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No matter where you come down on the debates over evangelical identity, one truth is indisputable: the evangelical movement in North America has been shaped by the divisions that became apparent in the early 20th century between fundamentalists and modernists. Arming themselves against those who questioned the authority of Scripture in a post-Enlightenment age, leaders like J. Gresham Machen differentiated theological modernism from orthodox Christianity. Most of their heirs, while adopting a more open posture toward engagement with the world, maintained that serious commitment to biblical fidelity.

This impulse to defend the Bible from its detractors from the left has remained strong in conservative Christian circles—demonstrated in the theological turnarounds that took place 30 years ago in the Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Since the rise of the Religious Right, theology and politics have often intertwined, with conservatives taking an originalist approach to written laws and the Constitution, just as they seek to discover the authorial intent of the Scriptures.

The result is that many church leaders today resist arguments that are theologically or politically liberal. They have adopted a posture that enables them to fend off the biggest threats to the church, which usually come from the left. Read World magazine or listen to Albert Mohler’s The Briefing, and you’ll stay informed regarding threats to religious liberty or new devolutions in theology that lead to the disaster of theological liberalism. The posture here is one of vigilance against slippery slopes to the left of us.

But we live in strange days, to quote the title of a recent book by a Christian leader in Australia, Mark Sayers. Slippery slopes go both ways. Our generation of pastors, equipped with guardrails to protect us from veering to the left, will also need to learn how to keep church members resistant from insidious ideologies that accompany the reaction of people on the populist right.

Sayers sees two groups, small in number but loud in influence. The New Left impulse was once transgressive—an insurgent force that attacked the morality of the establishment. Now that the New Left has attained cultural power, the movement has followed Herbert Marcuse’s trajectory toward authoritarianism, and, not surprisingly, the heart of this perspective is sexual freedom and self-determined identity. Dignity requires separation from anyone who might question your identity or choices.

Sayers sees the impulse at the heart of the New Left as essentially religious:

“The religious leaders of the left set up their inner courts, where only those circumcised of moral absolutism may enter. If anyone decries sexual expression or reproductive rights, or claims absolute truth, he is a Samaritan, unclean and unwelcome in the courts of the holy. . . . The New Left moral order increasingly begins to stiffen with a rigid and puritanical narrowness, becomes the establishment, trying to enforce its moral code from the commanding cultural heights.” (94)

Conservative Christians are well aware of this threat, trained for decades to spot and reject the assumptions that lead to the left’s vision for society.

But what happens when a new version of the right emerges to fight back, “reanimated and reimagined with a transgressive, cool sheen”? In seeking to reject identity politics on the left, some today have embraced dogmas and a nationalist agenda on the right, which morphs into its own brand of identity politics. Patriotic fervor and the rejection of globalization can devolve into nationalism and populist racism.

Ross Douthat believes the rise of both the New Left and the alt-right are the first signs of truly post-Christian politics. Without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right will be “tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed,” he writes. We are entering a world in which Christian virtue does not shade our political alliances, on either far right or the far left. In Sayers’s description, it’s “a world without forgiveness, which seeks not compromise but the utter humiliation of one’s cultural and political enemies.”

Jonathan Van Maren issues the warning this way:

As an increasingly post-Christian population begins to cut ties with church communities—even though they may still identify themselves to pollsters as “Christian”—we’re beginning to see that their affiliations are not simply vanishing but shifting. The alt-right—and we will examine this further in a moment—is now providing a very tempting ideology for many of the disenfranchised, an angry message of blood and soil that echoes elements of Christianity, like the primacy of family, while severing it from the love and compassion central to Christianity.

What does this mean for pastors and church leaders?

We must be equipped to see more than threats to theological orthodoxy coming at us from the left. We must also be trained to see falsehood and danger that lurks within the ranks of the populist right. And we must work to help people from succumbing to the temptations of post-Christian nationalism.

Slippery slopes go both ways. We can no longer be attuned only to dangers present on one side. To be faithful, we must recognize there is more than one way to compromise Christian conviction and Christian witness.

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