Today evangelical Christianity is almost entirely wedded to conservative American politics, even to the point where there are significant disagreements between American conservative evangelicals and conservative evangelicals elsewhere in the world. The merging of religion and politics could have disastrous consequences of evangelicalism -- at least from the perspective of evangelicals.
At least one observer fears that evangelical Christianity itself will collapse within a couple of generations. Well, I won't shed any tears.
1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.
2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.
Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.
3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.
4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.
5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to "do good" is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.
6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.
7. The money will dry up.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Michael Spencer goes by the moniker "The Internet Monk" and describes himself as a "postevangelical reformation Christian." He should probably add "completely American-centric" because he makes no effort to restrict his comments to just the evangelical community in America.
Spencer does refer to America a couple of times, but overall his claims about the future are made in an entirely general way that would apply to evangelical Christianity as a whole; but all the problems he describes are more a problem for American evangelical Christianity (and those non-American churches which have sadly fallen under the spell of American missionaries and money).
It's as if the existence of non-American evangelicals who don't have all those problems were completely irrelevant -- or just unknown. But isn't that in fact one of the core problems of evangelical Christianity: dense blinders that prevent evangelicals from recognizing that they are confusing contingent culture, economics, and politics for religion? In effect, then, Michael Spencer is just replicating the core problem he's writing about. Ironic, isn't it?
It seems to me that Michael Spencer is simply predicting what he wishes would happen: a collapse of faceless institutions which allows for the rise of ministries that promote a more "true" faith untainted by politics. But isn't that what Protestants and Evangelicals have been pushing for since the Reformation? Throughout history, small groups break away from large churches that have become too "institutional" -- too concerned with the worldly matters of politics, organization-building, transforming society, planning for the future, etc.
Thus while it's true that the blending of religion and politics may have negative consequences for the participating churches down the road, I doubt that the whole of evangelical Christianity -- or even just American evangelical Christianity -- will "collapse" any time soon. We might see a decline of the most politically conservative churches if American politics shifts enough to the left (like with accepting gays). We might see a decline of mega-churches if the culture changes. But that's about it.
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