There are Evangelical Elites. Look Harder.
They exist, but are they the kind of elites we need?
Editor’s note: This essay is part of a symposium on Evangelical elites.
Evangelical elites don’t exist. Or at least, that is the consternation of many writers at this publication and others. These commentators have bewailed the disgraceful lack of evangelical networks for nurturing talent, pointed to theological and sociological errors supposedly causing this dearth, and proposed new institutions and attitudes that might birth an evangelical elite in the future. (Many of these proposals—such as the “breaking down of barriers between mainline Protestant and evangelical laymen”—strike me as excellent).
What commentators have not done, however, is provide much evidence of the supposed non-existence of an evangelical elite. Indeed, articles about evangelical elites have not even devoted much space to defining “evangelical,” although the word is notoriously slippery; I take it that the word in this context means something like “American Protestants who attend a church that is not part of one of the Seven Sisters of the Mainline or a Black Protestant denomination.” (Others use “evangelical” more restrictively.) By definition, “elites” are a small group, unlikely to appear in survey data or other empirical metrics. So, I understand why commentators cannot cite statistics proving their claim. I have no statistics either.
Instead of empirics, then, other types of evidence are proffered. Personal anecdotes. Lists of famous Catholics, Jews, and Mormons are accompanied by the assertion that no such list can be made for conservative Protestants. Grok AI queries. [1. I commend the ever-insightful Aaron Renn for sharing the AI queries he used to generate his lists of “the top 15 living” evangelicals and Catholics in America. As Renn acknowledged, Grok struggled with the query. Several people on these lists were dead, and others were not American. Moreover, Grok stated that it was “interpreting this as influential living American evangelical leaders—those who shape evangelical thought, practice, or public engagement through preaching, writing, or organizational leadership.” That is, Grok construed the query to be only asking about clergy. Unsurprisingly, it returned fifteen clergymen. Renn defines elites as people who hold “senior positions in the culture-shaping domains of American society.” His examples suggest these domains are primarily law, media, academia, finance, and tech. To my mind, the federal government is the domain that most shapes American culture, both today and at the time of twentieth-century Mainline establishment. Renn, however, does not discuss governance much.
I have minimal experience with media, finance, tech, or the hard-science half of academia, so I will say little about those four domains. But I personally know evangelicals holding senior positions in all four (though some of those friends would not appreciate me outing them as evangelicals).] The extent to which that sort of evidence convinces differs greatly from person to person and largely depends on a person’s priors. It is vulnerable to somebody else’s anecdote, list, or AI query.
I do not possess a conclusive list of the fifteen or so most influential American evangelicals. But I am skeptical of any list that does not contain at least some of, for instance, Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mike Johnson, Mike Huckabee, and Mitch McConnell. For obvious reasons, Democratic presidents do not appoint evangelicals to high political office. But the current administration has placed evangelicals at every level.
In the professional areas that I know best—humanities, higher education, and the conservative legal movement—I freely admit that there are essentially no prominent evangelical scholars outside narrow fields such as biblical studies or church history. Mark Noll was right about that 30 years ago, and he remains right. But there are many evangelicals in law. Consider, for instance, Edwin Meese, Kristen Waggoner, Jay Sekulow, David French, the Hon. Raymond Kethledge, the Hon. Jennifer Mascott, the Hon. Andrew Oldham, and the Hon. James Ho.[2. Judges are cagey about their affiliations, so perhaps I have miscategorized. But private sources indicate that these judges are conservative Protestants.] If Trump gets to nominate another Supreme Court justice during his second term, he will likely choose an evangelical.
Of course, I could offer a longer list of Roman Catholic elites. But so what? The claim is that there is no lay evangelical elite—not merely that evangelicals punch below their weight. Moreover, “Catholic” is a broader category than “evangelical,” which covers baptized cradle Catholics with the most unorthodox theologies and the most progressive politics. The proper comparator to “Catholic” is “Protestant,” not “evangelical.” If evangelicals are non-Mainline or theologically conservative Protestants, then we need a corresponding label for Catholics to make a fair assessment. No doubt the most powerful Catholic politicians of the last decade have been Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.[3. Renn’s AI-generated list of the top 15 Catholic elite included four members of Biden’s cabinet: a reflection of the impact that Roman Catholics still have on the Democratic party.] If that is the kind of evangelical elites we are supposed to be nurturing, heaven keep us from evangelical elites!
My skepticism towards the present discourse about Christian class structure is more than just quibbling over what names should be on the lists. Rather, my greater concern is that almost all the people who write about evangelical elites are not themselves elite. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that these commentators are not skilled writers, penetrating thinkers, or well-meaning churchmen. But (as far as information available about their backgrounds reveals) they did not grow up in a wealthy WASP environment. They did not attend Ivy Plus universities. And they are not working at, say, the New York Times, nor Harvard, nor BlackRock, nor the Senate. These are outsider observers looking in—commenting on elite behaviors and networks like Jane Goodall on gorillas.
Outsider observers can perform superb quantitative analysis. But the ability to create a detailed qualitative assessment of some group’s class structure depends on actually being a member of that elite. Otherwise, you don’t know what you don’t know.[4. When I was a young urban professional, I was briefly part of an invitation-only mentoring program designed to connect young lay evangelicals with older evangelicals in the same fields. The group deliberately sought to keep a low profile. I would never have known such programs existed if I had not been invited to join.] For the sake of it, call it the Donna Tartt test. Have you read The Secret History? When you read it, did you think, “I went to college with all the characters in this novel?” If the answer to either of these questions is “no,” then you are not a member of the elite under discussion.
As best as I can tell, Jake Dell is the only recent commentator on evangelical elites who aces the Donna Tartt test. The Yale social world that Dell depicts is the one I recall from my time at a rival alma mater—blazers, port, smoking, boy choirs, members-only dining establishments that served a small menu made up of dishes best described as “the things white people ate in the 50s.” (You can tell such dishes by the fact that they have two-word names, one an ingredient and the other an arbitrary proper noun: e.g., Oysters Rockefeller, Beef Wellington, Lobster Thermidor, Bananas Foster.) Dell gives an ethnography of Mainline Protestant elite networks during their dying years. By the time I was in college, a decade after Dell graduated, Jews and Roman Catholics had replaced Mainliners as the heads of conservative elite networks.
Nevertheless—at least during the first decade or so of this millennium—evangelicals were welcome to join these networks. Unlike among Gen Z today, there was no great drive to convert to Catholicism, let alone Eastern Orthodoxy. I remember only one conservative Protestant friend who became Catholic at college; he now edits Compact Magazine.
Evangelical fellowships at my alma mater devoted a great deal of effort to setting forth a theology of faith and work. They regularly brought in prominent Christians working in elite professions to discuss their vocation and held conferences or retreats on faith and work issues. Evangelical undergraduates on campus led theological reading groups and edited a student journal of Christian cultural engagement. Politically conservative centers on campus (for instance, this one) were purposefully big-tent and sought to integrate—and fund—evangelical students and scholars, just as they did Catholics or non-Christian ones. Many classmates went on to distinguished lay careers (occasionally shedding their evangelical convictions along the way). Asian American evangelicals were especially common in elite circles, for they dominate Protestant fellowships at most top universities. Yet present-day discourse about evangelical elites almost never mentions Asian Americans.
In truth, the real problem isn’t that there was no evangelical elite. During the “neutral world” of the early part of this millennium, there very much was one. The problem is that evangelical elites that did exist—and do still exist—are the wrong sort of evangelical. The wrong sort, that is, from the perspective of most commentators.
The evangelical elite is disproportionately center-left or establishment Republican in politics and Kellerite in vocational theology. The elite “reads Christianity Today, listens to Tim Keller sermons, and tends to know far more about J.R.R. Tolkien than J. Gresham Machen” and “is proficient in the use of the word ‘winsomeness’.”[5. John Ehrett’s painfully true stereotype. But, as Ehrett has also noted, students and faculty would fill the room to hear Keller discuss Baruch Spinoza; they do not show up to hear Keller’s critics rage against the Big Eva class.] Their professional networks link to a particular mega-church. Or else, they merely join networks led by non-evangelical conservatives. It is no coincidence that, after graduation, many of my evangelical classmates went on to work in New York City and attend Redeemer Presbyterian: the parish church for elite evangelical New Yorkers. Similar elite “parishes” include Menlo Church in Silicon Valley and Falls Church Anglican in the D.C. suburbs.
Elite evangelicals rarely even identify themselves as “evangelical.” They prefer naming their denomination or just calling themselves “Christian.” It feels less shameful before their unbelieving friends.
Consider, for instance, just one example of an elite evangelical who exemplifies these trends: David Brooks. After decades as one of the most read columnists in America, Brooks publicly converted to Protestant Christianity around 2014, partly due to Keller’s ministry. A few years later, he married his second wife: a Wheaton grad with impeccable elite evangelical credentials. Brooks and his wife attended and were married at Christ Our Shepherd Church in Washington D.C., a non-denominational church that subscribes to the Lausanne Covenant. As far as I know, they still attend there. Since converting, Brooks has repeatedly written on evangelical subjects, aligning himself with the David French-Russell Moore school.
David Brooks is clearly an elite evangelical, although rarely discussed as one. He is a paradigmatic example of a well-known character type: the conservative Protestant author who loves writing about cultural engagement but criticizes other Christians in public to make clear that he isn’t some snake-handling hick. We have nothing to gain from ignoring or disowning Brooks and those like him. Surely, reconciling these elites with the evangelical mainstream is the better idea.
Evangelical elites exist. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, though, I will leave to your own judgment.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
