The Fall of the Evangelical Nation -- Book Review

The Fall of the Evangelical Nation:  The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church.  By Christine Wicker.  New York:  Harper Collins.  2008.  221 pp.

This book documents something I have known for many years, but never had hard systematic evidence for.  Christine Wicker, through extensive study, investigation, personal observation, and careful thought has assembled the data which clearly indicate that the fundamentalist, right-wing, religious conservatism that so plagues the cultural and political life of America is in serious decline.  The loud, aggressive, hard driving movement that is so visible and such a bane to every progressive trend in American society is actually a relatively small, but supremely dedicated and very well organized minority.  And it is a minority that is beleaguered and under considerable duress.  In the long view it has been in decline for over a century and that decline is accelerating.   American people are slowly becoming less conservative, less religious, and more independent in their thinking and their lifestyles.  This varies greatly according to location and circumstance, but the overall trend is unmistakable and Wicker argues very convincingly that it is permanent and irreversible.  This change penetrates every aspect of American life, and in one especially outstanding chapter Wicker illustrates how it results in very profound changes in child rearing practices that indelibly shape the attitudes and values that children carry into adulthood.  This is part of the reason why the move away from evangelical conservatism is irreversible:  the way most children are being raised today precludes them from susceptibility to fundamentalist religious ideology. 

For the past thirty years, 7 percent of the population has swayed elections and positioned itself as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.  By puffing its numbers and its authority, it has gotten legislation passed that opposes the popular will and has divided the country into acrimonious camps.  It has monopolized the media so effectively that other religious voices have been all but silenced.  It has been feared and loathed, revered and loved.  It has been impossible to ignore.  But underneath its image of power and pomp, the evangelical nation is falling apart.  Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago.  (p. 198)

America is slowly becoming more a more secular society, although its legal system is lagging behind that trend mainly because of the power and influence of this very committed, vociferous, well organized and well funded group.  Wicker culls this conclusion from statistics and studies compiled mostly by the churches themselves.  Church insiders know very well what is going on and they are alarmed.  Wicker describes them as almost in panic.  She shows us that Christian baptisms are down and dwindling, that devout believers are deserting the Christian faith in droves, that the behavior and attitudes of a great many common attendees are not at all orthodox, and that many of the great megachurches that have grown up in the last thirty years, which command thousands of adherents under the leadership of charismatic pastors and appear to be so powerful, are actually built on mountains of debt and are extremely vulnerable.  Wicker understands how misleading statistics can be and one of the great strengths of her book is that she looks behind the statistics and analyzes them, not accepting them at face value, and often reaches very different conclusions from what one might take away from a superficial glance at the figures. 

It is commonly reported that there are somewhere between 54 and 75 million evangelical Christians in the United States, if you count kids.  That's roughly one out of four Americans.  But Wicker uses the churches' own documents to show that that number is actually closer to 15 million -- which is still a lot of people to have firmly committed with a unified sense of purpose and agenda.  But she goes on to look at the trends.  The mainline Protestant denominations: the Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, are all losing members and have been for years.  It is the evangelicals who represent the growth in American Christianity.  The Assemblies of God is the fastest growing of all of these evangelical denominations and their growth rate is only 1.86 percent, just slightly more than the growth rate of the U.S. population.  Bobby Welch, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, launched a bold campaign to baptize one million people in 2006.  It was an aggressive campaign carried out in all fifty states.  When it was over they had baptized 371,850 people, a decline of over 4 percent from the previous year and fewer than they had baptized in 1950.  Wicker goes on to point out that this number does not represent new converts to the faith, but is mainly a reshuffling of people from one denomination to another.  You can be baptized as many times as you want, so a baptism does not represent a new convert to the faith.  These baptisms represent mostly people moving from one brand of Christianity to another.  In other words, the truth of the matter is that evangelicals are not converting non-Christian adult Americans in large numbers, especially native-born whites.  This is an ominous realization for those churches especially when you consider how many people are leaving the Christian faith on a daily basis.  Some of them are opting for an independent sense of spirituality not connected to any organized church, but many are becoming irreligious unbelievers. 

Wicker's findings are supported by the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008.  It  reported that 76 percent of Americans identified as Christian in 2008 versus 86 percent in 1990.   The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions, but from a rejection of all organized religion.  One out of five Americans failed to indicate a religious identity in 2008.  70 percent of Americans indicated belief in a personal god, while 12 percent are atheistic or agnostic, and 12 percent believe in a higher power, but no personal god.  27 percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.  Asian Americans are substantially more likely to indicate no religious preference than other racial or ethnic groups.  

However, you should not be misled by this emphasis on figures to think that The Fall of the Evangelical Nation is a dry compendium of statistics and academic prose.  It is richly illustrated with anecdotes and personal observations that allow one to see what is actually happening on the ground of people's inner lives, which is where religious faith ultimately resides.  Wicker writes with passion and deep concern that stems from her own personal evolution as an evangelical Christian.  She understands what is at stake for the personal lives of people and for society when religious faith plays a greater or lesser role.  But what I really like about the book is that she knows that religious faith is ultimately a matter of the heart.  It is in the private personal space of each individual's mind that religious faith thrives or withers.  A variety of factors, both internal and external, affect that outcome and Wicker spells those out and examines them to great effect.  The decline in religious faith in America is not a pendulum that may swing back one day; it is a permanent irreversible feature of our social landscape, and the society that results from it will look very different from the one we are living in now.  Wicker does not attempt to look into the future to imagine what will come as a result of a less religious America, but she does realize that personal values are evolving toward a foundation based on empathy and human need rather than obedience to authority.  Child rearing methods are becoming less punitive, more nurturing, and less dependent on a conception of the child as inherently evil.  Those factors are revolutionary on a personal level and on a level of familial interaction and structure.  This, as stated previously, is probably the most decisive factor making this progression toward secularization irreversible.   

Furthermore the character of religious faith itself is changing in America and even the character of evangelical Christianity may be taking some revolutionary turns.  The internet has diminished the need for the local church and allowed Christians to form communities of like-mindeds that are fluid in nature and not beholden to any structured leadership.  One such group calls itself the Red Letter Christians, who give preference to the words of Jesus (printed in red letters in some Bibles) over the words of Paul.  This results in a very different conception of the meaning of Christian faith with emphasis on moral conduct as opposed to ideological orthodoxy.  Wicker, along with many church leaders, sees the flourishing  of small independent Christian groups as a real threat to the integrity of the faith.  Christianity is splintering and the multifaceted character it will assume in the future is hard to imagine.  But the allegiance of Christian adherents to structured organizations with hierarchical, authoritarian leaders appears to be waning.  This is good news for American society, which has been oppressed and restricted and beaten down in both its cultural life and in its private personal relations for more than a century by this severe, ascetic, authoritarian, intolerant world view promoted by fervent, deluded, short-sighted, ignorant believers.  The misguided legislation based on this mindset has robbed American culture of much of its vitality and robbed American people of opportunities for personal and intellectual growth.  Christine Wicker does an excellent job of exposing the emphatic vulnerability this limiting ideology and its organized adherents and their inevitable demise as a force shaping public policy in American life.