What’s Wrong with Evangelicalism?
The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil that Seduced the Evangelical Movement, Mike Cosper. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2024. Hardcover, 214 pages.
There have been various efforts to diagnose evangelicalism’s ailment. In 1994, Mark Noll argued that The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was that there wasn’t much of one. In 2008, Michael Horton put his finger on what he called Christless Christianity. Last year, Joe Rigney assigned blame to The Sin of Empathy. It seems many have a sense that something isn’t right in evangelicalism, but they can’t agree on exactly what it is. Mike Cosper adds another voice to the discussion.
The author is especially known for his podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. For those just tuning in, Mars Hill was a Seattle mega-church pastored by Mark Driscoll. It fell under the weight of scandal in 2014-2015. Cosper created his podcast to document the grim stories of spiritual abuse. This book emerges from the shadows of Mars Hill, as well as other churches which ended in scandalous ignominy. This is Cosper’s effort to understand why these stories keep happening and what can be done to resist the forces behind them. He writes, “I want to look beyond the specifics of any individual (or their pathology) to the ideological and spiritual architecture they have in common” (p.7). To achieve this he relies on the insights of Hannah Arendt, the journalist famous for writing about the “banality of evil” she witnessed at the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt defined ideology as something that “can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise” (quoted on p.32). According to Cosper, ideology is a “totalizing way of accounting for history” (p.32) structured as a story. Ideology is “the evil that seduced the evangelical movement.” Ideology has manifested itself in different forms. For example, Mark Driscoll’s form was masculinity. His ideological story: “The church failed to reach a generation of people because it lost all the men.” This ideology enveloped everything at Mars Hill.
Though much of the book is philosophical and sociological, eventually Cosper concludes that “seen through the lens of worship…ideology is idolatry – falsely ascribing worth of things that cannot satisfy” (p.187). He writes that we need something better than what ideology offers: to come home to God. We ought to “worship the living God and…see his beauty revealed in the face of Jesus” (p.188).
Cosper also argues that dissuading evangelicalism from ideology will require “virtuousity,” which means “to speak to and evoke the passions and desires of the crowd, regardless of our message or medium” (p.173). Evangelical believers must speak, tell stories, and do it excellently. Regrettably, this leaves one with the impression that some technique or method will invariably be the means of spiritual revival.
The Church in Dark Times gets you thinking. One can stand off at a distance and comfortably arm-chair quarterback the problems over there in evangelicalism. However, what about ideology in our Reformed churches? Historically, a case could be made that the notion of ourselves as true church (vs. every other church which is not) had an ideological character. It was a black and white perspective with no room for nuance. But the book itself suggests another area in which ideology could perhaps lodge itself among us: mission or vision statements. Cosper says, “Ideology is what appears whenever someone claims to have a simple, all-explaining idea that can change the world. In our churches, this is often referred to as a mission statement” (p.56). As someone who has championed the idea of Reformed churches having such a statement, this challenged me. I need to think about this further and perhaps I’m not the only one.
One last thing to mention: on page 171, Cosper quotes a figure from the world of wrestling and the quote includes blasphemy. I don’t know why Christian writers do this and Christian publishers allow it. It seems yet another symptom of The Church in Dark Times.
