By the time we come to Part III, of After Evangelicalism, readers are already aware of the nexus of moral dilemmas and human suffering around three key ethical challenges: Sexuality and Gender, Politics, and Race. Given his own life story, Gushee speaks with considerable authority about the lived experience within and outside evangelicalism, and as one whose track record of ethical reflection and intellectual engagement is recognised and acknowledged far beyond Christian academic circles. Those who have read his previous work will know where Gushee is coming from, and going to.
On sexuality and gender his previous books Changing Our Mind, and Still Christian, give a clear exposition of Gushee’s theology and ecclesiology of inclusion and welcome of LGBTQ people. This book reaffirms that conviction, while also offering a critique of the attitudes and assumptions of white and patriarchal evangelicalism which underlie rejection of, and moral judgement of LGBTQ people. There are no easy answers, neither an ethic of sexual perfectionism, nor an ethic of libertinism. Instead Gushee urges a humble discerning of what human love is, and the call on Christian communities to search for ways in which all humans can flourish in a covenanted community called together in the name of Jesus.
The chapter on Politics is an unsparing exposé of white evangelicalism’s embrace of Trumpism. The writer tells of the watershed moment when Trump’s election was confirmed, aided by 81 per cent of white evangelical voters. His own words are unsparing: “The worst parts of Trumpism track closely with the worst parts of the long evangelical heritage: racism, sexism, nationalism, xenophobia, and indifference to ecology and the poor.” (144). Gushee urges a Christian faithfulness that maintains a critical distance from all earthly powers, an ethical discipline provided by Christian social teaching tradition, a global perspective on concerns for the poor, the ecology of the planet, and peace issues, and a thoroughgoing repentance of racism, xenophobia or nationalism.
The closing chapter on race and racism is a cry of the heart. Rooted in a history of slavery and slave ownership in America, Gushee argues that enculturated and institutionalised racism are powerful strains in the DNA of American evangelicalism, and that racism is, in fact, doctrinal heresy. Racism in attitude, action and social structures is a doctrinal aberration that denies the imago dei, and rejects the full consequences of Jesus as the Word made human flesh, for our understanding of both humanity and God.
A painful section recounts the missed opportunities for evangelicalism to repent, to own the wrong and to change direction. Perhaps Gushee will have to write another book, devoted to the deconstruction of white supremacy, and challenging cultural and institutional racism with the full force of the Kingdom ethics of Jesus. Such a book would require a theology strong and wide and deep enough to make possible reconciliation and peaceful racial healing. In turn, such a theology would also require to be substantial and durable, radical and prophetic, sacrificially repentant and costly, if it is to awaken hope for an end to systemic racism. Gushee has no time for virtue signalling; as a theologian and ethicist he is calling exvangelicals to form communities which in their performative practices, ethical activism and public rhetoric of reconciliation and welcome are the living contradiction of racism, exclusion and discrimination.
I finished this book with a heavy heart; not because it was finished but because it had to be written, and has to be read. On my reading, it is a sustained effort at two things. An honest and personal critique of the white evangelical tradition in the United States, and a courageous attempt at reconstructing a basis for Christian obedience in following Jesus and living the ethics of the Kingdom. White evangelicalism is on the decline in the United States; it may well be that its embrace of Trumpism will both hasten and harden the trajectory of its decline. Gushee’s book is a long time insider’s analysis of that weakening and decline, and of what he sees as a fundamentalist hegemony fixated on power and holding on to white privilege, in recent years, apparently at any cost.
This is a book by an ex evangelical writing primarily about white American evangelicalism in its evolution and current manifestations, and out of his personal knowledge, experience and perspective of that context. The book combines personal testimony, ethical critique, reconstructive theology, and pastoral guidance to those who are ex-evangelicals. He is not writing to comfort evangelicals. He is deeply concerned to offer ex evangelicals like himself, some foundations on which to build a more inclusive community of faith that flourishes as the soil in which the seeds of the Kingdom can grow. The book is both personal search and public manifesto. His last sentence in the book has its own poignancy, and latent hopefulness:
“If I have helped to provide, even for a few people, a way out of this lost place and a way ahead in the direction of Jesus, then all I can say is: thanks be to God. (170)
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