwarfs, and Popular Soul – these referring, respectively, to philosophy, natural science, mathematics, economics, industry, pharmaceuticals, and propaganda. Christ is here praised as the one who overcomes the ills of modernity and brings us “to a great city that has expected your return for years.”⁶⁸

Arguably Auden’s most powerful articulation of the relation between religion and modern society is the 1954 poem, “Horae Canonicae,” structured around the canonical hours of the divine office. The section on “Vespers” is a prose poem exploring the tension between two impulses in modernity: the one seeking a return to Eden, the other pining for New Jerusalem. This is the conflict between arcadia and utopia, between restoration and advancement, between conservatism and progressivism. The speaker, who expresses nostalgia for an Edenic past, eventually comes to realize that both he and his utopian counterpart have a shared point of contact. Both visions of society depend on a “victim,” a blood sacrifice “on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy are alike founded: / For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.”⁶⁹

Auden gives voice here to those – encompassing everyone from sophisticated Christian humanists to the most authoritarian Christian theonomists, including evangelical Reconstructionists and Catholic integralists – who believe that society, at least any society worthy of the name, depends on the foundation of religion. Like most Euro-Americans, Auden has been so thoroughly shaped by the idea and practice of Christian culture that he cannot imagine a society that does not have its basis in religion, and central to the anxiety he diagnoses in his poetry stems from the apparent loss of this religious ground. The war is symbolic and illustrative of the ideological and cultural conflict between modern secularity and the premodern synthesis of church and empire. It is this cultural war between secularism and what we might call cultural theocracy – whether in the soft form that privileges religious liberty over civil rights or in the hard form of religious dominionism and religious nationalism – that come to expression in Auden’s poetry. Secularism brings with it the “Kingdom of Anxiety,” along with the other kingdoms of science, technology, and mass media propaganda (i.e., “fake news”) – kingdoms that cannot safely stand because they lack the religious “cement” to hold them together. For those who share Auden’s anxiety about modernity, the only solution is to make religion normative for society.

Apparently, any religion is better than no religion at all. While “Horae Canonicae,” like Auden’s other work, is suffused with Christian symbolism and references, the specific line in question suggests that any mythic act of redemptive violence will suffice, whether Abel at the hands of Cain or Remus at the hands of Romulus, though the qualification “it must be human” evokes Anselm of Canterbury’s argument in Cur Deus homo for why God had to become human in Christ. The indifference to which myth or religion people adhere brings into relief the importance of violence – the belief that a “cement of blood” from an innocent person is what society requires. Nature is “red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, and apparently only a shared scapegoat can assuage humanity’s bloodthirsty tendencies and provide the ground for human coexistence. With chilling candor, Auden articulates the underlying conviction of those who lament the loss of Christian civilization and the end of medieval Christendom. Given the violent logic at the heart of Christendom, it is no surprise that cultural theocratists would not blanch at imposing the normativity of religion upon modern society, no matter how at odds with democratic pluralism that may be.

Auden is just one voice among many, albeit an especially eloquent one. Like many of his wartime contemporaries, including C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Jacques Maritain, and T. S. Eliot, Auden was deeply concerned about the loss of the mythical imagination and its replacement by a cold, modern, technocratic liberalism. More conservative voices in the early twentieth century, like J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary before founding Westminster Theological Seminary, were less culturally omnivorous and mythically universalist in their thinking. For them, a mythopoeic classical theism was woefully inadequate; it was either their sectarian brand of Christian orthodoxy or the highway – specifically the highway to hell and damnation. Machen and other fundamentalist culture warriors were not willing to embrace Abel or Remus as effective blood sacrifices. It had to be Jesus, and it had to be interpreted according to the dictates of Westminster Calvinism. But while the content of the religion in question was quite different, the overall atmosphere of conflict between religion and modernity remained consistent across these theological and ecclesial divides. Machen and the fundamentalist Presbyterians who announced their five “essential doctrines” in 1910 – as well as those associated with the publication of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910–1915) – have attracted a significant amount of attention from historians for laying the groundwork for postwar evangelicalism and the fusionist political alliance that formed what is often called the New Christian Right . But their “revolt against modernity,” as historian Richard Hofstadter famously described the anti-intellectualism of Machen, Billy Sunday, Carl McIntire, and William Jennings Bryan, was only one piece of a much larger revolt that involved even those so-called modernists that Machen rejected as godless liberals.⁷⁰

The wartime anxiety experienced by Auden and others of his generation was part of a long cycle of reactions to the changes wrought by the scientific, philosophical, and industrial revolutions that characterized the modern period. In the generations before Auden, similar anxieties produced analogous reactions and feverish attempts to restore order and security both to the body and body politic. As the literature scholar Justine Murison has argued in her work on anxiety in the nineteenth century, “nervousness characterized the basic psychological assumption of the century.” People at the time understood both body and mind to be “shaped by the social and physical environment” and thus “vulnerable to the political climate and the social world.” Anxiety was both “somatic and cultural, or, more accurately, somatic because cultural.” The cultural changes creating this anxiety, according to Murison, included growing urbanization, new technology, Jacksonian democracy, and the increasingly tense relations between genders, races, and classes. People were anxious to protect the soul from social disease, and that meant restoring the cultural order that they considered to be healthy.⁷¹

In addition to (and closely connected with) the sociopolitical sources of anxiety, Christian ministers and theologians were concerned about the threats posed by historical challenges to the trustworthiness of the Bible and church doctrine. Princeton Theological Seminary professors Archibald A. Hodge (1823–1886) and Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921) articulated the modern doctrine of biblical infallibility in an 1881 issue of the Presbyterian Review, in which they defended infallibility against “modern criticism” in light of apparent conflicts “with the present teachings of science, with facts of history, or with other statements of the sacred books themselves.”⁷² But it was more than an effort to secure the Bible in the face of new scientific discoveries. They also understood biblical revelation to include moral and spiritual truths that have held sway “over the noblest men, and over nations and races for centuries,” suggesting that the loss of biblical authority would result in moral anarchy.⁷³

Indeed, the immediately following article in the Presbyterian Review was titled, “The Prevalent Confusion; and, the Attitude of Christian Faith,” written by Ransom Bethune Welch (1824–1890), a professor of theology at Auburn Theological Seminary and previously professor at Union College in New York.⁷⁴ After reviewing the tenets of orthodoxy, including the “paramount and essential doctrine of Scripture,” Welch launched into the following list of the manifest social disorders and anxieties of the time: “anarchy, which reigns supreme in Church and State and social life”; “a tidal wave” of social changes; “widely diffused infidelity”; “a chaos of plans, nostrums, and watch-cries” in the political world; “strife between labor and capital” leading to “open and bitter hostility”; and a general “restlessness.” All of this “social, civil, and moral” confusion, Welch says, raises the question “whether Christian Faith has lost or is losing its regulative power.”⁷⁵ Welch then diagnoses the causes of this confusion. These include immigration and the growing “intercommunication” among culturally diverse people, the advancements of natural science (what he calls “physicalism”), the “emasculation” of morality due to the rise of unbelief and secularism, rapidly growing skepticism, and the spread of socialism and communism. This loss of social harmony and civil order “teems with Communism and Socialism, and matures at last in Nihilism.”⁷⁶ If any of this sounds familiar, it is because these same anxieties and their proposed sources were repeated constantly in subsequent decades by conservative Christians nervous about cultural changes.

Welch’s solution to this social confusion is also familiar – namely, the restoration of the infallible scriptures as the basis not only for true religion, but also for a properly ordered society. In an impassioned appeal for what we might call hyper-prescriptivism, Welch argues that the world needs “the true, true Christian faith, true science, reason, conscience, true religion. These will prove regulative. Thus shall we move toward order, instead of confusion.”⁷⁷ He goes on to explain that this “true, true Christian faith” ought to have social dominance. True Christianity, he claims, will “win and conquer” society through “its overcoming power” and by demonstrating “its right to supremacy.” Christian supremacy, according to Welch, goes hand in hand with “the progress of civilization” and brings about “law and order.” Making the case for more missionary activity, Welch says that the Christian faith invites people to observe “the steady conquests of Christianity” and to observe Christianity’s “permanent hold upon the civilized world, the more vigorous as the more civilized.” With triumphalist optimism, he declares that “Christian civilization is everywhere advancing.”⁷⁸ The theocratic imperialism evinced in this essay was not an accident. In a piece written in 1873, Welch declared that God’s word establishes the “theocracy of mind,” referring to morality and social order, corresponding to the “theocracy of matter” that God already has over the cosmos.⁷⁹ For Welch it was incumbent upon committed Christians to take control of the wider culture and conquer the world in the name of Christ. It would be hard to conceive a more brazen call for Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy.

Welch’s piece, and its juxtaposition with the famous article on biblical inspiration, is instructive for the way it highlights the connection between theological prescriptivism and social prescriptivism: true Christianity is often wed to a vision of the proper society. As Welch put it so clearly, the more Christian a society is, the more civilized. Welch was hardly unique for his time. In 1899, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Wallace Radcliffe (1842–1930), published a piece in The Assembly Herald, the mouthpiece of the General Assembly to the whole denomination, entitled “Presbyterian Imperialism.” Radcliffe was here writing in response to the imperial conquest of the Philippines by the United States, an event that he saw as a great opportunity for the church. According to Radcliffe, “imperialism is in the air” but now has “better intentions,” because under American leadership “it is imperialism, not for domination, but for civilization.” Radcliffe is anxious about the waning power and energy of the church. He is concerned that Christians have become lax in their missionary endeavors. He criticizes Presbyterians for not being more imperialistic, even though “Presbyterianism is imperial in its history and spirit,” and suggests that the church ought to imitate the nation “if Presbyterianism is to enter into its imperial inheritance.” The nation, he claims, is fulfilling God’s mission more faithfully than the church. For this reason, “the Church must go where America goes.” If it does, then it will fulfill its commission by God to bring freedom to humanity, for “the imperialism of the Gospel is the emancipation of humanity.”⁸⁰

Examples like that of Welch and Radcliffe could be multiplied over and over. These were not fringe positions. Welch was a celebrated professor and had a book of remembrances published upon his death. Radcliffe was not only the Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, but for twenty-seven years he was also the pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, where Abraham Lincoln faithfully attended during the years he was in the White House.⁸¹ If these were the mainstream Christian positions proclaimed in mainline Protestant pulpits and classrooms, one can only imagine what this means for the wider population. And it is no surprise that the rapid and wholesale transformation of society brought about by the world wars would inflame these anxieties. Each generation has had its anxieties, its reasons for lamenting the loss of tradition and the need to recover a purportedly more authentic account of prescriptive faith. For the purposes of this book, which focuses on the postliberal conservative turn in the late twentieth century, I am concerned especially with the anxieties inflamed by the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, as the feminist and gay liberation movements, along with the entire sexual revolution, posed a direct threat to the gender and sexual norms of religious conservatives.⁸² The civil rights movement and the civil rights legislation passed by the Johnson administration posed a threat to the white supremacy and racial purity that many saw as divinely ordained. For those already primed to see a conflict between religion and modernity, the transformations of society in the 1960s and beyond – with its challenge to the hegemony of white cisheteronormative patriarchy – only confirmed their deepest fears. This was the apparent fruit of abandoning religion as the foundation of civilization. Auden’s “secular wall” was no longer standing; it was now openly crumbling, according to Christian culture warriors. Something had to be done.

Much of the blame was placed on those who seemed to undermine the authority of the Bible and the supremacy of Christianity. On the moderate side, the dialectical theology of Karl Barth (at the time often called “neoorthodoxy”) started to make inroads into American Protestant seminaries in the mid-twentieth century. Princeton Theological Seminary, once the home of Protestant fundamentalism, began openly espousing Barth’s approach to Reformed theology in the 1930s, and Geoffrey Bromiley, one of the cotranslators of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, began teaching at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in 1958. Conservative mainline Protestants and moderate evangelicals were initially some of the most receptive to Barth’s theology, since mainline seminaries were influenced more by the likes of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and as I show in Chapters 2 and 3, Barth’s influence in the United States also laid a key foundation for the postliberal reaction that empowered the conservative movement. More radical elements began to form in the postwar years. The 1950s saw the arrival of Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologizing to the shores of the United States, beginning with Bultmann’s visit in 1951 and followed by the publication in 1953 and 1962, respectively, of the two volumes of Kerygma and Myth – the English translations of the main essays from the German debate over demythologizing.⁸³ By 1964, Time could claim that “Dr. Rudolf Bultmann’s Marburg Disciples … dominate German theology the way the Russians rule chess.”⁸⁴ At the same time, there was growing interest throughout the 1960s in secular, religionless, and even atheist Christianity, marked by the popularity of books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, Bishop John A. T. Robinson, Harvey Cox, and Thomas Altizer.⁸⁵ It was only to be expected that the forces of conservative reaction would connect these challenges to biblical authority and Christian tradition with the cultural changes in society at large.

The frantic attempts to restore order that followed were predictable. The solution on all sides was a more robust prescriptivism. For evangelicals, the answer lay in the Bible. In 1976, while he was editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell (1913–1998) published his broadside, The Battle for the Bible, which warned of a coming confrontation between “true Christians” who held to the complete inerrancy of the Bible in all matters and those Christians In Name Only who had been influenced by what he considered liberal and neoorthodox views about the Bible as a fallible human witness to revelation.⁸⁶ Lindsell leveled a direct attack on evangelical institutions, such as Fuller Seminary, that he believed were slipping into heresy, due to the presence of the likes of Bromiley. The following year, inspired by Lindsell’s call to arms, evangelical leaders such as Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul, J. I. Packer, and Norman Geisler formed the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. This led to the widely publicized Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in October 1978.

Evangelicals were not the only ones who were interested in the Bible. Mainline Protestant theologians were also invested in the topic, with Hans Frei publishing his landmark Eclipse of Biblical Narrative in 1974 and David Kelsey’s The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology appearing in 1975.⁸⁷ The signal difference between the evangelicals and what would come to be known as the postliberals – referring to the group of mainline Protestants who publicly disavowed liberalism, both theological and political, in favor of what they considered a more traditional, antimodern Christianity – came down to the question of interpretation.⁸⁸ The evangelicals were convinced the Bible’s true meaning was self-evidently clear to any individual who read it plainly and faithfully. The postliberals, by contrast, believed that interpretation required participating in a community and tradition of biblical exegesis. This led the postliberals to engage in ecumenical conversation across denominational barriers, and it also led them to situate the question of prescriptivism within the doctrine of the church.

The interest of the postliberals in ecumenical dialogue illuminated a fundamental insight: exegesis alone was not the reason for theological divisions between traditions and denominations, nor would exegesis be able to bring people together. Differences in doctrine were not a matter of disagreements about the biblical anthology but rather reflected the different cultural contexts for reading these texts. In other words, culture, not the Bible, was the solution. George Lindbeck’s landmark 1984 book, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, reshaped the conversation about normativity by viewing religious norms as cultural norms.⁸⁹ Writing against both conservatives who viewed doctrines as propositional statements corresponding to an objective, metaphysical reality and liberals who viewed doctrines as expressive statements articulating subjective experience, Lindbeck argued that doctrines are cultural statements that regulate the practices of a community. Doctrines are the grammar of religious performance, and like any grammar, doctrines can only be understood by those within the cultural community who “speak” the religious language. Lindbeck rejected the effort to engage in apologetics and instead advised people to focus on their own internal cultural norms. Framed as an intervention in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, the book’s argument aimed to prevent proselytism and increase respect for different traditions .

Lindbeck’s key innovation, the one that would have long-term implications for Christian prescriptivism, was to relocate the normativity of Christianity from a set of theological propositions – the traditional creedal rule of faith – to a cultural framework, something more like a language. Whereas the old regula fidei meant that Christian norms could, in theory, inhabit any cultural context once the creedal propositions were translated from one linguistic culture to another, the new postliberal model ruled out any translation from the start. You can translate German words into English words, but you cannot translate the German language into the English language without losing the German language. A language ceases to exist when people stop speaking it. But this was where Lindbeck’s own anxieties began to quickly manifest themselves. Once Christianity becomes a culture, in which its norms are identical with its cultural identity, anything that threatens this cultural-linguistic framework becomes a threat to Christianity itself, and the principal threat, as he saw it, was “anti-religious secularism.” His work respected the diversity of religious traditions, but he had no respect for those who rejected religion altogether. In his later work he described Christianity as an untranslatable worldview (Weltanschauung) that “purports to provide a totally comprehensive framework, a universal perspective,” and for this reason is caught in a struggle with secularism, which likewise claims universality. “No reconciliation is possible between the secular and biblical outlooks thus understood,” he argued. Both are “untranslatable and competitive,” caught in a battle for supremacy.⁹⁰

In an autobiographical piece published in 1990, Lindbeck acknowledged that his experience growing up in China “laid the groundwork for a disenchantment with Christendom that led me 30 years later to hope for the end of cultural Christianity.”⁹¹ But later in this article he notes that his mind has changed: “I once welcomed the passing of Christendom … but now … I am having uncomfortable second thoughts.” The reason he gives is that “traditionally Christian lands when stripped of their historic faith are worse than others. They become unworkable or demonic.” He claims that “the Christianization of culture” may be “the churches’ major contribution.”⁹² While expressed in a more sophisticated way, Lindbeck’s claim that Christianity makes a society better than non-Christian societies is essentially identical with Welch’s claim that “the more Christian, the more civilized,” or Radcliffe’s notion that Christianity’s imperialism is beneficial and civilizing. If a Christian society is superior, then the Christian has a moral obligation to bring the rest of the world under the benevolent rule of Christian norms. Lindbeck articulated the logic behind this imperialistic move in his account of biblical interpretation, articulated most clearly in a lecture given in 1995 at the annual Wheaton Theology Conference held at Wheaton College, the self-styled “Harvard of evangelicalism.”⁹³ If Christian norms are cultural, then the interpretation of scripture, according to Lindbeck, involves the “social construction of reality.”⁹⁴ And since the Bible provides a “totally comprehensive framework,” any interpretation of the Bible ought to be a universal culture, one that encompasses all people within its totalizing worldview. Put simply, “the biblical world absorbs all other worlds,” and once we realize that the biblical world is the cultural framework of the church, it follows that biblical interpretation is properly the construction of an ecclesial society – namely, Christendom.⁹⁵

If an actual Christian society is no longer possible, then the answer lies in retreating into sectarian communities where Christians can nurture the virtues and practices that characterize their distinct culture. Christians, according to Lindbeck, “must become, sociologically speaking, sectarian.”⁹⁶ Such a message was quite at odds with mainline liberal Protestantism, and those who championed this countercultural message attracted significant media attention. Stanley Hauerwas became, for a time, the most famous theologian in the United States by denouncing modern secular society and calling people to form intentional Christian communities. More recently, Rod Dreher has assumed that mantle in his proposal for a so-called Benedict Option. For many mainline Protestants attracted to Lindbeck’s way of thinking, the more straightforward response was to join the Roman Catholic Church, or in the case of Radical Orthodoxy, to argue for a renewed Anglican Communion that could engage in a similar effort at totalizing social construction.

The message landed somewhat differently for Lindbeck’s evangelical audience. By the mid-1990s, American evangelicals, who had already developed their own subculture, were in retreat from the wider society. Evangelicals already imagined themselves as a sectarian community, a persecuted countercultural minority, even if their actual lives did not look much different from their neighbors.⁹⁷ The efforts by the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, and other groups in the late 1970s and 1980s had brought Ronald Reagan into the presidency, but the results were often disappointing in terms of the hot-button culture-war issues, and with the election of Bill Clinton it seemed like their best days were in the past. Moreover, it had become clear in the wake of the “battle for the Bible” that inerrancy solved nothing, much to the chagrin of evangelical leaders who assumed the meaning of the text would be obvious to all who read it faithfully. Merely holding to biblical authority and infallibility gave no guidance to interpretation.⁹⁸ After years of scorning the field of hermeneutics as “liberal,” evangelicals rushed to catch up to the wider scholarly world. If merely reading the plain text of scripture was insufficient, what tools were available to guide interpretation in what they considered to be the right direction?

The answer, according to Lindbeck and the postliberals, was the church. This message arrived at just the right time. The 1980s had seen the rise of corporate, megachurch evangelicalism with its emphasis on parachurch organizations. As David Wells observes, “evangelicals began to think of the whole of evangelical faith in para terms,” and thus “evangelicalism began to think of itself apart from the church.”⁹⁹ Lindbeck, by contrast, gave evangelicals a way to connect the Bible to the culture wars in a more theologically nuanced and academically respectable way via the sectarian, culturally distinct church. Instead of naively assuming that Billy Graham-style evangelism would change the culture, on the assumption that all born-again Christians would weaponize the handful of verses in the same political way, evangelicals came to understand that they first had to convert the culture. Cultural absorption and political power, rather than classic apologetics and evangelical crusades, became the solution to the problem of modern Christian anxiety. Lindbeck spoke more truly than he knew when, at the Wheaton Theology Conference, he commented in a closing panel discussion that, “if the sort of research program represented by postliberalism has a real future as a communal enterprise for the church, it’s more likely to be carried on by evangelicals than anyone else.”¹⁰⁰ The statement was prophetic. Whether consciously or not, evangelicals embraced the postliberal emphasis on the church as a distinct culture, a sectarian polis whose alternative way of life would be the starting point for widespread social transformation. Evangelicals began to embrace ecclesiology in a way they never had . Books and articles on the evangelical doctrine of the church began to appear. In 2004, the Wheaton Theology Conference held its conference on “evangelical ecclesiology.” And in 2015, just before the “crisis” that emerged the following year, Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Daniel J. Treier, two leading evangelical theologians, blamed the fractures in evangelical identity on “the evangelical failure to address ecclesiology” and proposed to solve these fractures by establishing scripture and “the catholic tradition” (along with “ecclesial authority”) as the twin principles of evangelical theology, something that would have been unthinkable even a generation earlier.¹⁰¹

Lindbeck’s turn to the church – a distinctively cultural account of the church – was only part of the answer, but Lindbeck and his postliberal allies also pointed the way toward the second key piece of the prescriptivist puzzle. As evangelicals became convinced that merely believing in Jesus and trusting the Bible were inadequate, they became increasingly open to the idea that understanding church history, and not merely biblical studies, was essential to informing their newly cultural view of Christian faith. For a long time, evangelicals reveled in their status as “Bible-only” believers and disparaged creeds and confessions as the mark of Roman Catholics and liberal Protestants, both of whom, they claimed, made human traditions authoritative over or alongside the Bible. Now that sola scriptura was understood to be inadequate, these same traditions took on a more positive significance precisely because they were no longer merely human but were instead part of the cultural framework that defined what they regarded as the orthodox worldview. Despite being children of the modern world, evangelicals increasingly came to see modernity as the source of all the cultural anxieties they had previously sought to oppose on strictly biblicist grounds. The idea of grounding Christian normativity in a premodern cultural framework looked like the answer for which they had been searching.

The idea was not wholly novel. In May 1977, the year before the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a group of evangelicals issued “The Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals.” In this document, wholly overshadowed by the publicity surrounding the “battle for the Bible,” a group of evangelicals called fellow evangelicals to recover “historic Christianity,” a term used five times in the document.¹⁰² The group of forty-five who crafted the statement, including the likes of Robert Webber and Peter Gillchrist, were a distinct minority at the time. This was not long after Newsweek had declared 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical,” and there was little felt need at the time for such a drastic rethinking of evangelicalism. The situation was very different, however, near the turn of the millennium.¹⁰³ The need for a more nuanced and historically grounded identity was apparent to many. And once evangelicals made the turn to the cultural church along with the postliberals, all barriers to ancient Christianity fell away. In place of the “Bible alone,” evangelicals began to champion the rule of faith as the guide to Christian prescriptivism. By 2008, Christianity Today’s cover story read: “The Future Lies in the Past.”¹⁰⁴

The rule of faith within this new postliberal framework was more than simply the ancient protoorthodox beliefs that formed the basis for ancient liturgical practices and creedal statements. Now it represented the ecclesial grammar of the Christian language, the cultural norms that constitute Christianity and determine its social embodiment. R. R. Reno – who considers Lindbeck “the most significant influence on my intellectual life”¹⁰⁵ and began graduate work at Yale the year Lindbeck published The Nature of Doctrine – connects the regula fidei to “the Nicene tradition,” “the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed,” “ancient baptismal affirmations of faith,” “the Chalcedonian definition,” and “the creeds and canons of other church councils.” But as if in response to the objection that these do not provide us with a clear definitive list of doctrinal rules, Reno responds in a classic Lindbeckian way that this is precisely the point. The rule of faith is not “limited to a specific set of words, sentences, and creeds. It is instead a pervasive habit of thought, the animating culture of the church in its intellectual aspect.” ¹⁰⁶ Such ideas would have seemed threatening to evangelicals a generation ago, but in a time of deep uneasiness with the prevailing culture, the idea of returning to some premodern golden age – making Christianity great again – was and still is deeply attractive.

My aim here is not to provide a history of evangelicalism or to further explain how evangelicals could have voted in such overwhelming numbers for Trump, though their agitated responses to the age of anxiety no doubt contributed significantly to this result. My interest in this book is not with evangelicals as such but with the question of Christian identity. Evangelicals happen to make a useful case study because of the persistent sense of identity crisis that pervades evangelicalism in the United States. Chris Armstrong has claimed that “the 1970s marked the beginning – or at least intensification – of an evangelical identity crisis from which we have yet to emerge.”¹⁰⁷ To be sure, it was only the intensification. The likes of Welch and Radcliffe laid the foundation for the fundamentalist movement in the twentieth century out of which contemporary evangelicalism arose. And there were many others before them.

Every generation has had its age of anxiety, and every generation has had its prescriptivist reactionaries seeking to define “true Christianity” in response to some new threat, whether threats from within (e.g., nominal Christianity, creeping heterodoxy, political and ethical deterioration) or threats from without (e.g., modern liberalism, communism, anti-religious secularism). Every such effort has involved clarifying, implicitly or explicitly, what constitutes Christian normativity and thus who counts as Christian. The term “rule of faith,” as I use it here, refers to this prescriptivist rubric for shoring up Christian identity. While it has a certain historical definition connected to the first and second centuries of Christianity, it has become something more than that – a symbol for whatever will address the current sources of anxiety. In this book I examine the history of this quest for a normative, ruled Christianity, the problems with many of the accounts of this rule, and some ways we might rethink the rule so as to avoid the pitfalls that bedevil so much prescriptivism. We cannot abandon prescriptivism, but we might, just possibly, be able to redeem it.

Rethinking the Rule of Faith

In this book I wrestle with questions concerning who and what counts as Christian and why. If we strip away everything unnecessary to Christianity, what are we left with? What is the enduring core, the permanent essence at the heart of the faith? Is it even possible to strip away the inessentials to find an essence of Christianity at all, or is Christianity simply the irreducible complexity of the forms in which it occurs throughout history? Is there a normative Christianity, or is Christianity merely whatever self-described Christians say and do? And if there is a normative Christianity, how should we understand the norms in a way that will not reproduce the protectionism and imperialism that have characterized so much of Christian prescriptivism?

As we have already seen, these questions have been asked anew by many generations of Christians, and they will continue to arise in the future, as new anxieties confront us. Those who champion the regula fidei as the solution to these religious anxieties often see themselves as recovering what they call “historic Christianity” or “consensual Christianity,” by which they mean an ancient, ecumenical account of Christian faith that transcends the various divisions between traditions and denominations, including the separations between East and West as well as Catholic and Protestant. Proponents of this “historic Christianity” place it over against the developments that came with modernity. The history of modern theology, according to this view, is a declension narrative, and true Christianity lies in the past – a past that one can recover by adhering to the rule of faith.

The problem with this narrative is that we can only ask these questions as modern Christians, as those shaped by the social, political, and ideological changes brought by modernity. There is no recovering a premodern culture, no matter how earnestly one tries. Moreover, the very posing of this question presupposes precisely the modern changes that one claims to be resisting. Premodern Christianity had no concept of being able to choose an alternative account of Christian faith and identity. The idea that we can posit a rule or essence or “mere Christianity” in opposition to inessential accretions or undesirable changes is itself a modern notion.

For this reason I begin in Chapter 1 by exploring the history of the modern quest for the essence of Christianity, tracing the developments in defining the normative faith from the Reformation to the mid-twentieth century. I pay special attention to Martin Luther, John Locke, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, and Karl Barth – all key figures who contributed to the formation of modern Christianity. They show that the essence of Christianity is inherently flexible, constantly adapting to new conditions and new discoveries. Precisely in response to such flexibility, the rule of faith functions in modernity as the supposedly unchanging antidote to the essence.

Since my focus in this study is on the antimodern reaction to liberal Christianity, I turn in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 to the story of the conservative quest for authentic faith, organized around the three categories of religion identified by Schleiermacher: thinking (doctrine), feeling (culture), and doing (politics). Chapter 2 examines the search for the doctrinal rule of faith, expressed as the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” I look at three key figures in modern Christian history who have been instrumental in the rise of theological retrievalism among Protestants: John Henry Newman, Karl Barth (or rather the American neoorthodox theologians who appropriated Barth’s work for their agenda), and C. S. Lewis. Chapter 3 then tells the story of how mainline Protestants, responding to the precarious state of Christianity in an increasingly diverse America, advanced the idea of Christianity as a culture. I trace this development from the biblical theology movement in the postwar years to the rise of postliberalism in the 1970s into the theological interpretation of scripture movement in the early twenty-first century, which is an effort to revitalize biblical theology but on the other side of the cultural turn that postliberalism inaugurated. I argue that the cultural rule of faith laid the groundwork for expanding and refining the culture war waged by conservative Christians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.¹⁰⁸ This leads to Chapter 4, which documents how the quest for true Christian doctrine and culture ultimately led to, and was bound up with, the quest for a truly Christian politics. In addition to examining the question of religion’s place in a liberal democratic society, this chapter explores two examples of how the quest for a normative Christian identity has been weaponized for political ends. The first example looks at the construction of global Christian identity that redefines true Christianity in terms of persecution – a definition easily manipulated by the global right-wing in its denunciation of “cancel culture” and alleged infringements on religious liberty. The second example looks at the construction of historic Christian identity through attacks on the supposed gnosticism that pervades modern society. These three chapters demonstrate that talk of the regula fidei is thoroughly modern in character. It is an exercise in modern cultural construction more than any retrieval of the past.

The last chapter then lays out the argument against the recent retrieval of the rule of faith and its quest for a normative, orthodox essence. In rehearsing the problems with each of the three forms of antimodern Christianity, I unpack the logic implicit within, a logic that necessarily distorts history even as it claims to recover it. I show the similarities between the conservative quest for Christian identity and the conservative quest for American identity, both of which involve reducing the complexity of the past to ahistorical principles. The problem at the root of this quest, I argue, is the pursuit of orthodoxy itself, which turns out to be the pursuit of a theological purity culture that requires the exercise of magisterial authority. The antimodern, antiliberal rule of faith ultimately ends up becoming a tool of authoritarian white Christian supremacy – the logic underpinning a theopolitics of Make Christianity Great Again.¹⁰⁹

In the Conclusion, I turn from the diagnostic to the constructive in order to propose an alternative way to think about the rule of faith. As I have already argued, we cannot do without prescriptivism as such. We need norms if we are going to construct a liberating vision of Christianity that is able to live without fear in the face of social change. Central to that project is rethinking the rule not as a fixed account of Christian faith and practice but rather as an open, flexible, and translatable faith. My positive alternative will therefore not be a normative dogmatics outlining what I think Christians ought to believe about doctrinal topics such as Christology, atonement, and the trinity. I am not offering a new regula fidei or essence of Christianity, as if that would solve the problem. Instead, my approach will be to provide guardrails for how to think about normativity itself. What must the rule of faith be in order to embrace the diversity and flexibility of our world today? Lisa Isherwood and Dirk von der Horst helpfully frame religion as a way of “negotiating the poles of normativity and transgression,” caught in a constructive tension between religion as something that “provides order and normativity” and religion as “a transgressive force.” The danger with religious norms, they argue, is the temptation they provide to settle into sedate, safe patterns of normativity that refuse to upset unjust and unsustainable human relations. They point to resources in Christian theology for transgressing and challenging norms.¹¹⁰ As helpful as this is, however, so long as normativity and transgression are placed over against each other, this way of thinking continues to reinforce the assumption that norms are inherently conservative, traditionalist, and reactionary. Isherwood and Horst are pushing against this assumption already by pointing to normative resources for engaging in socially transgressive actions. What I will argue here is that the rule of faith needs to be conceived in such a way that it empowers a normatively transgressive Christianity, by which I mean a Christianity that is constantly transgressing boundaries precisely as an expression of its internal norms.¹¹¹ We need a rule that helps Christian communities to cross old barriers and forge new identities and practices. Rather than a rule that guarantees uniformity, this will be a rule that guarantees diversity and pluriformity – what Alvin J. Reines, Catherine Keller, and Laurel C. Schneider each call “polydoxy.”¹¹²

The pioneering German theologian Ernst Troeltsch wrote in 1913 that “the essence of Christianity differs in different epochs.”¹¹³ Similarly, we can say that the rule of faith differs in different epochs – indeed, that it differs among different individuals and communities. There are many rules and essences of Christianity, and that is something to celebrate. But that does not mean just anything goes. Embracing plurality does not necessitate a pure, absolute relativism. That would be another denial of prescriptivism and a relinquishing of our responsibility for thinking carefully about what it means to be Christian in modernity. My hope is that the following chapters will serve as both a diagnosis of our current theological condition and a prescription for how to address the crisis of modern Christian identity.