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Still Christian

Still Christian

Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism

By: David P. Gushee

176 Pages

Paperback
ISBN: 9780664263379
Published By: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: September 2017

$16.00

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Review
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Author Interview

David Gushee, who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University, has given us a concise, valuable, and beautifully crafted memoir. His book sheds a great deal of light on the history of white evangelical Protestantism in the years between 1978 and 2016. On a warm afternoon in the summer of 1978, Gushee went to a shopping mall in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia to visit a gym. Then, for reasons that are not altogether clear, Gushee decided to walk up a nearby hill and enter the building in which the Providence Baptist Church held its worship services. Three days after he walked into the church—a church that was associated with the Southern Baptist Convention—Gushee made a decision to follow Jesus. The men and women who played a direct role in Gushee’s decision to become a follower of Jesus could all be labeled as “evangelicals.” Evangelicals played a decisive role in shaping the rest of Gushee’s life. After earning his bachelor’s degree at a secular college, Gushee continued his education at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. In the 1980s, when Gushee studied there, Southern’s faculty still included a number of moderate evangelicals. One of those moderates, Glen Stassen, encouraged Gushee to pursue doctoral work at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. While pursuing his doctorate, Gushee developed strong relationships with professors such as Larry Rasmussen and Beverly Harrison. But at Union Gushee very often felt like a stranger in a strange land. After his first year at that school, Gushee concluded that a vast “gulf” stood between him and “most people at Union” (43). In 1993, Gushee was offered a job teaching ethics back at Southern. He accepted the offer. He soon found himself embroiled in a series of ugly battles. (In the 1990s, Southern was rapidly being turned in to a bastion of the fundamentalist wing of the Southern Baptist Convention.) In 1996, Gushee fled Southern for a small Baptist college—Union University—located in Jackson, Tennessee. He taught there until 2007. Since then Mercer University has been his academic home. Gushee now describes himself as an “ex-evangelical” (142). In 2014, he published a set of articles that formed the basis for a book called Changing Our Mind: A Call from America's Leading Evangelical Ethics Scholar for Full Acceptance of LGBT Christians in the Church. Writing those articles and that book dramatically transformed Gushee’s relationship with American evangelicalism. A great many evangelicals found the arguments that Gushee made in those texts to be highly objectionable. Some evangelicals thought Gushee’s arguments were clearly heretical. Gushee’s views on homosexuality placed him, by his own account, beyond the margins of evangelical Christianity. From Gushee’s perspective, Still Christian is a book about a man whose determination to follow Jesus forced him to leave evangelicalism behind. Gushee’s book can certainly be read that way. It is also true, however, that Still Christian reads (from my perspective) like a book that was written by a man who still thinks and writes in ways that are profoundly evangelical. When Gushee discusses topics such as conversion experiences, elite academic institutions, fundamentalism, Jesus, the life of the mind, prayer, and social justice, his language strikes me as evangelical as evangelical can be. That is not entirely surprising. From some points of view, identifying oneself as “an ex-evangelical” is an extremely evangelical thing to do. Much of the best scholarly work on evangelical history has been produced by people who think of themselves as ex-evangelicals. For at least thirty years, scholars who are ex-evangelicals (and many other scholars as well) have been arguing that modern evangelicalism is far more variegated that many outsiders realize. Gushee’s Still Christian includes a great deal of evidence that supports that argument.His book illustrates the remarkable range of ideas that evangelicals espoused in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The book also suggests that evangelical Christians sometimes act in extraordinarily kind ways. In nearly every chapter of Still Christian some evangelical Christians go way beyond the call of duty to support Gushee and his work. Gushee himself seems to be an unusually kind human being. His account of some of his evangelical adversaries (R. Albert Mohler Jr., for example) are incredibly charitable. Gushee’s book does not, however, present an especially flattering portrait of the forms of Christianity practiced by white evangelicals. Far from it. In the pages of Still Christian, the world of white evangelicals overbrims with anti-intellectualism, arrogance, hypocrisy, racism, and vindictiveness. It is also a world in which there is shockingly little tolerance for differences of opinion. Voting for Democrats can lead people to view you with great suspicion. Maintaining that climate change is real or that torture is wrong can get you branded as a traitor to the cause of Christ. Questioning the notion that the Bible prohibits women from serving as pastors can cost you your job. American evangelicalism is, in Gushee’s view, a “deeply damaged” form of Christianity (146). It is also, he believes, a form of Christianity that nearly always finds itself on the wrong side of history. “It is hard to imagine,” Gushee says, “how any single religious community could so often be so consistently wrong” (146). Of course, whether or not a particular religious community tends to get things “wrong” or “right” is not the only question in which scholars of religion are interested. But it is certainly a question upon which many scholars focus a great deal of attention. For scholars such as those, and for many others as well, Gushee’s book provides an invaluable introduction to the recent history of evangelicalism in the United States. David Harrington Watt is the Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies at Haverford College. David Harrington Watt
Date Of Review:

June 26, 2018

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor Christian Ethics at Mercer University and the current president of the American Academy of Religion. He has long been known as a leading evangelical ethicist who has studied and advocated for stronger evangelical positions on everything from the Holocaust to LGBTQ inclusion in the church. His recent memoir, Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism, tells the story of his life inside the American evangelical movement and his eventual exodus from it. This is a record of our conversation about his book. –Cynthia Eller, independent scholar

CE: What inspired you to tell your life story now?

DG: Over a decade ago, when projecting what I wanted to do before the end of my career, I expressed interest—to myself only!—in writing a memoir. By the summer of 2016 this had become an urgent desire. The immediate trigger was everything that happened after I wrote my 2014 book Changing Our Mind. That work called for full LGBTQ inclusion in the life of the churches and led to what amounted to my being banned from evangelicalism. By 2016, I felt the need to reflect on that episode in my own life as part of a longer and larger story about what has become of evangelical Christianity in America. Westminster John Knox, the folks who published this book, thought that was a story worth telling, and I am glad!

CE: The title of your book assures the reader that you’re still a Christian. Are you still an evangelical?

DG: I’m certainly still a Christian—that is, someone who is trying to follow Jesus. But I’m definitely not an evangelical—that is, a socially and politically conservative white American Christian. That is what that term now means, and it is not who I am.

CE: What were the first indications you had that you couldn’t fit comfortably inside an evangelical identity anymore?

DG: It’s a long story. I grew up Catholic, and became Southern Baptist via a teenage conversion. In my late 20s, when I was working on a PhD in Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, I took a job with Ron Sider, who taught at Eastern Seminary (now Palmer Seminary) and who led Evangelicals for Social Action. That was from 1990 to 1993. Sider was serious about his evangelical identity but he’s best known as a social justice evangelical, particularly for his book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. He became my guide into the “card-carrying” evangelical world, and I liked and identified with what I saw in him. Twenty-five years later, it was clear that space for his kind of evangelicalism had been squeezed out, at least in the US. Political conservativism, over-identification with the Republican Party, and a fallback into reactionary white-maleness…these were things that were going on within American evangelicalism for some time, but they really reached their apogee with the evangelical surrender to Donald Trump. For me, evangelical support for the US using torture in interrogations after 9/11 was strike one. Evangelical disinterest in dealing with climate change was strike two. Evangelical hardheartedness on LGBTQ inclusion was strike three. All of this was before Trump.

CE: Do you think of yourself as having left evangelicalism? Or as evangelicalism having left you? Or, I suppose, evangelicalism having spit you out of its mouth?

DG: I think that the Christian Right has won in squeezing out the evangelical left and even the evangelical center. They no longer have any meaningful place in the “movement.” I think that negative evangelical reaction to Barack Obama played a big role. But it was always the goal of the Christian Right to define both the GOP and evangelical identity in the way it’s now developed. I should have anticipated that even offering a serious exploration of LGBTQ inclusion would threaten my place in the evangelical world. I knew that it would be controversial, but I didn’t really anticipate the ferocity of the reaction. And I’m not the only one who has experienced that, for sure. I’m glad, in retrospect, that my farewell to evangelicalism came beforethe capitulation to Trumpism, so that no one calls on me these days to try to explain why “my people” can support him. Not my people. Not anymore.

CE: I’m struck by the fact that you went to graduate school at Union Theological Seminary, well known for its liberal and even radical orientation toward Christian thought and practice. And now you’ve come to find that kind of theology and ethics very influential in your own thinking. Why do you think it didn’t resonate with you when you were a grad student?

DG: I went to Union in 1987 when I was still a somewhat sheltered Southern Baptist kid of twenty-five, nine years after my conversion. I was certainly ready for a wider world, or I wouldn’t have gone to UTS, but I wasn’t quite ready for the liberal-radical theological/ethical/political ecology of the place. With the analytical tools now available to me, I would say that at the time I was still very much a white, straight, married, cisgendered American Christian dude. I I was politically progressive, but I was not prepared for the theologically-driven decentering of people like me. I had to learn to listen to others and not be in charge of every room I entered. I wasn’t ready for that at the time. I’m so glad I went there, though. It planted seeds that have gradually borne good fruit.

CE: Is there a particular audience you were hoping to reach with this book?

DG: At one level the book was therapeutic for me. I needed to ask and answer the questions that I addressed in the book, especially whether I was still in any real sense the same person who committed my life to Christ at sixteen, or whether my critics are right: that I lost my way. I would say my main audience is people who find themselves in a post-evangelical place, and there are millions of them. I also hoped that the book would be of some value to scholars and historians of US evangelicalism.

CE: Do you think there will be a sequel to this book one day?

DG: I don’t think so, because in a sense the book marks a farewell to trying to be a public theologian who is in the mix of all the important current discussions—you know, being “in the room where it happens.” The book tells the story of a person who was in that room for the better part of twenty years, and who is now ready for something different. My beliefs, dreams, and agonies have been very public for a long while now, and I’m now ready to live a more private life, and a more scholarly life.

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