Is Evangelicalism outdated? Facing up to times of public shame, rejection and hostility
by Os Guiness, VirtueOnline:
The word “Evangelical” is a scoff word among secularists, and an embarrassing word to many leading American evangelicals, but to author and social critic Dr. Os Guinness, Evangelicals should not be ashamed of the word, and he himself remains unashamed to identify as an Evangelical.
The author of some 30 books spoke to a symposium at Faith & Law on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, recently and reiterated his allegiance to Evangelicalism, and said Evangelicals could learn from Jews how they sustained their faith over many centuries in the face of intense persecution and scattering across the globe.
The week Guinness spoke, he said, was especially poignant because on the one hand there was an outpouring of tributes to Billy Graham, the most admired Evangelical in the world, and on the other hand, the bitter accusation by Juan Williams, a FOX news commentator, that Evangelicals were “selling their souls to Donald Trump.”
“Over the last 10 years there has been a swelling chorus of voices, including Evangelicals such as theologian Scot McKnight, journalist Pete Wehner and activist Russell Moore, who have made sweeping criticisms of Evangelicalism and even suggested that the term is no longer useful. Three major charges have recurred repeatedly. First, the charge of moral hypocrisy. Second, the charge that Evangelicals have undermined their own movement — some say forever. And third, that it is time to abandon the term and the label and look for different forms of identification.”
Guinness was one of the lead drafters of The Evangelical Manifesto in 2008. The catalyst for him was conversations with some fifteen people within a fortnight who were abandoning Evangelicalism. In each case, the reasons were political, cultural and social and had had nothing to do with theological considerations. “They had an incredible lack of biblical theology and little sense of Evangelical history.”
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