Is evangelicalism the walking dead?

An essay in Christian Science Monitor today suggests that within 20 years, the evangelical movement will be dead. I think it is wrong for several reason, but first, what it is right about:

• It is true that by tying their religious movement to a particular political philosophy, they would be in trouble as soon as that philosophy became outdated
• It is true that by failing to make understanding of their own theological traditions (so-called “catholic” Christianity, which includes much that modern evangelicals fail to appreciate, such as the role tradition plays in the theological hermeneutic) they basically made the whole thing hostage to how people “feel” about their religion
• and it is true they cannot fight the “rising tide of secularism” (they’d have been better to deal with it directly by making secularism their own rather than the enemy. As I have argued before, secularism protects them)

Here’s what they are wrong about:

Evangelicalism is not the sole preserve of the American revivalist movement. It in fact goes back to Lutheran origins, and includes the liberal traditions of that denomination and others in Europe, as well as the rather more restrained evangelicalism of the British traditions. The sort of evangelicalism I grew up with tended to be more like low church Anglicanism than the hard line southern Baptists, and it was open minded to homosexuality, equal rights for men and women, and racial groups. It tended to be a lot more socially conscious (when I did theology, the head of the “rival” Baptist college was a liberation theologian). It permitted critical thinking and biblical interpretation.

This is a much harder beast to kill, even if you wanted to see it die. American hardline evangelicalism is fundamentally antimodernist, and if you try to ignore or fight the tide, you drown in it. But an adaptive evangelicalism will persist so long as it is adaptive, just like any lineage in social evolution or biological evolution. What the writer in CSM is bemoaning is the loss of antimodernism. But the traditions will persist, and probably even the denominations, so long as they are able to adapt to the changes in social ecologies.

And of course, fundamentalism will remain as the village idiot of social discourse and from time to time raise its head.