The Overview (Monday, August 16)
Gen Z and evangelism, evangelicalism is fracturing, and the continued regional polarization of America
Even though classes don’t start for another week, today marks the official beginning of the Fall 2021 semester at John Brown University. Faculty and staff meetings kick off today and tomorrow, new students arrive to campus Wednesday, and several days’ worth of orientation activities and meetings come after. It is always a bit of whirlwind start to the new academic year, but after months of calm and quiet on campus, it’s also nice to see the campus active once more.
This semester promises to be a busy one (no surprise there), especially since on top of teaching, advising, and research, and, you know, being a husband and father, I’m also starting a critical phase of my Uneasy Citizenship book project. I can start to see major due dates on the horizon. With that in mind, I’m going to be scaling back my presence online over the next few months, including with this newsletter.
I’m sure I’ll occasionally log on to this site share something I think is worth sharing (including teasers from the book, perhaps?), but the scheduled Overview newsletters will be paused for a while. I’m not saying goodbye; I’m just going to ground for a while. To echo General MacArthur following his escape from the Philippines, “I shall return.”
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s the Monday, August 16 edition of The Overview:
1) Christianity Today’s Daniel Silliman provides an interesting look into what evangelism looks like for Generation Z. Silliman highlights a recent study from Barna Group:
The 13- to 18-year-olds who identify as Christian “have strong feelings against specific evangelistic language and persuasive practices,” the study found, but they “are talking about their faith with non-Christians” and believe that “relational, neutral spiritual conversations with non-Christians strengthen their faith.”
More:
Most Gen Z Christians do not think it’s important to have all the answers to questions about faith. They are skeptical of arguments that aim to change someone’s mind. Almost none think it’s a good idea to be quick to point out inconsistencies in others’ perspectives, which has been a key component of some approaches to apologetics.
Instead, 66 percent say they want to be someone who listens without judgment, 62 percent say they want to be confident sharing their own perspective, and 54 say it’s important to ask good questions.
For this generation of Christians there seems to be an intentional effort to meet people where they are, and to communicate their faith in an authentic and deliberate way. And this is to say nothing of the role that social media—especially Tik Tok—plays in their outreach.
2) Also for Christianity Today, Bonnie Kristian wonders whether American evangelicalism is in the midst of a major schism:
Widened and embittered division in the movement is certainly impossible to deny. The specific issues are many, some comparatively new (critical race theory, former President Donald Trump), some all too familiar (racism and race relations beyond the one theory, roles of women, sexual ethics, Christian nationalism, church handling of abuse), all with a political edge.
It’s not primarily about different policy agendas or rival partisan loyalties. On paper, a lot of that remains unchanged. The political division I see is more, as CT president Timothy Dalrymple wrote in April, about different informational worlds feeding different fears, hopes, habits of speech, and political priorities.
As a political scientist, there’s a lot I identify in Kristian’s article that is consistent with the latest research in my discipline. Polarization in American politics is actually less about politics-as-policy, and more about social identity. And given the breadth of a movement like American evangelicalism, schisms are becoming more and more pronounced. It really is a discouraging state of affairs, but there are reasons for to be optimistic (hopefully my in-progress book is able to speak to this in a productive way).
3) Speaking of polarization, the Washington Post Magazine’s David Fontana writes about expanding regional and geographic divides in America. No, it’s not just that the Deep South is fundamentally different from the Pacific Northwest; more and more, it’s that cities in these regions are far more like one another, and much less like their surrounding rural areas.
This idea of geographic polarization is nothing new, but Fontana hits on an important component of this divide:
America is experiencing a political crisis rooted partly in the concept of place. Our political elite in both parties are disproportionately connected to a few neighborhoods in a few metropolitan areas that are distant and different from the places they are supposed to understand and govern. For too many of these people, the road to political influence involves effectively defecting from the places they know to the places where there are people it is important to know. That leaves many places in our country governed by strangers rather than neighbors — with disastrous consequences for American democracy.
In reading this essay I couldn’t help but think of Grace Olmstead’s wonderful book Uprooted. Hers is a memoir and not an empirical study, but her observations and conclusions are echoed in Fontana’s piece. I highly recommend both.