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It is my pleasure this afternoon to get to introduce to you our jones lecture Caitlin. Bt Caitlyn is an acquisitions editor currently with Brazos Press, a division of Baker Books. But for nearly 10 years,

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she served as an editor at Christianity today, where for four years she served as the magazines youngest and first female managing editor. She's originally from Dayton Ohio and is a graduate of Calvin College, as well

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as being the author of a Woman's Place, a christian vision for your Calling in the Office, the Home and the World. And she has written pieces that have appeared in the atlantic the new yorker,

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the new york times Religion News Service and Religion and Politics, as well as the Washington Post. And she's commented on faith and culture for CNN Abc NPR , the Associate Press Religion News services service and the

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Canadian broadcasting Corporation. But if these accomplishments have yet to impress you, you should also know that she writes about evangelical is um and politics now in a Political climate where our last election showed 87% of evangelicals

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voting a certain way, you would think it might not be a good idea to talk about politics with this particular demographic. And yet, Caitlin weighs in carefully and pastorally talking about the need for persons coming

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out of the evangelical church to be able to speak boldly in a time when voices are needed. I wanted to share with you a brief bit of what what she's written, addressing political issues from racial injustice

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to abortion, to immigration reform, to sexual assault carries the risk of losing fellow evangelicals. But it carries the far greater reward of living out christian moral leadership in a politically and spiritually chaotic time Caitlin.

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We are grateful for your christian moral leadership. And we look forward to what you will say to us today and well, thank you Caroline for that very warm and well researched introduction. Um, and to

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uh President Wardlaw and the rest of the Austin Seminary community for allowing me to be part of your prestigious lecture series. I, as Carolyn mentioned I uh , maybe she didn't mention I recently moved to new

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york. Before that I was in Chicago For 10 years. So the warmth here, both the warmth in the air and the warmth among you all is a welcome break from my normal routine. So I

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will admit that on the evening of November eight, I got very little sleep. Now they say that wine interferes with sleep patterns. So surely the cabernet that I sipped nervously while watching the televised electoral map

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sweep from blue to red. In a very unusual turn of events. Probably did not help. But that night I did manage to have one vivid dream . And in it I am standing on a stage

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in an auditorium full of Christian leaders and I am telling them that their support for Donald Trump during the 2016 election will prove to be a grave mistake. The next morning greeted me as it did half the

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voting population, feelings of grief and confusion. But the days following, the morning of November nine brought a more complex emotion. I have come to think of it as something like soul abandonment. That wasn't

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meant to be funny, but maybe it doesn't strike you that way as I'm sure you've heard early analysis from the Pew Research Center found that of the white evangelicals who voted on Election Day, 81% had voted

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for trump a thrice married casino and real estate mogul who has said that he never asks God for forgiveness . Their support for him was higher than support for previous Republican candidates like Mitt Romney in 2012, and

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George W. Bush in 2004. And the warnings against trump from many christian leaders and publications, including Christianity Today, the magazine where I served as an editor for almost a decade had seemingly fallen on many

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deaf ears. And so in the days after the election, I no longer recognized my own faith family , but I can no more disown that family than I can disown my biological one. And sometimes I've

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tried that too. The bonds of faith run deeper than blood. Now you can breathe a sigh of relief. President Wardlaw did not invite me to this lecture series to have me process my spiritual angst in

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a room full of strangers. And surely we can say the american church has survived far worse than a trump presidency yet it's important to mine the meaning of evangelicals broad support for a rather an evangelical candidate.

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Now, I grant that a vote doesn't necessarily mean an overt support of all that a president and his administration stands for. Nonetheless, the 81% signals that evangelicalism as a theological movement, as a cultural movement

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, Has drifted far from its roots and finds itself in the midst of two crises. The first crisis is one of authority and is at the heart of the evangelical movement, one whose history I will trace

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in a bit. The second crisis is one of identity and it flows from the crisis of authority, but has taken on a new urgency in the past 50 years in the midst of much social and cultural

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change, and Christians perceived loss of dominance and power in the west. So I will review these crises this afternoon before suggesting ways that evangelicalism can thrive in the years to come. And I do this as

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someone who stands both within and a little bit outside the movement. Now, I'm inside the movement simply because if you were to observe my daily life and follow me around it would kind of appear jesus,

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e for lack of a more precise term. I do attend church every week and sometimes at this church , people raise their hands and I heard last night that that's really hard for presbyterians, but I will

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pray for you. I will lift my hands in prayer for you. I believe that the bible is more than a collection of stories about religious experiences. I believe that it is the word of God.

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I desire to live in such a way that embodies God's love and justice and mercy for all people who they're God's image and thus deserve respect and dignity. And I have on occasion even told someone about jesus

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, even though I despise talking to strangers on airplanes and will probably only mention jesus if the airplane appears to be going down. Evangelical is um is the rich soil into which my faith has been planted.

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And despite this soul abandonment that I have felt in the past few years, I am grateful for the ways that being an evangelical has taught me that love of God and neighbor is a real actual force in

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the world that can help heal its deep Brokenness. But I also speak as somewhat of an outsider to the movement insofar as that label. Evangelical has become a political rather than a spiritual signifier. You've probably

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heard some of this story history not too long ago in the 1970s and 80s, conservative christians who came to be called the religious right sought to stem the tide of cultural change, what they thought of as

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decay by forming alliances with political leaders that they hoped would get the country back on track. And even though the architects of the religious right are mostly dead or defamed by this point, their legacy looms large

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in the assumption The White Christian witness necessarily looks like voting for one political party over another. And we see how deeply that assumption holds way given the 2016 results. And we might lament the ways that this

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alliance has led evangelicals to look and sound like a voting bloc and to overlook pressing issues that run counter to the Republican Party's agenda. So it's worth spending a bit of time tracing the historical roots of evangelicalism

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in the U. S. To see. Well , where did we get so far from these roots ? I have found that of of all the religious groups in the United States evangelicals have to be among

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the most misunderstood. Even prestigious publications like the new yorker and the New York Times frequently get evangelicals wrong referring to them as evangelists or the evangelicals, which is to miss the movements decentralized nature and on the

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ground diversity, it's well established that religion is somewhat of a blind spot for journalists who are tempted to fill in the facts with stereotypes and hastily scanned Wikipedia pages. This leads to some errors that go to

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print that are by turns hilarious and grading. For example, one new york Times report on tourism and the tourism industry in Israel noted that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks the site where quote many christians

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believe that jesus is buried. If many christians believe that jesus body is buried in the ground, that story should be on the front page since it's a Radical departure from what most Christians have believed in the

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last 2000 years. Um we will also pray, I will also pray for the journalists in my hand raising church worship services, but I do believe that journalists are somewhat at a disadvantage at getting evangelicals right

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? Because evangelicals themselves aren't always sure who they are and who speaks for them. The movement is global , drawing from hundreds of denominations, each with their distinct emphasis and traditions and figureheads. Evangelical is um

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includes believers as diverse as Chinese house churches that meet in secret due to government restriction megachurches that in Nigeria that draw 200,000 worshipers each week and blend faith with promises of financial success. So when a reporter wants

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to know what Catholics think of a particular pressing social issue, they can call up the local archbishop or they can look at a statement from the U. S. Conference of catholic bishops. By contrast evangelicals

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don't have a pope and by the way many days I think we could maybe stand to have one in the vacuum of centralized leadership. Often the loudest voices espousing the most extreme views end up speaking for the

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whole movement and the whole family to media outlets. And that's something that I have found incredibly distressing and frustrating. So what is an evangelical well to understand how this movement has drifted far from its roots,

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we have to re examine those routes. The historian George marston once quipped that an evangelical is quote anyone who likes Billy Graham actually. It kind of works . If you think about it, it's pretty good

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Graham's own evangelistic crusades In the past century find their ancestry in a series of revivals that swept across the North Atlantic Anglo American World in the 18th and 19th centuries. Those revivals led by people like George Whitfield

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john Wesley, the founder of Methodism, the puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Those revivals came to be known as the 1st and 2nd great awakenings. They would draw crowds of thousands calling individuals to repent, to

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turn away from sin and toward christ and to rely and trust on in christ for salvation. Those revivals stress that faith came not simply from going to church or from following rituals they're in, but from this

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intensely personal experience, this experience of having one's heart strangely warmed by the good news. That's a beautiful line from Wesley. The word evangelical derives from the greek Evangelion. The seminarians might correct my greek.

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Uh and what does this word mean? It means good news or gospel. And what is the good news? The good news is that God in christ has conquered sin and death through the cross and is

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renewing persons and the whole creation for an eternal kingdom through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The evangelical experience centers on conversion, which is understood as both a single moment and a lifelong process of trusting christ

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and his promise of salvation. And these revivals That brought this good news to thousands were so successful that by the 1820s, evangelical is um, was the dominant expression of Christianity in the us. And the

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methodist and baptist churches had gone from being these kind of obscure sex to America's two largest denominations. Another popular definition of evangelicalism comes from David Bevington, according to this british historian before hallmarks of evangelical faith are

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as follows. First, conversion is um, the belief that one needs to change to be converted as a result of hearing the Gospel. Second Biblical Theism , the belief that the bible is the word of

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God and has authority in matters of faith and practice . Third cruces centrism, the belief that the death of christ on the cross is the defining moment in history and finally activism, the belief that the Gospel

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compels christians to work for personal and social reform during their time on earth. I believe this emphasis on activism has spurred great social good in the United States and beyond. From its earliest days, The evangelical

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movement held that if the good news of the Gospel doesn't sound like good news to our neighbors to our fellow image bears people, we've never met, but who we believe bear the imprint of God, then

00:17:07.790 - 00:17:26.550

it's not really good news. The Gospel isn't just for individuals, but for the flourishing of whole communities and societies. This is where evangelicals diverge from their long lost cousins, the fundamentalists, those strange cousins

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Are remembered for their rejection of modern forms of knowledge and their role in the scopes monkey trial of 1925 . As evangelicalism emerged as a more unified movement. After World War Two, its leaders criticized their fundamentalist

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cousins for neglecting social issues and for retreating from cultural engagement. Those evangelicals rightly understood that the gospel must be good for your neighbor, and if the good news isn't good for your neighbor, is it really

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good? Perhaps no other evangelical captured this better than the 19th century preacher Charles Finney, the most important figure of the second great awakening. At age 29 , Finney came to Christ with this signature evangelical drama

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, kneeling in prayer during a walk in the woods . He said that the experience was like waves of liquid love coursing through his body. The morning after this dramatic encounter, Finney dropped out of law school

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and he began a period of study with the presbyterian church go presbyterians. He spent the next 15 years traveling throughout upstate new york, drawing crowds to the thousands in the thousands, facing opposition from conservative presbyterians

00:18:48.260 - 00:19:06.470

and liberal unitarians alike. And in his preaching, I think this is the important thing about Phineas witness . He not only preached individual conversion, but directly addressed social ills. Head on things like alcohol abuse

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, calls for the humane treatment of prisoners, support for women's rights and most controversial for his time, admonitions against slavery. This was an era in our nation's history when being an abolitionist was an insult in

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the north and could very well get you killed in the south. But Finney believed that genuine christian conversion always resulted in a changed life and that these slaveholders who said that they were christians risk eternal judgment for

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keeping fellow image bearers in bondage. During Phineas tenure at Oberlin College, A Berlin became the first U . S. College to admit both african americans and women and became an important stop on the underground railroad

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. One of Phineas proteges, Theodore Weld was converted to the cause. After hearing funny preach, he went on to organize the 70. This was a group of abolitionists sent out like the disciples to preach

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freedom for slaves. Late Weld later wrote an anti slavery tracked, showing that in fact the bible condemned slavery and that tracked would become the inspiration for Harriet . Beecher, Stowe's uncle Tom's cabin, the novel

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that reshaped americans moral imagination about slavery long before a drop of blood had been shed in the civil war . Now, even as even the abolitionist splintered into factions and lost funding and even while of course many

00:20:41.880 - 00:21:00.770

white christians continued to defend slavery, Finney and his friends left a long legacy of evangelical social responsibility. We see that today in groups like International Justice Mission , which rescues victims of trafficking and slave labor worldwide

00:21:02.340 - 00:21:17.770

, and world relief, the largest refugee resettlement organization in the U. S. That happens to be the development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. These and other groups led new york times columnist Nicholas

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Kristof to label evangelicals the new internationalists in his journalistic work, he saw that these were people who really wanted to give everything they had to end sex trafficking , um to speak out against slavery to address the

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scourge of HIV AIDS throughout Africa. In 2002, Kristof wrote, evangelicals are usually regarded by snooty college educated by coastal elites as dangerous neanderthals, and maybe they're regarded by that by some people in Austin to

00:21:55.440 - 00:22:10.430

, I don't know. Um But while the old religious right was destructive when it launched the cultural wars , the new internationalists are saving lives in some of the most forgotten parts of the world. Yeah,

00:22:10.440 - 00:22:22.690

if I am honest, I'm not actually sure if Nick Kristof would write that today. It's true. Yes, I j. M world relief. Many other groups are going about the work of loving and

00:22:22.690 - 00:22:40.170

serving their neighbors even while the news headlines focus on trump's Evangelical advisory council. Yet I believe many evangelicals are tempted in this moment to reassume the cultural wars fought by the Religious right and are picking up swords

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when much of the world still needs the witness of plowshares. The temptation facing evangelicals in this century is to assume a posture of fearful self defense rather than loving self sacrifice. I think they are uniquely vulnerable

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to this temptation due to this crisis of authority inherent to the movement. The crisis of authority centers on the bible that ancient poetic oftentimes confusing text that we nonetheless believe is the word of God. 2017 marked

00:23:15.410 - 00:23:30.900

the 5/100 anniversary of the reformation sparked by martin Luther as he issued his 95 theses to church leaders. Throughout Germany. In october 15 17, Luther was compelled to challenge the church harder hierarchy. In light

00:23:30.910 - 00:23:49.260

of indulgences this practice of selling certificates that purported to reduce the punishment of the purchaser or his family in purgatory, Luther saw this and other excesses of late medieval Catholicism, as departures from the one true faith

00:23:51.240 - 00:24:03.910

Luther called christians to place their trust in the bible as the word of God rather than in the words of bishops, councils, and man made creeds. So Sola script or a scripture alone, is a

00:24:03.910 - 00:24:21.210

hallmark of the reformation and of the evangelicals who followed in their footsteps. The footsteps of the reformers, Luther's teachings went viral, as the kids these days say, throughout Western europe, the invention of the

00:24:21.210 - 00:24:36.370

printing press allowed him and other reformers to disseminate their teachings, to lay christians, and christians who could read, could learn and engage the biblical story directly from the text, rather than from gazing at the

00:24:36.370 - 00:24:51.710

stained glass windows in their local cathedral or just relying and trusting in what the local bishop had to say . The reformers underscored the priesthood of all believers that every christian could discern for themselves, the bible's teaching

00:24:51.710 - 00:25:07.560

and apply it to their lives. And they were they were confident they seemed to be confident that christians would understand the plain meaning of the text apart from a tradition of interpretation or a hermeneutic to guide them

00:25:07.600 - 00:25:26.060

. And so you can probably guess where this leads the reformation produced. Not one plain meaning of the text, but several plain meanings of scripture, a diversity of interpretive traditions and embassies. So we have

00:25:26.060 - 00:25:42.210

the Mennonites, the calvinists, the baptist, Anabaptist , the Low Church Pentecostals and the High Church presbyterians . Yea, presbyterians, all of these groups and factions and institutions and denominations could claim to fit in

00:25:42.210 - 00:26:00.010

the big tent of evangelicalism. But at any given point in the last 500 years, these groups have debated the Bible's teachings fiercely and sometimes have doubted each other's salvation. Are you guys even really christians Evangelical

00:26:00.010 - 00:26:23.770

is um is a big tent, but inside the tent it's a 12 ring circus or 1000 ring circus , historian molly worthy were then describes this perpetual state of evangelicalism as an intellectual civil war. Now,

00:26:25.440 - 00:26:41.620

Worthen says that since uh since the post World War two evangelicals derive their knowledge, their understanding of how Christianity applies to modern issues. Through three frames. They look to the bible, they look to personal

00:26:41.620 - 00:27:00.060

experience and they look to reason to figure out how to be christians in this world. But these different ways of arriving at truth, these different epistemological avenues create many competing truth claims and cognitive dissonance over time

00:27:00.070 - 00:27:18.850

, lacking both a single unified understanding of the bible as well as a church hierarchy to help engage the text. Evangelicals are particularly susceptible to creating and relying on strong men. These are authoritarian figures who promise

00:27:18.860 - 00:27:36.880

clarity and cohesion. In the midst of that cognitive dissonance. We see this today in the hundreds of independent churches, led by charismatic men, who often operate apart from any kind of accountability, These leaders

00:27:36.880 - 00:27:55.800

have been remarkably effective at growing ministries, attracting followers in establishing their unique brands. They need a felt need for security amid anxiety among evangelicals and other cultural conservatives about where America is headed and whether they will

00:27:55.810 - 00:28:12.340

lose some of the power and dominance that they have enjoyed for so long. The cultural revolution of the past half century has left many evangelical sensing this political disadvantage and fearing encroachments on their religious freedom. As

00:28:12.340 - 00:28:30.290

one church leader said to Christianity today, recently, we've gone from being the home team to the away team, so enter president trump. One significant reason , I believe that 81% of white voting evangelicals supported

00:28:30.290 - 00:28:45.870

Trump despite his being way outside the evangelical camp, Was because he promised to protect and defend them in this midst of sensing this cultural loss. And he was very brazen about promising this leading up to the

00:28:45.870 - 00:29:00.480

election before November eight, he told a group of evangelical leaders, your power has been totally taken away . So we're going to get your voice back. We're going to get it back. One month before

00:29:00.480 - 00:29:15.130

the election trump, warned a group convened by the Family Research Council, This is your last chance, This is it. And at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2017 Trump promised that he would quote, totally

00:29:15.130 - 00:29:33.400

destroy the Johnson Amendment, which is a very important amendment created to limit the political speech of pastors in churches since churches enjoy tax exempt status, trump's promise of power to those who feel disempowered worked better than

00:29:33.400 - 00:29:49.170

anyone predicted. And in a reversal of decades of evangelical voting where you had leaders saying we really need to look at a character, the character of our political leaders to determine whether they're fit for office.

00:29:49.840 - 00:30:07.300

White voting evangelicals turned out for trump because he offered himself as their Liberator and defender. Some people who are more prone to prophesy than I am have called trump a king cyrus figure. Mm hmm. Were

00:30:07.300 - 00:30:26.140

suspicious about that Zeira sauce as you recall, is the powerful, rich and very pagan ruler in the old testament who helped to nonetheless rebuild the temple in Jerusalem after the Israelites captivity in Babylon. Evangelicals,

00:30:26.150 - 00:30:41.530

long crisis of authority coupled with this loss of cultural footing, created a mile strum in which a strong man could come in and capitalize on these anxieties for his purposes. Now to be sure, there were

00:30:41.540 - 00:31:00.120

evangelical leaders who have opposed trump before during and after the election. They warned that trading these questions of character that have long been important to evangelicals would in due time undo christian witness in the public square and

00:31:00.120 - 00:31:18.940

it could affect America's credibility on the international stage, Naturally, Christian leaders of colour could not overlook Trump's comments about racial minorities, and for them, the 81% vote confirmed that racial justice in the white evangelical

00:31:18.940 - 00:31:34.740

world would always take a backseat to concerns over sexual ethics and religious freedom. Evangelical women who rarely wade into politics, decried trump's comments about sexual assault morning that some of their brothers in the church minimize these

00:31:34.740 - 00:31:55.430

comments as locker room talk in light of the factions upset and furthered by trump, some evangelicals have renewed calls for reconciliation at the local church level and for creating unity that transcends our current divides. But such

00:31:55.430 - 00:32:07.790

calls for unity assume that these current divides among evangelicals are political in nature, and I think that these divides, our theological, touching on the root of what it means to follow, christ in the world

00:32:07.790 - 00:32:24.930

today. And this is the second crisis evangelicals face . The crisis of identity, if anything, trump , has not created a crisis of identity among evangelicals so much as exposed it Expose the natural uh divisions

00:32:24.930 - 00:32:45.310

and factions and weakness is at the heart of the evangelical movement in the 21st century. From my vantage evangelicals, most acute points of identity confusion center on the following two themes one the relationship between Christianity and

00:32:45.310 - 00:33:02.830

America, and whether the christian God has a unique interest in the character and direction of the United States and to the relationship between personal faith and public witness and whether the church exists primarily for its own sake

00:33:02.840 - 00:33:20.280

or for the sake of the world. This first theme centers on the perceived role of the United States in God's plan for plans for the world, with different evangelicals framing their identity in primarily american terms,

00:33:20.290 - 00:33:35.250

or primarily global terms. In other words, what is the distance between these two identifiers for evangelicals, american and christian? If these labels trip off the tongue easily in succession, then you probably think of

00:33:35.250 - 00:33:52.170

the United States as essentially a Judeo christian nation that has drifted from its spiritual roots. By contrast at these, to identify or seem incidental or even create dissonance depending on the particular topic that's relevant to american

00:33:52.170 - 00:34:06.790

life, then you probably think of Christianity as a global movement that includes the United States, but doesn't look to this country to gauge the church's success in the future, we might call this the difference between

00:34:06.800 - 00:34:25.730

national evangelicals and international evangelicals. The national evangelicals had their rally rallying cry at something called the celebrate freedom rally at the Kennedy center a couple of years ago , they're a choir composed of members of first baptist

00:34:25.730 - 00:34:49.740

church in Dallas led by robert Jeffress. Some of you probably know who I'm talking about. Okay, texas texas is a weird place, you guys, it's kind of wild. Um Mhm. So yes

00:34:49.740 - 00:35:02.830

, members of first baptist church in Dallas led by robert Jeffress, who is a member of trump's evangelical advisory council debuted a worship song titled Make America Great . Again, it included the lyrics, Make America

00:35:02.830 - 00:35:15.310

great again, Make America great Again, lift the torch of freedom all across the land, step into the future, joining hand in hand and make America great Again, in this formulation, the strength of

00:35:15.310 - 00:35:32.290

the church seems to rest on the economic, military and moral strength of the United States. By contrast , international evangelical evangelicals see God's hand of blessing in the flourishing of the church, across divides of language

00:35:32.290 - 00:35:47.250

and ethnicity and national borders. Over the past 50 years, Christianity in the Global South has grown exponentially in places like sub Saharan africa and across latin, America and asia. According to the Center for the

00:35:47.250 - 00:36:01.460

Study of Global Christianity 100 years ago, two thirds of the world's christians lived in europe, and today only about a quarter of the world's christians live in europe, while a plurality more than a third live

00:36:01.460 - 00:36:20.890

in central and latin America alone. As the journalist Eliza Griswold notes today, the typical evangelical is not a white american man, but an african woman. The national evangelicals might lament that this locus of christendom

00:36:20.890 - 00:36:38.220

has moved far outside the West. But international evangelicals are eager to learn lessons from their global cohorts about evangelism, church growth and living faithfully under government restriction , they are not mourning the loss of christian America

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because they believe that the future of the faith does not depend on the future of the United States, and they anticipate a day when people from every tribe and tongue and nation will be united in common love

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and worship as the book of revelation tells us, white american christians will be a minority in the kingdom of God. But instead of that minority status being a threat, it's a comfort. The second point

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of acute identity crisis for american evangelicals, as I stated earlier, this relationship between personal faith and public witness and whether the church exists primarily for its own sake or for the sake of the world, many

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white evangelical sense that the winds of culture have shifted against them. They've gone from being on the home team to the away team. They fear that they might soon live as exiles. If not a persecuted

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minority in the US, many evangelicals think they can no longer assume that their neighbors share this Judeo christian uh different Judeo christian assumptions about morality and human identity and the family and sexual ethics. Rod Rare,

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a writer for the american conservative, has become one of the iconic proponents of this view. In an op ed for Time magazine, he wrote, Orthodox christians must understand that things are going to get much

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more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution

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and we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our Children to build resilient communities. Since then, Dreyer has put forward a vision for this christian life in a

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book titled The Benedict option. His vision is named after Benedict of Norcia, a 5th century monk who left the crumbling roman empire to form a separate community of prayer and worship Drayer insists that just as these

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monasteries, these separate communities became places where true christian witness could flourish. By many accounts they were this , they planted the seeds for this new civilization to blossom as the fall of Rome was coming. Drayer

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insists that conservative christians should likewise withdraw from this crumbling american empire to preserve the faith less it be choked out by secularism and individualism. In my view, the Benedict option is a white flag in the culture

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wars, a sign that the religious right failed to secure a christian nation by forming alliances with politicians. But to me, it is sadly also a call to retreat from public life to build communities that can

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in dryers, words outwit and outlast and eventually overcome the occupation. I don't find the language of occupation being a helpful framework for thinking about our neighbors in many ways, the Benedict option is a call in

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in some sense for churches just to be churches to invest in christian institutions and communities to be places of lifelong commitment information and discipleship, and all of this is to the good. But evangelicals who are compelled

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to retreat from public life must examine what they give up in the process. If evangelicals come to be known among their neighbors for defending their own institutions and primarily their own institutions, I fear they will become

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just one aggrieved minority among many. We will become defined by defeated resistance rather than joyful service. And this would mean giving up our namesake, giving up this heritage of being good news people, people who

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faithfully point to christ and seek justice and mercy that reflects the character of God and God's kingdom. An evangelical who does not offer good news to the world for the world is like a man who looks at

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his face in a mirror and after looking at himself , goes away and forgets what he looks like now . Of course this image comes from the Book of James Which includes this admonishment in Chapter one verse 27

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, Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless. Is this to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world? The pollution of the world here

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includes all the dehumanizing forces in our time that rob vulnerable people of their dignity and their rights and their well being. Real christian religion and the focus of christian social engagement is to defend the dignity of humans

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from the beginning to the end of life, even those humans who annoy us or threaten us or stand as our ideological enemies. That's the really hard news about Christianity. We have to love the people who

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we really don't want to. Instead of the Benedict option. I think we need what we might call the Wilberforce option. William Wilberforce was an influential politician and activist in 19th century England as well as a

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an open evangelical. He campaigned tirelessly to abolish the slave trade and he said that christians should actually be the first to respond to social injustices alongside his friends in the Clapham sect, Wilberforce made christian witness,

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synonymous with defending human dignity against coercive and corrupt economic and social forces. The Wilberforce option would help evangelicals live from a posture of hope rather than fear and thanks be to God, even though they are unlikely

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to make headlines. Yes, plenty of evangelicals are living out the Wilbur first option today, I mentioned International Justice Mission before um World Relief. Their their work has only become important, more and more important

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in the last few years I think of politicians like frank Wolf and Tony Hall, two senators who from different ends different political camps but joined forces to promote international religious freedom for communities facing violence or government threat

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. After retiring from service in 2006, Hall has served as executive director of Alliance to end hunger, which engages both faith based and secular organizations in alleviating hunger domestically and abroad. He's been nominated for the

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Nobel Peace Prize three times. And although Hall and Wolf disagree on many political issues, they have forged a friendship, true friendship in the spirit of protecting the poor and the vulnerable because of the work of

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these and other christians. I believe that evangelical was evangelicalism can reclaim the worth of its name despite the 2016 election, I am not ready to throw out the E word which some people have definitely encouraged me

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to and I'm not I'm not ready to throw it out yet. The election may have been difficult, but it also clarified what evangelical alliance to one party or the other will lead to. Now the real

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work begins of recommitting to seek and to demonstrate the heart and mind of God in christ. This calls evangelicals into greater humility. In a time of this perceived cultural loss, it leads them to recommit themselves

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to work for the dignity and well being of all image bearers, knowing that God calls us to live not in fear, but in self sacrificial love. This call upon evangelicals is away from self serving power

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and toward a cruciform love, the kind that Francis of Assisi praised when he wrote O Divine Master Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console to be understood as to understand to

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be loved as to love for. It is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Men, Yeah