CULTURAL PESSIMISM IN MODERN EVANGELICAL THOUGHT: FRANCIS SCHAEFFER, CARL HENRY, AND CHARLES COLSON

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2006 by Patterson, James A

Shortly before his election as Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger delivered a sermon in which he spoke bluntly about a "dictatorship of relativism" that was poised to hurl the West into a new "Dark Age." George Weigel, a biographer of Pope John Paul II, soon drew comparisons between the newly-elected pontiff and St. Benedict of Nursia, the father of European monasticism who labored valiantly to help preserve Western civilization in an earlier period of cultural crisis. As if to ratify this connection between two Benedicts, Weigel invoked the intriguing conclusion to Roman Catholic ethicist Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue:

[I]f the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds of hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.1

Whether or not the "dark age" theme represents an accurate portrayal of the West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some key Catholic thinkers obviously have not hesitated to use it in their analyses of the moral condition of the present era.

The cultural pessimism of Mclntyre and Ratzinger, moreover, suggests a broader context for understanding the fairly widespread propensity in modern evangelical thought to employ images of death, decline, and darkness when describing contemporary Western civilization. In particular, widely-read American evangelicals like Francis Schaeffer, Carl F. H. Henry, and Charles Colson regularly lamented the moral and cultural decay of the West, which they regarded as an undeniable verity of life in the current age. Since such gloomy views are probably shared by many Christians of varying stripes (as well as by some non-believers in the general population), the pessimism of these three evangelical leaders cannot simply be dismissed as idiosyncratic or marginal.

At the same time, the negative cultural images that Schaeffer, Henry, and Colson used appear to have functioned in a distinctive mode that was rooted in the problems and prospects of American evangelicalism during the second half of the twentieth century. Like the Puritan preachers who used the jeremiad sermon to inspire their audiences toward reform in colonial New England, these evangelical public intellectuals adroitly applied cultural pessimism with a motivational purpose.2 They enjoyed some apparent success, at least in stirring evangelicals to a higher level of political engagement. All the same, "dark age" rhetoric may have unintentionally undermined another evangelical priority of the post-World War II era. While Schaeffer, Henry, and Colson all made notable, albeit sometimes indirect, contributions to the Christian higher educational enterprise, their cultural stridency may actually have been counterproductive for the challenge of integrating faith and scholarship. In other words, targeting the "barbarians" of the present age and encouraging a Christian political activism, which often came across as not carefully nuanced, probably made the work of Christian academics all that tougher. Can the integration of faith and learning flourish in an environment where nothing of redemptive value or promise is found in contemporary culture? Does a hostile stance toward the surrounding culture inevitably imply that meaningful dialogue between Athens and Jerusalem is thwarted?

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: THE RISE OF A NEW EVANGELICALISM

In the aftermath of World War II, American evangelicalism entered a period of extraordinary growth that was marked by noteworthy ventures in evangelism, mass media, and education. In one of the most insightful analyses of this remarkable resurgence, Joel Carpenter points to "some amazing feats of religious creativity and imagination" that "turned failure into vindication, marginality into chosenness, survival into an opportunity for expansion, and a religious depression into a prelude for revival."3 Brimming with an optimism that had eluded them since the setbacks of the 1920s, evangelicals boldly charted new designs for cultural and political engagement on a scale that would have made their nineteenth-century forebears proud. While many secular observers and cultured despisers had all but buried fundamentalism in the 1920s and 1930s, the movement's neo-evangelical heirs demonstrated the amazing resiliency of conservative Protestant perspectives in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

As Carpenter so effectively illustrates, this new generation of evangelicals based their optimism on the conviction that spiritual revival in America, indeed even a new "Great Awakening," could turn around the culture.4 Neoevangelical leaders, however, seasoned their hopes for revival with a hefty dose of realism about the cultural scene of the mid-twentieth century. For instance, Boston pastor Harold Ockenga, one of the key architects of the National Association of Evangelicals, often challenged his listeners during the war years by posing two stark choices: the nations of the West could either be rescued by a revival of evangelical Christianity or revert "to the Dark Ages of heathendom."5 The young Carl F. H. Henry, an emerging evangelical star, communicated a similar message in his first explicitly theological book, Remaking the Modern Mind, in which he maintained that Western culture was in a state of near collapse.6 Even so, a resurgent evangelicalism remained at least moderately upbeat about the prospects for a genuine revival that would bring significant cultural renewal.