The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.

Book Review

Wicker, Christine. The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. The surprising crisis insde the church. Harper One 2008
C.W.- was a feature writer, columnist and religion reporter for Dallas Morning News for 17 years.

Comment. Henry
Christine describes herself as an apostate. She talks about being saved at age nine but walking away from her faith as an adult. This disposition is reflected in her thesis. There is a lot of valuable information in this resource that is relevant to any serious evangelical leaders. It comes most often in a negative slant. Christine has done her homework and is very serious in being authentic in her presentation. What she calls the “outside threats to the evangelical church” is the weakest part of her presentation, in my opinion.

Christine has done a lot of research on evangelicalism and this book is the result of her findings. She defines evangelicals as, “those people who have accepted Jesus as their personal savior and as the only way to heaven, who accept the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and who are scaring the bejesus out of the rest of America”. Xi (intro).

Christine talks about a “split-screen picture” (3) that reveals what she discovered in her research. One side of the screen shows authentic, evangelical believers, the other shows a deceptive picture of decline and fall of evangelicalism. Based on her interview with a pastor of Lake Pointe church she concludes that only a minority of people (attending Lake Pointe) are genuine evangelicals.

There is a lot of ambiguity in statistics that are presented about the significance and influence of evangelicals on the political and religious scene in America. E.g. one in four Americans is evangelicals.

“Within the church and within the faith it preaches, all the elements crippling the evangelical nation reside side by side with all that makes the church and the faith great.” (34) A story is related about a refugee couple of Katrina. This story serves as an illustration of how great the church and its people of faith are. This story comes out of Lake Pointe church.

“Non-believers are the fastest- growing group in America in numbers and percentage.” (53) Reference is made to “non-religious-right evangelicals and religious-right evangelicals”. (54) Evangelicals are losing ground when it comes to conversions and growth.

The religious image of America is distorted because of inflated, inaccurate statistics. A closer look is taken at what actually defines a real evangelical. Barna’s “nine criteria” (86) are used as a definition. To be a born again Christian requires meeting only two of the nine criteria. Hence the high percentage of Americans who claim to be Christian (38%).

Christine turns her attention on what she calls “the threats inside the evangelical church”. (96) Her focus is the mega-churches. The strongest threat is the vulnerability that they face or will face when the founder/leader is no longer part of the picture. Another threat is the overpowering economics that can destroy churches because of lack of finances.

Another threat is the reality that evangelicals are leaving organized churches. George Barna identified and explained this trend. He says that “20 million (Americans) are being led by God to turn away from the church altogether”. He refers to this as a revolution, the title of his book.

A serious issue is the matter of “disillusioned believers”. (123) They all leave the church but they don’t all leave the faith. Stories of three women who represent this crowd are related. “Politics gone bad, midlife women leaving the evangelical faith, competition from individualized twelve-step gods, and evangelicals refusing to proselitize are all small symptoms of a huge reshaping that’s going on in Western perceptions about truth found about the meaning of reality, about the purpose of life, about the very nature of what it is to be human.” (145)

There are also “threats outside the evangelical church”. (147) There is science and reason that conclude that God is dead. It is suggested that science actually successfully attacked the original sin concept. New family values have developed that are a serious departure from traditional evangelical standards.

Christine describes a personal spiritual experience that was very meaningful to her but was completely outside the standards of traditional evangelicalism. She expresses a desire to “reconnect with God in ways that serve our time and place better than the old ways. It’s happened before. It could happen again.” (205)