By Carl Trueman, First Things. (Image: Unsplash)
The controversial publication, withdrawal, and then republication by Christianity Today of an article suggesting Elisabeth Elliot was bisexual, amid a wave of layoffs and resignations that has stripped the evangelical magazine of half of its staff, has raised numerous legitimate questions about its attitude to journalism, the wisdom of its editorial policy, and its future. I don’t subscribe to it and have rarely read it, so I have no personal interest in the debacle, although the feckless strategy after the controversy broke would seem to confirm the best way to handle media storms: Never apologize, never explain, to paraphrase an adage favored by the late Duke of Edinburgh.
The chaos also raises an important, though rarely asked, question: Does evangelicalism really exist? Certainly it exists as a whipping boy for critics who treat the sins of any one evangelical organization as the sins of all. It also gives others a platform: With no formal leadership, evangelicalism can be claimed by anyone with a social media account. But does it exist as anything more than a label?
Critics will no doubt point out that I have published books with evangelical presses and cohost a podcast for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I am a fellow in the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Evangelicals in Civic Life program, though the e-word was the one thing I queried when I agreed to join. If others want to see me as evangelical and a participant in evangelicalism, they are free to do so. And yes, in my twenty-five years in the U.S., I have spoken at three national evangelical conferences. But I have also spoken at Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Orthodox, and even secular equivalents, without being given those labels. So here is the rub: To describe me as evangelical does not reflect my own self-understanding, nor does it explain me in any useful way.