Published March 3, 2025
I’m approaching 40, which means I came of age at a time in American evangelicalism where putting distance between conservative politics and Christianity was a very, very popular trend. It is not an exaggeration to say that one of the defining hallmarks of my evangelical adolescence and early career experience was defined by not being “one of those” types of evangelicals—a James Dobson or Jerry Falwell-style evangelical. The assumption was that an association with conservative politics would repel potential converts. “God was neither a Republican nor Democrat” was the rallying cry. Thus arose “Third Way” evangelicalism, a sociological-but-disguised-as-theological cosmopolitanism that assured us that Christianity stood above all earthly powers, whether left or right.
There was an air of rebellion in resisting the supposedly troglodytic and rigid form of conservative Christianity linked with the Religious Right. Enlightened Christianity stood above all earthly politics, which is true insofar as Christianity is a transcendent judge of all earthly political regimes. Advocates of this approach believed they were merely untethering Christianity from partisan politics (which is commendable, on the one hand), but there was also an understanding that a less-partisan Christianity would be more successful at evangelizing unbelievers. There was also the injection of ambiguity, the idea that left and right were equally an affront to God’s apolitical kingdom (which is not true, I would argue). That no earthly kingdom can represent God’s kingdom does not mean that various political ideologies are equally wrong in their revolt against God’s law. During this era of evangelicalism, the highest aspiration for a culturally learned evangelicalism was that a well-known elite (most likely a political liberal) would come to this de-politicized faith, thus lending to Christianity a sort of cultural legitimacy that many strove for.
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Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is a Fellow in the Evangelicals and Civic Life Program at The Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is also the Dean of the School of Theology and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and the founding Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. He co-hosts The Bully Pulpit, a weekly podcast exploring faith, culture, and politics from a conservative Christian perspective.
