Pietism, Evangelicalism, and the Hollowing of the Christian Man
An Excerpt from Offensive Christianity by J. Chase Davis
On May 26, 2026, one of evangelicalism’s leading voices, Albert Mohler, spoke at the Heritage Foundation. In a talk “Young Men Turn to Religion,” Dr. Mohler says the return of young men to religion is one of the most significant moments of our time. “Young men are more distinctly conservative than young women.” As Mohler notes, this is a reversal of a long standing pattern when it comes to religion. Part of the decline in the first place was that religion in America was thin, not thick, meaning that it lacked theological substance and depth. This is because of creation order and ontology among young men. They are turned off by feminized religious space and hunger for thick Christianity.
Part of this thick Christianity involves speaking openly and honestly about how God made men and for what they were made.
As a pastor, I have interacted with hundreds of men over the years who are tired of being treated as a problem for simply being men. They are not sinning. They are simply living out of their nature. They embrace competition and ambition, and pursue glory. But what is often preached to them explicitly and implicitly is that God made a mistake when he made them men. This is why we have hollow men. They do not know their design. How did we get here?
Pietism
The roots of Pietism as a movement trace back to seventeenth-century German Lutherans and the perceived deadness of orthodox Lutheranism. When we speak of Pietism, we should not confuse it with piety, the biblical pursuit of holiness and righteousness. Pietism began as a spiritual renewal movement, emphasizing Bible reading, personal holiness, and heartfelt devotion. Publicly, however, it devolved into a theology of retreat. It created a posture of withdrawal from public theology and formal ecclesiology. This was in part a reaction to the Thirty Years’ War, during which conflicts over public theology cost millions of lives. Under Pietism, concerns of the embodied life were considered “worldly,” by which they meant evil and opposed to true spirituality. In this way, it was very similar in nature to Gnosticism.
What most concerned the Pietists were matters of the heart. The emotional and experiential aspects of the Christian life were elevated above doctrinal clarity, confessional identity, and church structure. In contrast to the magisterial Reformers, who sought to reform both church and society under the lordship of Christ, many Pietists pursued spiritual separation. They viewed engagement with politics, public life, and institutional reform as distractions from personal sanctification or, worse, as spiritual corruption.
The movement did not remain confined to Germany. Pietism spread throughout European Protestantism, influencing movements such as the Moravians and especially Methodism, founded by John and Charles Wesley. The Wesleyan revival carried forward key Pietist distinctives: daily Bible reading, experiential religion, lay leadership, and revival preaching — elements that many Christians rightly appreciate.
However, Pietism also injected a subjectivist strain into Protestantism. Its overemphasis on the individual’s inner experience laid the groundwork for individualism, anti-institutionalism, and the privatization of faith. This influence can be traced into movements like the First Great Awakening, and later into modern evangelicalism, where feelings often take precedence over formation, and personal sincerity is prized above ecclesial faithfulness. The poison root of Pietism came to full maturity in the Second Great Awakening, which abandoned doctrinal fidelity in favor of pragmatic methods for conversion. Out of the Second Great Awakening was birthed the Burned-Over District, in which the soil of cohesion was obliterated and many cults thrived, including Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and feminism.
Perhaps no movement has more needlessly and effectively crippled modern Christian men than Pietism. It has essentially infected every Protestant denomination and evangelicalism as a movement. The Pietist is often “too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good,” as the saying goes. In this framework, any man who gives significant attention to material concerns — his work, his land, his household, his legacy, his nation — is viewed as being distracted from what really matters: his private spiritual feelings.
For the Pietist, spiritual life is almost entirely internal and immaterial. They may speak often of love for people, but in practice, they display a subtle contempt for the material world and the responsibilities that come with it. Pietists are anti-material. The body, the land, institutions, even family — these are at best distractions, at worst temptations. This posture has left many men unsure of how their masculinity, labor, or leadership fit within the Christian life. By retreating into a hyper-spiritualized inner world, Pietism has functionally disembodied the faith and neutered the call for men to take dominion under Christ in the world God actually made.
Pietism set the bait for a spirituality that was detached from embodied existence. And evangelicalism has been chasing the lure ever since.
Evangelicalism
American evangelicalism is both a socio-cultural movement and a religious tradition. Today, some have abandoned the label “evangelical” because they feel ashamed to be associated with those who are merely “culturally Christian.” This is quite unfortunate because many of these cultural Christians are fertile ground for gospel proclamation. While “evangelical” was a descriptor historically used by Protestant reformers, the modern evangelical movement arose in the twentieth century out of the modernist-fundamentalist split. This division stemmed from the challenge posed by German higher criticism. Fundamentalists (a term now often used pejoratively) were those who sought to uphold the authority of Scripture. Modernists, on the other hand, approached Scripture through an Enlightenment lens, undermining its divine authority and elevating “science” as the new source of revelation.
Evangelicalism sought a “third way” for Christians to move forward between these two camps. As one famous evangelical, Vernon Grounds, famously said, “Here is no unanchored liberalism — freedom to think without commitment. Here is no encrusted dogmatism — commitment without freedom to think. Here is a vibrant evangelicalism — freedom to think within the bounds laid down in Scripture.” The movement aimed to influence culture for Christ, refusing to accept the ghettoization of Christianity amid growing liberalism.
However, baked into the movement were certain attitudinal dispositions that steered its convictional course. D. W. Bebbington famously summarized evangelicalism’s four key tenets in his quadrilateral: a commitment to the authority of the Bible, a cross-centered focus on the saving work of Jesus Christ, an emphasis on conversion, and an activist spirit. While evangelicals maintained a strong commitment to Scripture’s authority, they built institutions and denominations that often adapted to cultural trends in an effort to remain relevant and savvy.
One of evangelicalism’s defining dispositions has been a passionate desire to win the lost to Christ. This is rightly considered a conviction rather than merely an attitude. It seems common sense that Christians should want to win souls for Christ. Who could object? Building upon earlier American religious movements, evangelicalism embraced a revivalist bent focused on outreach and conversion. Tent revivals, whether in rural settings or those led by Billy Graham, were common features. Evangelicals also founded outreach ministries like Campus Crusade for Christ, Navigators, and Young Life to win the next generation for Christ. Talk to any older Bible-believing evangelical, and they will likely recall the importance of winning souls for Jesus.
Yet the “camel’s nose under the tent” that has plagued evangelicalism is its attitudinal disposition to prioritize evangelism at the expense of ecclesiology — the doctrine and life of the church. The tail began wagging the dog as numerical growth and cultural influence increasingly overshadowed deeper commitments to the church.
And as the movement matured, compromise became increasingly apparent. Ministries like Campus Crusade for Christ dropped the word “Crusade” from their names, finding it too alienating for the lost. Seeker-sensitive churches, often planted in strip malls and stripped of denominational identity, emerged from the heart of evangelicalism. What began as a movement concerned chiefly with the authority of Scripture shifted to one chiefly concerned with managing public relations with the unbelieving world.
This trajectory became commonplace in the American evangelical church. A new generation of scholars and leaders arose to sanctify this posture toward culture. Some labeled it “faithful presence,” borrowing from James Davison Hunter, who urged Christians to quietly engage institutions and communities without seeking dominance. Others championed “contextualization,” a concept rooted in missiology that, at its best, meant adapting the gospel message to different cultural settings without changing its content — but in practice, often led to softening doctrine or moral clarity to avoid offending modern sensibilities. Still others promoted the idea of having a “winsome witness,” a strategy that prioritized being likable and persuasive over being direct or confrontational. It became shorthand for tone policing and respectability, especially in elite Christian spaces.
This strategy is often lauded by major evangelical organizations. For example, Biola University’s Winsome Conviction podcast, which describes itself as helping listeners “deepen convictions without dividing communities,” recently hosted two Mormons in the name of civility (itself a type of idol in liberalism) and a ‘winsome witness’ model of ministry.
Aggression and assertiveness were out. The new aspiration was to be invited to Google to give talks about Christianity in very nuanced terms. Meanwhile, the culture warriors of the 1980s and ’90s, many of whom founded evangelical institutions, became punchlines. They were mocked and dismissed as backward, embarrassing, or harmful to the church’s reputation. Evangelicalism, in its attempt to win the world, had begun to fear looking too different from the world.
The distinctiveness of men seemed to have no home in this movement. What role could men play in such an environment? When Christian men attended seeker-sensitive churches and ministries, they were implicitly taught that the very traits that made them men were liabilities rather than assets.
Unless Christians and evangelicals offer a robust, offensive Christianity, which speaks to men as men, training them up and discipling them in the Lord’s ways, young men will look to outside voices, many of whom are pagan, in order to learn what to do with their nature. We live in revolutionary times, and many men are desperate to hear from God’s Word regarding what action to take to halt the revolution. But what they often find when they come to many evangelical churches is not clear teaching from God’s Word but therapy dressed up as spirituality. They are offered teaching meant to soothe, and songs meant to comfort when what they need is clear truth from God’s Word about their design and purpose.
Many of these therapeutic churches might mean well, but they’ve essentially baptized feminism such that the pulpit resembles a therapist’s office. It’s time to return to a more faithful and consistent understanding of the nature of men. One that doesn’t peddle a soft gnosticism, treating the body as a problem. Instead, by returning to the basic understanding of theological anthropology, man as body and soul, we can understand how God made men for glory. This type of Christianity will be perceived as hostile by nice Christians today, those Christians who would rather not speak up and speak out for the truth of God. It will be branded offensive. So be it. Without it, the revolution will continue to progress unimpeded.
Davis’s book Offensive Christianity is available through Founders’ Press.