Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: an interview with Christine Wicker
By Helen Mildenhall

Christine Wicker’s provocative new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, was released at the end of April.

I asked Christine a few questions about her book and her own beliefs.

Christine, in what way is the Evangelical Church in crisis?

I’ve posted a sampling of the statistics from the first part of my book on my website. More come in every day and I’m adding them to my site as I hear about them.

In the second part of the book I look at attitudes and behavior and why it’s all happening.

That part of the book is not getting much attention from critics, but evangelicals who really care about the faith, and not merely the institution and their image of power, are reading those pages more closely than the first part of the book. They already know the faith is in trouble.

Mainstream evangelicals are so busy attacking me for even suggesting that they aren’t the robust winners they think themselves to be that they’re ignoring all the reasons the country is rebuffing them.

Was this the book you intended to write?

No. I intended to write a story about how great megachurches were. They are great. They’re astonishing.

I was happily lauding that type of faith for what it gives believers. I’d finished two or three grueling re-writes and sent the final book to my publisher, when I realized I’d written the wrong book.

I should have known that years ago. Sources kept telling me that the evangelical movement was in trouble. But evangelicals have always cried wolf, and I didn’t believe them.

Then the results of the Southern Baptist Million Baptism Campaign came in. The Baptists spent more than a million dollars, did a big national road trip and walked neighborhoods all over the country. But they baptized fewer people than the year before.

That forced me to re-consider something else I’d learned but left out of my book. A megachurch consultant had given me pretty good proof that megachurches are facing big trouble.

I put the million baptism failure and the megachurch troubles together and started digging. It was all there. Most of it gathered by evangelical churches themselves. Just waiting for someone to look for it.

Are you an evangelical?

I was saved at nine, but I would have said no until a few weeks ago.

Then Christianity Today educated me about the good standing of nominal evangelicals, and I realized that I’d been too fastidious. So now I’d say yes, why not? With this new book, it will be to my advantage to be an evangelical.

Here’s the kind of evangelical I am:

1. I haven’t been to church for anything but work, weddings or funerals in more than 30 years.
2. I don’t read my Bible. I suspect Bible-based doctrines encourage people to put self at the center and call it God.
3. I don’t think my beliefs are important to God. He probably regards them the way I regard my dog’s beliefs. I love my dog, but I don’t look to him for great depth.
4. I rarely pray for others. If God isn’t moved by the pain around us, he isn’t like to do anything on my say-so.
5. I often think believing in God is absurdly optimistic and can’t do it.
6. I’m pro-choice. I think misogyny is the true heart of anti-abortion laws. The idea that women might wise up and stop being the servants of life rightly terrifies us. But it shouldn’t. Because they won’t. As a former Catholic priest who teaches at Marquette University puts it, women have kept humanity going all this time. We can trust them to decide when a child ought to be brought into this world and when it should not.

7. I believe gays and lesbians should have equal rights and equal respect.
8. I never try to save anyone.
9. I never give God the glory, at least not aloud.
10. I think everybody’s religious ideas are as good as mine.

And I sure am happy to be back in the fold.

What responses have you had to the book so far?

Christianity Today was pretty snarky about it. But Jim Henderson, Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, Spencer Burke, Todd Hunter, Diana Butler Bass, Diane Winston at USC, James Dunn, who is a legend among traditional Baptists, and others endorsed it.

So it must have something in it worth looking at.

What are you hoping this book will achieve?

I hope it will set free and embolden the majority of American Christians who’ve been silenced and ignored since the religious right’s ascendancy.

I hope it will cause reporters to be more bold about challenging the religious right. My greatest wish for my own profession is that it would help journalists re-fashion how they do news.

I hope it will allow people who are developing their own spiritually without any sponsorship — because people are doing that everywhere — to speak up and enter the national conversation.

I hope those evangelicals and other Christians who know in their gut that something like this is happening will be encouraged to admit that what they call Bible-based is merely their interpretations of Scripture. Then they could re-think those interpretations and perhaps be a more potent force for good.

I hope to kill the idea that so-called Bible-based approaches are the only ones that work. That approach locks most Americans out of Christianity and every day they are more locked out because the world is moving farther from the honor-based, tribal society that such Bible-based approaches favor. The last parts of the book deal with why so many of us can’t “get saved” in the old fashioned way.

At the same time, there are stories of wonderful faith in the book, I hope those stories will help outsiders understand that the most conservative brands of evangelical faith attract smart, sensitive people of sound mind and good hearts. This type of faith can help people live good, secure, happy lives.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Writing this book was a miserable experience. I had to face a lot of anger and fear in myself and in my former evangelical friends. But it’s helped me. I no longer have those flash points of anger and despair that evangelicals used to inspire in me. It’s good to be rid of them.

Jim Henderson gets most of the credit for that. When I started this book I was still scoffing at his approach. I didn’t think it could work. I still thought he was employing some evangelical trick, a crafty new way to collect scalps.

But his honesty and openness worked some kind of magic. It changed how I think about myself and the value of Christianity.

Our conversations have given my passion for Jesus’ teachings, which I hardly recognized myself, an outlet and a voice. He allowed me to see that I could be a good, thoughtful, honest, caring person of conscience who didn’t set myself apart from others as “the saved one” and still have community with people who follow Jesus.

When he first told me this, I couldn’t even contemplate such a thing. I found it alarming, slightly distasteful, and at the same time, appealing. I wanted to stop my ears or at least be strapped to the mast so I couldn’t be overwhelmed and crash on the rocks.

But the idea is growing on me.

It galls me to admit how right he turned out to be. I’m frightened by it. But I comfort myself by imagining that he would say, “That’s all right. You’re wise not to get too close. You might get burned again. It’s okay to set limits. It’s okay to be yourself.” Those ideas are radical to me, but I like them.

Christine Wicker was raised in Oklahoma, Texas, and other parts of the South. Her mother's grandfather was an itinerant Baptist preacher, and her dad's father was a Kentucky coal miner. During her seventeen years at the Dallas Morning News, she was a feature writer, columnist, and religion reporter. She is the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead.

Helen Mildenhall lives in Illinois with her husband and two children. She hosts the blog Conversation at the Edge and is website manager manager for Off The Map, an organization promoting otherlyness, the spirituality of serving.