Evangelical Cynicism
The cynicism that most afflicts evangelicalism is not coming from the outside, but the inside.
The most potent form of cynicism in US evangelicalism today isn’t coming from its detractors, from so-called “exvangelicals”. It’s coming from inside evangelicalism.
It’s common to dismiss many of the external criticisms leveraged at US evangelicalism as “cynical”. This word is doing a lot of work.
Cynics and Romantics
I understand cynicism theologially as an antonym of “hope”. Cynicism renders a closed world, hope renders a redemptive world. It’s condemnation without the possiblity of redemption.
But I’m also aware that “hope” can be reduced and distorted to “fantasy”. When hope is a fantasy, or a “phantom” divorced from reality, then we are not hopeful in the biblical sense, we are not hopeful, we’re sentimental. We’re romantic.
Cynicism is the Cross divorced from the Resurrection. And cynicism doesn’t carry this Cross, it carries out the crucifixion.
On the other hand, by labeling critics as “cynics”, hope can be reduced to sentimental fantasy. Romanticism wants the Resurrection divorced from the Cross.
I think about churches putting their heads in the sand over the crisis of abuse in the church. The rush to paint victims as critics and then dismiss them as “cynics” points to a sentimental romanticism distorting how some view the church, and God. We’ve lost what cynicism really is by trying to use it to determine who is in and who is out. Cynicism has become a defense measure.
Cynicism is more than criticism. And if we should divest of cynicism, then it must be understood as our faithless acceptance of the status quo. Maybe then the cynicism that needs to be confronted in evangelicalism then is the kind that loves to make and have enemies without any responsibility to love them.
Evangelical Cynicism
The accusation of “cynical” functions as a way to redraw or maintain the boundaries of evangelicalism. But I’m arguing there is cynicism within evangelicalism. It is the cynicism of our moral imagination.
If cynicism operates in a closed world, then maybe the most potent cynicism within evangelicalism is our embrace of the choices offered to us by political machines. I do not believe it is a stretch to describe the general and common shape of the evangelical moral imagination by looking at the voter’s guide handouts in the church lobby.
Which brings me to a very familiar place. Trump is once again running for office. And I can see no better time than now to remind ourselves of the need to maintain the freedom of the church’s moral imagination.
Because the church itself is liberated by the freedom of God. Jesus’ body in the world must resist being held captive to manufactured choices of political necessity and immediacy.
But evangelical cynicism takes these choices at face value for a zero-sum culture war. Evangelical cynicism understands what it means to be Christian in America by the political calculus of partisan games. It accepts the world as rendered by political necessity, not by the Biblical account of principalities & powers.
This doesn’t mean we run from politics, but rather that we practice a different politics. These politics, notes Bonhoeffer, should be far more subversive.
The Unsettling Antidote of Hope
The cynicism that most afflicts evangelicalism is not coming from the outside, but the inside. It is a cynicism that short circuits and even shuts off the task of imagining what it means to be “holy troublemakers” in the words of Jacques Ellul.
The question confronting all of us in days like ours, evangelical or not, is where we prefer cynicism to romanticism, and where we prefer romanticism to cynicism.
In the tension of our preferences is a confrontation with the living God who calls us instead to a hope which is as comforting as it is unsettling. Hope in Jesus makes demands on our lives that sometimes we’d prefer to ignore.
And so that’s why cynicism is attractive. That’s why romanticism is really just positive cynicism. And why neither can lead us into the future of Jesus Christ.