The power and the weirdness of the evolving evangelical narrative

By Jeff Sharlet

The New York Times has declared itself on the subject of megachurches — and thus, in the paper’s logic, evangelicaldom — with an 8,107 word story in its Easter Sunday edition of the magazine, “The Soul of a New Exurb,” by contributing editor Jonathan Mahler. I read it with terrible dismay, not because it’s bad, but because it’s pretty good, and, as it happens, on Good Friday I put to bed a 10,000-plus word story on a megachurch — New Life, in Colorado Springs — and exurbanism for Harper’s magazine.

I’m pretty certain I can claim I got to the subject first — my story grew out of and includes a fair chunk of notes on the subject I made after Ralph Reed led Georgia Republicans to a set of historical victories in 2002, using not Christian Coalition rhetoric, but the language of the exurb: shorter commutes, lower mortgages, more time with family. Reed hadn’t given up his old crusades, I argue; rather, he’d found a new and better way of talking about them.

But that’s my story, which’ll be out in the May Harper’s. Mahler has made the first big statement in the secular press, and what will probably be the definitive one. If you’ve never heard of a megachurch, it may be shocking. A friend of mine who might be described as “spiritual but not religious” alerted me to the story with an all-caps email: “SCARY!” She’s a Democrat; Mahler does a good job of detailing how many megachurches function as Republican political machines. Others will find Mahler’s account amusing: the church he profiles, Radiant, in the town of Surprise, Arizona, has a drive-thru latte window and a $16,000 annual budget for Krispy Kremes.

But to my thinking, the sharpest insight of “Soul of a New Exurb” comes with Mahler’s effort to distinguish today’s megachurches from their 1980s incarnations: “the new breed of megachurches,” he writes, “has more in common with the frontier churches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which served as gathering places for pioneers who had gone West in search of opportunity.”

In the town of Surprise, though, Radiant acts as more than a gathering place. “In sprawling, decentralized exurbs like Surprise,” writes Mahler, “where housing developments rarely include porches, parks, stoops or any of the other features that have historically brought neighbors together, megachurches provide a locus for community. In many places, they operate almost like surrogate governments, offering residents day care, athletic facilities, counseling, even schools.”

Case in point: In Surprise, Radiant Church runs a federally-funded public charter school. Ostensibly secular, the school operates as a recruiting agency for the church.

This story should lay accusations of the Times‘ hostility toward evangelicals to a rest. Mahler’s story goes easier on this theocratic overstep than would a solid piece of reporting in Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicaldom. Perhaps it is a matter of manners: Mahler is in strange territory, on ground occupied by the “other side” of what is reputed to be a “culture war.” Mahler wants to be fair, of course, so he focusses on commonalities, the ordinary desires for affordable homes and good schools and fun activities that Radiant members share with nearly everyone. And he excludes that which “nearly everyone” wouldn’t understand, venturing into the heart of charismatic Christianity gingerly to note that Radiant’s pastor “even says he speaks in tongues,” as if this were a hint of fringe religion.

It’s not; it’s mainstream. More mainstream than the mainstream press, for that matter. But Mahler writes according to the experts — his otherwise observant story is larded with quotes from talking heads — and thus he sees Radiant, as exemplar of the new American Christendom, in traditional terms, which dictate that a church can be assimilationist or separatist. Mahler’s most critical observation comes close to the end: “…there’s a kind of narrowing going on here as well,” he writes. “…Tom flipped to another passage from a recent sermon. ‘”Some seed fell among the thorny weeds, and the weeds grew up with them and choked the good plants,”‘ he read, quoting Luke 8:7. Then he added his exegesis: ‘We’ve had friends who were not Christian, and for me they were like the thorny weeds,’ he said. ‘We’ve had to commit ourselves to friends who could help us grow spiritually.'”

That’s a common attitude, but it’s a bit misleading — it suggests that today’s evangelicals are like fundamentalists of old, more concerned with purity than power. A more revealing passage comes when Mahler has the good sense to tweak the authority of sociologist Alan Wolfe, who in his ongoing quest for something resembling a national character goes even further than Mahler in claiming that we are really all the same:

“In his recent book The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College, writes that ‘American faith has met American culture — and American culture has triumphed.’ Radiant seems the embodiment of this assertion. And yet not exactly. [Pastor]McFarland’s long-term plan for his congregants involves much more than playing video games and eating doughnuts. He says that his hope — his expectation, really — is that casual worshipers will gradually immerse themselves in Radiant’s many Christ-based programs, from financial planning to parenthood and education, until they have eventually incorporated Christian values into every aspect of their lives.” 

I wish Mahler had continued with this analysis. What’s striking about megachurch evangelicaldom is that it combines the passion of separatism — purity — with the ambition of assimilation — ubiquity.

But the story here is for most part the official one, the narrative of religious change in America told by “church-growth” authorities. And that, it should be said, makes it unusual for the secular press. Mahler has made several very smart moves.

First, he chose Radiant, rather than better-known megachurches like Willowcreek, outside of Chicago, or Saddleback, in Orange County. In Mahler’s telling, there is nothing distinctive about Radiant. It’s the megachurch equivalent of Middletown, the classic sociological study of anywhere, U.S.A. That gives Mahler’s account a kind of authority that accounts built around superlatives (mine included) lack.

Second, he paid attention not only to secular experts like Wolfe, but also to evangelical experts such as John Vaughn, head of the the Megachurch Research Center in Bolivar, Missouri. This doesn’t make his account more accurate than others, but it does mean we learn about the evolution of megachurches from the perspective of those who’ve helped build them. By their way of thinking, megachurches aren’t sensational, they’re simply the logical progression of church life in America. They’re normal.

But Mahler’s good manners, his reliance on the public narrative, and the Times‘ most fundamental bias — dilution of the strange — lead him to overlook the fact that what is normal — that is, common — can still be weird.

Yes, Radiant is weird; much of modern evangelicaldom is weird. That’s a charge I make not because I don’t share its worldview, but because it holds a worldview in rapid flux; what mainstream evangelicals believed twenty years ago is tepid next to what many believe today. It is weird in the sense that much of the worldview is new and raw, some of it undercooked (The Prayer of Jabez), some of it too hot (the surprisingly common belief that homosexuality is “caused” by demonic possession), all of it electric with newfound political power, cultural awareness, ambition, hesitation, anticipation. Contemporary evangelicaldom is anti-intellectual and intellectually vibrant; “humble” and flamboyantly proud.

Nothing less is to be expected from a Great Awakening that’s in the tradition of those led byJonathan Edwards and Charles Finney but too vast to be known by any one central figure. (Consider the insider jockeying over who’ll get to be the next Billy Graham: Will James Dobson finally get the topdog status he seems to crave? Will Rick Warrenveer rightward to win the mantle? Will Ted Haggard openly claim the authority he already quietly wields? Will Graham’s son, Franklin, surprise everyone and finally fill his father’s shoes? My handicap: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and then some. The movement is too big now to be helmed by a single personality.)

Some argue that Protestantism, worldwide, is undergoing a transformation on the scale of the Reformation. I’m not convinced that’s the case — I think the changes may be as politically and aesthetically potent as that of the Reformation, but probably not as theologically significant — but there’s no questioning the fact that big things are happening in the Protestant spiritual world, with very real consequences for those who prefer the plain old world.

The 2004 election alerted the mainstream press to that reality. In the days after the election, there was much talk of the overwhelming importance of “moral values”; and then, for a spell, much talk about how it was really still traditional politics that mattered; and now the fruits of many frantic, mid-November magazine and newspaper assignments are ripening. The results are, for the most part, very respectful; so respectful, in fact, that they respect the radical fervor of a revolutionary movement right out of the story.

Well, I’ll get my shot at adding the power and the weirdness to the narrative next month. “Add” is about right, I think. The movement is too big for just one magazine article.