Last week in the Christian Science Monitor, the “postevangelical” blogger Mark Spencer described the “coming evangelical collapse,” predicting that “Evangelicalism doesn’t need a bailout. Much of it needs a funeral.” Since then, other evangelicals have begun articulating their own visions for the future of evangelical Christianity. Senior managing editor of Christianity Today Mark Galli, for instance, both agrees and disagrees with Spencer’s assessment:
Like any movement, religious or not, evangelicalism has become embedded in certain aspects of its culture. Because it exists in the contingencies of history, it can’t help but tie itself to some cultural themes while fighting others. While there is a socially liberal wing of the movement, evangelicalism has mostly tied itself to the pro-life, traditional family, personal responsibility, suspicious-of-big-government-yet-patriotic part of our culture. Spencer, among others, says that such identification will lead to its collapse. Eventually, perhaps, but not until a large part of our culture rejects such themes. It’s hard to imagine that happening in ten years.
[…]As senior managing editor of Christianity Today —whose masthead reads “a magazine of evangelical conviction”—it would seem that I have a vested interest in the survival of evangelicalism. Yes and no. On the one hand, as a student of church history, I can also predict that cultural evangelicalism will collapse, not likely in ten years, but collapse it will. On the other hand, evangelicalism will never collapse, at least not until the final altar call.
Read Galli’s entire piece here. The Evangelical Outpost both rounds up the discussion and responds to it here.