Beckwith on the catholicity of evangelicalism and the irrelevance of Donald Miller

Francis Beckwith's advice to young evangelicals may be difficult for them to hear, but they would do well to heed his call to return, if not to Rome (as he has), certainly to a faith that retains a respectable degree of catholicity.

What I mean by Evangelicalism’s catholicity is its traditional allegiance to classical Christian orthodoxy and all that it entails about the good, the true, and the beautiful, including its commitment to the authority of Scripture and the veracity and normativity of the Catholic creeds. This is why if Evangelicalism is to survive, it has to grow up and not “emerge.” It needs the wisdom of David Wells’s The Courage to Be Protestant rather than the beatnik aphorisms of Donald Miller’s Oprah-fied narrative, Blue Like Jazz. It needs more Augustine and less Pelagius, and a theological and pastoral leadership that understands that it is not above its pay grade to suggest to its people that a purpose-driven life requires a purpose-driven death.

Writing in response to Lee Anderson's essay, "The New Evangelical Scandal," Beckwith confronts, quite forthrightly, the veneer of "authenticity" behind which so many theologically-thin young evangelicals hide.

According to Anderson, the young evangelicals are questioners: “For previous generations of evangelicals, questioning one’s faith was anathema. Now, it is a rite of passage, necessary for maturation and perfectly acceptable to God. It is, after all, part of the journey toward authentic faith.” As a philosophy professor, I love questions and questioners. I encourage my students to think critically about their faith. Jesus himself was the master questioner, always asking just the right question to the right people at just the right time. But the young evangelicals are selective, self-serving, questioners, just like their Baby Boomer grandparents. They have bumper stickers on their car saying “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” and “Question Authority,” while not realizing that the truth of the first requires that you not question the driver’s authority. So, what the bumper should have is just one sticker that asserts, “Question everyone’s authority except mine.”

The young evangelicals are a lot like that. They like to “share their feelings” about how they believe they are constrained by what Anderson calls, “puritanical legalism,” because “Jesus really cares about the heart and our intentions.” But they are, at the same time, absolutely certain about lots of other things that they would never dream of questioning, such as “social justice” and environmental sustainability. Thus, they “know” precisely in what bin each piece of garbage should be deposited (you dare not show contempt for God’s creation), but they feel it is “judgmental” for one Christian to tell another Christian that it is wrong to have sex with one’s boyfriend or girlfriend regardless of the genders of the participants. Thus, they are dogmatists, “puritanical legalists,” about the proper end of garbage and recycling, but “thoughtful questioners” about the proper end of their reproductive organs within the confines of the one-flesh communion of husband and wife. This is, of course, exactly the direction in which secular culture is heading, about which the young evangelicals refuse to take a “skeptical, authentic, thoughtful” pose they claim their parents’ generation lacked. The acorn does not fall far from the oak tree after all. Sorry to say, but if your worldview has more in common with Al Gore than Thomas Aquinas, you are not a “questioner.”

If the young evangelicals are really serious about “struggle” and “authenticity,” they should ignore drama queens like Donald Miller and look to those who have actually lived it. Take, for example, my late grandmother, Frances Guido (1913-2002). She lost her husband (my grandfather) to stomach cancer in 1952. Widowed at the age of thirty-eight, she worked as a seamstress and provided each of her four children with twelve years of Catholic-school education.

Donald Miller's stature among young evangelicals is, to coin a phrase, ironically iconic. His own "authenticity" has been called into question, as we have explored previously. Beckwith is quite correct in characterizing him as a "drama queen" who ought to be, and ultimately will be, an irrelevant footnote in the history of Christianity in general and evangelicalism in particular.