Prolegomena to a Future Protestant Elite
Mourning
Walking through the remains of mainline Protestantism, one cannot help but mourn its downfall. New England and New York are filled with old Protestant cathedrals built and maintained by elites who have gone on to forsake their ancestors’ customs and their God. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, located in Morningside Heights, New York, is the largest Cathedral in North America and the world’s largest Protestant Cathedral. It was originally built to serve as the mother church for the episcopal diocese of New York, and its scale and vision rivals that of its Roman Catholic counterpart, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In the narthex is the Great Rose Window, spanning 40 feet in diameter and depicting Jesus surrounded by the Prophets, Apostles, and Angels. The Cathedral inside is 124 feet high, and the walls are lined with Barberini Tapestries depicting the life of Christ. Behind the high altar, lie seven different mini-chapels dedicated to immigrant communities that had come to New York. Chapel of St. James for the Spanish, Chapel of St. Ambrose for the Italians, Chapel of St. Martin of Tours for the French, Chapel of St. Saviour for the East, Chapel of St. Columba for the British and Irish, Chapel of St. Boniface for the Germans, and Chapel of St. Ansgar for the Scandinavians. Each chapel is a mini-church with its own unique lighting and art. The Cathedral would be the crowning achievement of the Episcopal elite, a testament to their ambition, scale, and leadership for the future. Alongside other Protestant institutions, like Columbia University and St. Luke’s Hospital, the Cathedral would serve as an American Acropolis – a gathering center of religion, philosophy, art, and culture, looking down on New York, rivaling great European cities. Chronicler Edward Hall observes: “On Morningside Heights, in the City of New York on ground consecrated by the blood of our forefathers in the War of Independence, stands a trinity of institutions which represent with singular completeness the threefold nature of man: Columbia University, which ministers to the Mind; St. Luke’s, which ministers to the Body; and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which ministers to the Soul.”
But today these three institutions are a shell of themselves. The Cathedral itself, while maintaining many of its traditional altarpieces and art, has also added new idols to bourgeois morality. One side altar hosts Our Lady, Mother of Ferguson which depicts the Virgin Mary as a Black Madonna, holding her hands up. The Cathedral has a stone statue depicting the most important figure of every century after Christ – for the twentieth century the Cathedral chose not one but four people to depict – Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Einstein, and Gandhi. In the installation service last September of Winnie Varghese as Dean of the Cathedral, the service featured readings and music that included the Bhakti Saint Kabir Da, Sufi melodies, Chakravarthini, and the Quran. The Cathedral stands, and yet, its statues are treated as relics of a regrettable past (there’s regrettably a crusader altar next to the altar of Our Lady of Ferguson), whatever has been there has been abandoned by God, and the transcendence the space once evoked is reduced to a discomfort that the Cathedral doesn’t belong here today. The world it was built for no longer exists. No doubt, a similar story occupies the two heads of this acropolis. Columbia’s faculty and students betray the university’s motto ,“In Thy light shall we see light,” and instead trade in Marxist activism and their administrators in pragmatic accumulation of scientific grants, property, and capital. St. Luke’s, only steps away the Cathedral, welcomes its patients with two large pride flags. The acropolis is uprooted from the Christian visions and Protestant ambition that invigorated it, but its size, and sheer legacy prestige allow its new inhabitants to reap its benefits. But the Evangelicals, who share the same fire and zeal that built these institutions, are not here. So we walk around. We lament. And we mourn.
Aaron Renn’s, The Problem with the Evangelical Elite, is above all, a mourning and an autopsy of Evangelical deracination. He writes, “All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the culture-shaping domains of American society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities.” There might be Evangelicals in academia, finance, tech, and law, but they are disproportionately underrepresented relative to population, and they are not notably known as Evangelicals. Renn’s AI experiment on listing notable Evangelicals versus notable Catholics reveals a poor institutional organizing, credentialing, and promotion. But, historically, Evangelicals didn’t need such an ecosystem because the brightest, and most ambitious Evangelicals would go on to be inculcated into mainline Protestantism. However, since that ecosystem has been hollowed out, the only solutions for Evangelicals in elite institutions is to betray their childhood, privatize their faith, and assimilate into secularism, or join Roman Catholics who are still allowed to operate within prestigious institutions.
This is not to say that there are no evangelicals at Yale and Princeton or Goldman and Blackrock. In fact, I know many of them. Rather, Evangelicals here are confronted with two plausible social identities to assume in these spaces – that of secularism or Roman Catholicism. And in many instances, Roman Catholicism endures because of the strength of the Roman Catholic ecosystem in protecting and promoting its members and Roman Catholicism’s enduring status as an inherited cultural identity, whereas Evangelicalism is a chosen identity to set itself apart from the everydayness of the culture to earnestly follow Christ. Which is to say, ultimately the governing framework of legacy, prestigious institutions is still secularism, and evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism are tolerated insofar as they accept the founding methodological principles of secularism, and toe the party line and never seek too much influence such that people would question secularism’s primacy.
An evangelical might attend Columbia (many do!), and Columbia would gladly allow ministries like RUF, and Christian Union to operate and even flourish, (and they do). But if one starts to seriously advocate for Columbia to return to its founding principles and motto, they would in all likelihood be laughed at and probably kicked out. And that looming loss of respectability always makes Evangelicals feel institutionally homeless. It’s an eerie feeling to be at a place that looks like home, that looks like safety, but is in fact hostile to your way of life in its most authentic expression. No wonder then, that most Evangelicals either opt out of these spaces, and go to distinctly Evangelical spaces, or seek a career within the safety of the Church as pastors, or simply keep their faith to themselves and do not allow Evangelical convictions to occupy controlling influence in cultural productions. And so the cycle continues. And we mourn. The regime of secularism is suffocating. In its most neutral forms, it is still offering a false peace with Christian convictions, and stifles Christianity to private dwindling while the core social fabric that underwrote society decays. For Evangelicals, elite spaces are the regime of the Antichrist (a pressure to offer false peace with the world).
Clearing
The forces that maintain Evangelical dhimmitude are internal and external. For one, it’s not within the Evangelical ethos to acquire institutional influence and pursue reform. In a previous article, Renn distinguishes between middle class and striver class professionals. Middle class people are concerned with building and maintaining basic material comforts while the striver class also wants to climb the ladder of social prestige. Historically, Evangelicalism has come from the poor and middle class whose primary concerns are about trusting God for a family, stable job, a peaceful and quiet life. As for piety of the soul, this is good, but for the piety of the country, it is dangerous when the fundamental framework of the country is uprooted.
Let me explain. From a forward looking perspective evangelical representation in elite academic institutions is encouraging. Christian representation has grown over the past two decades because of increased recruitment of middle-class students and the growth of the financial aid necessary to support them. I myself am a product of this recruitment and financial aid, and almost all of the Evangelical undergrads I know today are too. As a result of that recruitment, the undergraduate makeup of elite institutions is trending more spiritual but not religious, and open to Evangelicalism (provided they, in turn, are open to pluralism).
Now, evangelicals should support these financial aid programs, and support Evangelicals in elite academic institutions since they remain the primary gateway to elite influence. Nonetheless, due to the inherent Evangelical hesitancy to influence, most Evangelicals conceive of the university and other places of elite influence as centers of compromise and danger. As a result, most organizations in a university setting exist as Evangelical affinity groups. They help incoming Christians adjust, make friends, have a social life, get connected to Church, and maybe even learn some theology. But they do not seek to reposition their students as bearers of incredible responsibility for thinking and leading Evangelicalism, much less the country. They do not set off to inculcate and bestow the heritage of mainline Protestantism – a well rounded liberal arts community that positions students to discern and obtain the good on campus and where they go after. Much less do they encourage students to be confident in their faith, the truth of their convictions, and also affirm the desire to seek godly ambition and forge, with their talents, a better world. So, unintuitively, most of these groups will continue to grow in size, but they will be effectively neutralized against challenging a regime other than neutral world secularism and its assumed leftist hegemony. The numbers might be there, but the impact will be minimal, because they are not taught to be Protestant elite who organize and work for the good. The behave instead like affinity ghettos.
The same dynamic is endemic in Evangelicals outside academia. For instance, there are plenty of Evangelicals who work in hospitals – as doctors, nurses, and nurse aides. The hospital is a place where there is earnest openness to Evangelical faith, but we do not see a coherent vision for organizing and building a vision of nursing, healthcare, and bioethics that train talented healthcare professionals and pressure hospitals to accommodate Christian values. More generally, Renn touts the need for “an expanded theology of vocation,” endorsing the efforts of the faith and work movement and to expand them to have “theological mandate for leadership at the top of the key domains of society.” But it’s worth dwelling more on the assumptions that drive the faith and work movement.
The “fundamentalist” work ethic, consequently, subordinated work to piety and focused on funneling the resources work provides to evangelization. However, the rise of Evangelicals to the middle class and the emergence of the knowledge-based economy sparked a revival of the harmonization of work and spirituality. This movement centers on recovering theological resources that charge working laity to sacralize and stabilize their participation in the economic sector, rather than subordinate or shirk such responsibilities in light of pressing ecclesial duties. However, this movement is not just a recovery of the Protestant view of work but also a response to an economic system that tends to aestheticize work and workism.
The movement does not resist this aestheticization, but endeavors to Christianize it, so that after Sunday, people can say, ‘thank God it’s Monday! So while Renn might envision a faith and work movement which encourages the reordering of society, but the intrinsic nature of the middle-class evangelical sensibilities confine them to accommodate the framework they’re in, and Christianize it, rather than work for the necessary will to change it. There can be Christians in Goldman Sachs, NBC, and the New York Times, but the most disruptive work they might engage in is coordinated prayer groups, inviting colleagues to church–the same affinity group playbook–but not a conscious reallocation of capital, change of media portrayal, and protest of assignment. They see vocation as a singular duty to steward before God, and not as representatives of the hopes and dreams of 25% of the country.
But even further, there might be a case that the Evangelical elites simply have no fundamental disagreement with the current operating system for Evangelicals. Or to put it more simply, they do not believe it is Evangelicals’ job or responsibility to challenge the social fabric, but to accept Evangelicals’ minimized place in the public square and to teach other Evangelicals to operate as a marginalized group – full scale accommodation to secularism. Nathan Ristuccia’s article basically illustrates this point. Ristuccia mentions that there indeed are Evangelicals in prominent elite spaces – they just happen to not represent the will of Evangelicals. David French, David Brooks, and Russell Moore all engage in this playbook who attempt to make Christianity attractive to other elites by criticizing Evangelicals and to distance themselves from the snake handling hicks. Essentially, all Evangelical elites posturing against “power” is elites acting against the best interests of Evangelicals. This is also basically the hinge of the class war John Ehrett highlights that divides Evangelicals and their elites. It’s not just access to influence, and prestige, but a fundamental orientation, a question of whether Evangelical elites will organize for their common good or accommodate secular progressivism’s supremacy.
The highest represented theological system in Evangelical elite circles is retrofitted neo-Calvinism. In its current form neo-Calvinist essentially works for the managed decline of Evangelical cultural influence. The first move in neo-Calvinism is to set off a “Christian” worldview, which is incorrigible from other worldviews, such as an atheistic or secular progressive worldview. In this way, neo-Calvinism assumes pluralism. The explosion of different worldviews in America, weakens Evangelicalism’s claim to speak and describe reality as it is given and describe its opponents as fundamentally not in accord with reality.
However, God has given common grace to unbelievers so that there are glimmers of the truth in every unbelieving worldview. And God has been patient with unbelievers, so we should be patient with other unbelieving worldviews and seek to have a pluralistic society where Christians cooperate with the common grace given to other unbelievers. This is the basic political theology underlying Evangelical elite engagement. It’s the essence of “third-way” and it gives the permission structure to cozy up to secularism as providing the “real foundations” for pluralism, and allow Evangelicals to adopt leftist etiquette.
This works through co-option of theological terms, divesting them of their historical meaning, and employing them to create a point of contact with leftist politics. This is essentially how the traditional doctrine of the imago dei is used today, most recently in shaming Evangelicals into labeling illegals as “neighbors in the image of God,” thereby neutralizing any threat to regime politics on immigration. Or even worse, some will condemn Christians for “not lifting up the marginalized” (not voting democrat), and so will trumpet the “common grace” of leftists.
Consider Presbyterian Church in America teaching elder, Justin Ardour, who commented on Mamdani becoming mayor of his city: “I think a major reason so many are celebrating the election of a Muslim democratic socialist is that, in sacralizing capitalism, many Christians have relinquished their responsibilities to the most vulnerable… a moral-theological vacuum has been created—one now being filled by those who are willing to place the marginalized at the center.” He and PCA TE Abe Cho co-wrote a letter of prayer and lament which above all things chastises the PCA for seeking Christian social policy: “The very neighbors we are seeking to love — secular, progressive non-Christians, LGTBQ individuals, immigrants, people of color, and more — are publicly belittled and demonized, if not by our words then by our legislative actions.” (Emphasis mine). Charlie Kirk’s funeral “brought me to tears with anger” at the sight of Chris Tomlin singing Holy Forever: “The songs used in many of our churches, written to orient us to a servant King of mercy, compassion, and holiness, were used in service of a gathering filled with angry, vitriolic, combative, heretical, fear-mongering nationalism that also, and this is no exaggeration, had speakers whose speeches could have cited Hitler himself.” Rich Villodas, an influential pastor in NYC involved in the Barna group, said this too about Kirk’s death to his congregation: “I’ve also seen him using words that have caused great harm to black and brown people, to Muslims, and to LGBTQ people. We are in no position to offer the final word on anyone’s life but what we must ask ourselves is this: What does it mean to be faithful to Jesus?” These are the most extreme examples, but they are the terminus of principled pluralism—just mainline Protestantism with extra steps. In reality, they offer a false peace with the world, continuing the regime of the Antichrist. It’s not enough for evangelicals to encourage entrance into elite spaces, but the framework of principled pluralism must be exorcised from the evangelical imagination. It must be cleared. There is no evangelical elite with a “third way” engagement approach.
Building
The issue with exorcising accommodationist sensibilities is that there is no alternative vision for our social fabric. In other words, the issue with Evangelical elites is that there are no elites–culture shapers–being minted in the first place. As our culture has been uprooted, and lost the theological and moral assumptions that underwrote our culture, elite production has amounted to maintaining bourgeois morality (corporate democratic politics) and accumulating enough capital for a self-sufficient life. It used to be the case that undergraduates at the Ivy plus schools would conform into the institutions’ rituals and thereby acquire a duty to become leaders of the country. But now the average Columbia, University of Chicago, and Princeton student is anxious about securing a college internship, and then a return offer, to eventually middle management at a legacy corporation. The economic anxiety that overtook the country after 2008, also infected college campuses, such that for most students, everything is subordinated to the pragmatic goal of securing enough money for themselves. Their ambitions and desires have dwindled to securing a great piece of power for themselves and their own tribe.
Even the emergence of identity politics, and attractiveness of virulent leftism in the university is a reaction to the breakdown of the economic stability post 2008, causing people to seek stability and recognition in projects that upend the economic system, and its bureaucratization. The corporate dems have tried to take this impulse and accommodate it into “DEI” and previously “multiculturalism”, essentially allowing anxious elites to feel recognized and provide them a bridge to communicate values to the rest of the country. But in short, there is no transformation of the younger generations to elites who staff, direct, and reorder society, just entry paths to increasingly more power. The hallmark of elites – the learning and creation of culture for its own sake – is currently gutted. Eric Gregory, an Evangelical professor at Princeton, remarked to me that in his undergraduate class on the Good Samaritan, not one student could tell him the story. Not one. In another Princeton class on religion, no one could tell the instructor the definition of Providence! The illiteracy, lack of desire to become trained in liberal arts, to investigate and consider the good, is endemic in current elite institutions.
In other words, in 10 years, it will be the case that Christians in elite institutions are going to be recognized as the only group of people who know how to read, or at least know how to read anything worth reading. And this is the best hope that Evangelicals have of building back after accommodating to secularism. Elites will grasp a vision of the good life and the common good that offers authentic existence beyond the accumulation of prestige and capital. That vision cannot be, as the principled pluralist want, maintain the same regime that everyone is dissatisfied with. Nor can it be, as traditional Roman Catholic want, a representation of the medieval hierarchy whereby the Pope and the clergy direct all portions of life.
Instead, Evangelicals must commit to building a new acropolis. And the only way forward for the next generation of Evangelical is to recover, and implement classical, Magisterial Protestant social thought and political theology to replant our culture. These prescriptions expand Renn’s prescriptions to be a civilizational level reordering. Intellectually, resources must be devoted to the recovery of the protestant social anthropology in the natural law tradition in our churches and seminaries. Moreover Evangelicals must encourage their best and brightest to aim for the best and highest places of influence they are able to as their talent allows, but instill them with a sense of responsibility for Evangelicalism and the country, so they lead not just for themselves, but for the common good.
Next, the Evangelical media ecosystem needs to be rebuilt to highlight and promote Evangelicals in prominent positions as role models, and as inspiration for a new generation. Externally, Evangelicals must begin to organize for their good across cultural domains consciously and intentionally. For instance, there should be an effort for Evangelicals in finance to reallocate capital to companies who provide long-term value for the country, and its people. Say Evangelical in finances should oppose gambling corporations – refuse to invest in them, and then lead the coalition necessary to pull back on their access to capital.
At the same time, Evangelicals should build the best in class institutions to learn deal-construction, portfolio management, etc. In medicine, doctors and nurses should organize to build high class fellowships and cohorts and protest the assignments and legislation that goes against Christian anthropology. This type of effort requires a new patronage system devoted not to quantity (the obsession with spending $430mm on Superbowl ads that portray Jesus as non-threatening), but to retrieving, and building institutions for people to be formed by. The character of our institutions should be welcoming to all, but fixated on restoring optimism for the country around ordered life. Evangelicals will offer a platform for people to live an authentic life through the induction of Protestant values. These elites are then sent out to steward and lead others in the rebuilding of a coherent social fabric.
There must finally be confidence and resoluteness in this vision. This requires adopting the long-term horizon of earlier mainline Protestant with the express goal of leading the ecosystem of arts, business, government, and tech. This is not a recapitulation of a Benedictine option of an alternate economy, but an imperative for Evangelicals to go all-in on converting their zeal to the disciplined rebuilding of society on Evangelical terms. It is not enough for Evangelicals to lead a peaceful and quiet life. They must work to provide that for everyone God has placed, so they could live the Christian life and by God’s will encounter and follow God himself. The way to do that, is to recover a new elite, one that sets the ground forward for what a good life is, and inspires others to staff it, disseminate it, until it becomes the default option – even for people who are not Evangelical.
And so after mourning, clearing, and we can build with enough imagination and Evangelical piety that has sustained this country. By God’s grace we will imagine a way out.
Editor’s note: part of a symposium on Evangelical Elites.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.