Reformed Resurgence: The New
Calvinist Movement and the Battle over American Evangelicalism
Brad Vermurlen
© Oxford University Press 2020
ISBN 9780190073510 (hardback)
ISBN 9780190073534 (epub)
ISBN 9780190073541 (online)
Page 2
… the sociological strength of
the New Calvinism is less a matter of market dynamics of supply and demand or
happening to take the best posture toward culture—and instead is a direct result of religious leaders’
strategic and conflictual actions. The New Calvinism enjoys a vitality that
has been fought for and won in the context of the broader field of
Evangelicalism. Through the analysis in these pages, the Reformed resurgence is
shown to be real and strong and nevertheless relationally constructed.
Page 3
… In the same storyline by which conservative
Calvinistic belief has experienced a resurgence in its field, American
Evangelicalism has turned in on itself—such that the strength and prominence of
this neo-Reformed movement also reveals the increasing weakness, fragmentation,
and incoherence of the Evangelical field as a whole, at least in the United
States. For an institutional domain of life with no agreed-upon overarching
leadership, with very little consensual meanings of important texts, and no
real mechanisms of accountability, how is coherence in that arena finally
maintained? The short answer is, after much conflict and struggle, it can’t.
… The temptation is to think
that the New Calvinist movement or Reformed resurgence is real only if there
are significantly more Calvinists in the American religious landscape today
than there were two decades ago. This book resists that temptation by arguing
the New Calvinist movement is less about this kind of numerical growth than it
is about relational, game-like contestation and the struggle for symbolic
capital and power in one's field. At the same time I am not merely explaining a
widespread though ultimately mistaken perception of a religious movement (one
that does not actually exist), because the
perception of such a movement, including the media attention it receives, is
itself an indispensable part of the movement. What is important at the beginning
of this analysis is not whether or not there is an actual numerical resurgence
of Calvinism in American Evangelicalism (see chapter 3), but just that a lot of
people are talking about one. [emphasis added]
Pages 36-37
A significant component of the
New Calvinist movement consists of various African American pastors,
professors, and other church leaders. Among these are Thabiti Anyabwile, who is
a pastor at Anacostia River Church in Washington, DC, and who blogs for The
Gospel Coalition (and formerly served as assistant pastor for church planting
at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, with Mark Dever); Voddie
Baucham, Jr., who was the preaching pastor at Grace Family Baptist Church in
Spring, Texas, and a council member of The Gospel Coalition before moing to
Lusaka, Zambia, to be Dean of the Seminary of African Christian University; and
Trillia Newbell, a popular speaker, author, and the director of community
outreach for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission with the Southern
Baptist Convention.
Other notable black voices
include Anthony (Tony) Carter, who is the senior pastor oof East Point Church,
on the southwest side of Atlanta; Crawford Loritts, Jr., who serves as the senior
pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, Georgia, and a council member of
The Gospel Coalition; Charlie Dates, senior pastor at Progressive Baptist
Church in Chicago; Louis Love, Jr., the senior pastor with New Life Fellowship
Church in Vernon Hills, Illinois; and Eric Redmond, a Southern Baptist, and now
assistant pastor of Bible at Moody Bible Institute and a former council member
of The Gospel Coalition; among others.
There is also a noteworthy
portion of the movement that produces theologically rich Christian hip-hop,
spoken-word poetry, and accompanying music videos. The most widely known among
these Calvinistic hip-hop artists is Grammy-winner Lecrae, but this phenomenon
also includes rappers such as Trip Lee, KB, and Tedashii with Lecrae’s record
label, Reach Records; Flame and Mike Real with Clear Sight Music; Shai Linne,
Json, and Stephen the Levite with Lamp Mode Recordings; Propaganda, Sho Baraka,
and Jackie Hill-Perry with Humble Beast Records; Eshon Burgundy with NFTRY; and
approximately a dozen others. …
Pages 38-39
Despite the presence of several
prominent black leaders in the New Calvinism, the race story in recent years—particularly
since research for this book began in 2012—has been dominated by what has been
called the “quiet exodus” or “black exodus” from (majority white) Evangelicalism.
Many black leaders previously within the orbit of the Reformed resurgence have
distanced themselves from Evangelicalism (without abandoning their doctrinal or
moral convictions) due to what they perceive as various race-based grievances,
injustices, and frustrations, among them the underrepresentation in leadership,
tokenism, unsympathetic response to police shootings of black men, the election
of Donald Trump, lack of concrete advancement in racial reconciliation, and
recurrent microaggressions and other insensitivities. Nationally recognized
black leaders who have, in one way or another, given up on or stopped trying to
engage (white) Evangelicalism in just the last few years include Lecrae, Jemar
Tisby, Anthony Bradley, Leonce Crump, Jr., and Eric Mason, among others.
(Anthony Bradley is a professor
of religious studies and chair of the program in Religious and Theological
Studies at King’s College, a Christian college in New York City; Leonce Crump,
Jr., is founder and lead pastor of Renovation Church in Atlanta; Eric mason is
the founder and senior pastor of Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia. Both
Crump and Mason were formerly board members of the Acts 29 Network).
Vermurlen’s
work would be good to cross reference with Maren Haynes Marchesini’s doctoral
dissertation on the musical culture of Mars Hill. He doesn’t cite Haynes
Marchesini’s work but he does refer to Jessica Johnson’s Biblical Porn regarding affect and labor as crucial elements in
Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill. Vermurlen may not be adding a lot I didn’t already
know about New Calvinism overall but he’s shown, at least, that he’s made a
point of being as scholarly as possible in producing a sociological survey of
the movement and has relied on one of the few works about Mars Hill I actually
recommend. It was sad to read that there
were attempts to develop a hip hop musical culture within Mars Hill that got
snubbed. Though I’m a classical
guitarist and hobbyist composer I’ve been interested in facilitating however I
can theoretical tools for bridging the gap between American popular song and
dance styles and classical musical forms as promulgated in “traditional” theory
but I digress.
Note
that Crump and Mason were both board members on Acts 29 when they were
signatories on the statement that Acts 29 leadership had found Mark Driscoll
unfit for ministry
page 33
… for an accurate sociological
account of the New Calvinism, it must be recognized that a significant minority
of laypersons are not aware that they are swimming in the Calvinist stream of
American Evangelicalism.
Pages 159-160
… a crucial and multifaceted social
cause of the Reformed resurgence is that New
Calvinist leaders strategically position themselves as having clear,
compelling, “black and white” answers to pressing ethical, social, existential,
and doctrinal questions, and especially to young persons. For those
invested in it, the New Calvinist movement offers a new generation firm moral,
theological, and intellectual ground on which to stand amid the tectonic shifts
of the post-1960s cultural and institutional environment in which they live.
Several of the non-Calvinist
leaders I interviewed pointed to this as a reason why Calvinism appeals to a
lot of young Americans today. As one neo-Anabaptist pastor stated in our
interview, “With the neo-Reformed there is a very strong confident sense of
getting something right, of getting the Gospel right. […] I think New Calvinism
is so popular mostly because of its sense of certainty, and of being right
about things, and being `black and white.’” Similarly, Tony Campolo, after
explaining to me why he believes women should serve as pastors even though, as
he put it, he does not have any good arguments either from the Bible or Church
history to support it, said to me: “That’s the problem with Calvinism—everything
is answered, everything is tied up. There is no question they can’t answer.” In
our interview, Emergent leader Doug Pagitt opined: “I think that version of
Christianity doesn’t make sense, but if you get plugged into a system that
forces it on you … This is why Reformed theology people have to become so
well-educated in Reformed theology, in my view, because it only makes sense as
an insular system.” Or again, Rachel Held Evans stated, “There’s an appeal
about how it supposedly answers every question. It has this cohesiveness about
it that I think is really appealing. When you’re young, you kind of want and
long for an answer to everything. You want to find somebody who has the entire world
figured out, everything’s `black and white’, no room for gray. I think the
neo-Calvinist movement is beautiful at presenting people with that.” Greg Boyd
put it more simply: “Folks who don’t like loose ends—these are tough times for
them.” Statements like these came up repeatedly among non-Calvinist Evangelical
leaders.
Pages 171-172
… In one of my conversations
with Mark Driscoll during my time in Seattle, I explained that I saw how Mars
Hill was innovating culturally, as well as how in a different way Redeemer is
involved in “culture making,” but I had trouble seeing how Bethlehem [Baptist
Church] was engaged in similar work; Driscoll responded: “Piper is like the
grandfather of the neo-Reformed movement. He doesn’t need to be cool. You don’t
want your grandpa to be cool; you want your grandpa to be wise.”
… In his 2013 interview with
conservative media host Glenn Beck, Driscoll said:
Culture is made “upstream”
in the city and then it flows “downstream” into the suburban and rural areas. A
lot of people of faith, a lot of conservative families—husbands, wives, kids—they’re
in the suburbs, they’re in the rural areas, because [of factors like] cost of
living, education, all the very real variables. Meanwhile, all the single
college-educated culture-makers are flooding into the cities—the very places
that the churches have tended to flee over the generations prior. And the
question [for Evangelical leaders] is, is there an opportunity to plant
churches, to go back and to re-evangelize major urban centers, especially young
men.
Page 191-192
Self-Appointed Gatekeepers
In addition to the ways already
described in previous chapters, several New Calvinist leaders also
strategically position themselves as the
rightful gatekeepers of their field’s established “orthodoxy”, functioning as
if they had real authority to claim which other players are “in” and “out” of
the American evangelical field. Stated differently, some (though not all)
New Calvinist leaders enact their accumulated symbolic power in the American
Evangelical field as part of a “classification struggle” over which Christian
leaders (in addition to themselves) ought to be classified or categorized as
belonging to the field at all. This is accomplished mainly through the force of
their public “speech”, especially on the Internet, in which they draw symbolic
boundaries marking off “lines” of inclusion and exclusion for being an
Evangelical. The concern is: who really,
truly is an Evangelical Christian, and who, despite what they may say, is
not? Which beliefs fit within Evangelicalism and which are out of bounds?
Pages 225-226
… an additional mechanism contributing
to the New Calvinism is incumbent
religious leaders publicly presenting themselves—and being presented by
challengers and the media—as a significant new movement for orthodoxy. An
important variant of this mechanism is writing
about and documenting themselves, including giving themselves a moniker, so as
to construct and present themselves as an identifiable tribe. Clearly, the
most important version of this is the writings of Collin Hansen—first his 2006
article in Christianity Today and later his 2008 book Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New
Calvinists. In this manner, Hansen’s work is just as much a part of and a
milestone for the New Calvinist movement’s development and rise to prominence
as it is a description of it.
Another example is a lecture
Mark Driscoll delivered in February 2009 at an Acts 29 boot-camp in Raleigh, North
Carolina. The seventy-two minute lecture was titled, “We Are a Movement,” and it served to inform and
encourage church planters on “What God is in the midst of doing” through the
Acts 29 Network. Among the attributes of a Christian movement, Driscoll
discussed the importance of young people in their twenties, auxillary
organizations, and cultural production like music and publishing. He also
emphasized that Acts 29 is collaborating
and networking (“clumping,” as he called it) with other like-minded Evangelical
organizations and leaders (he mentioned Carson, Keller, Grudem, Akin, Mohler,
Mahaney, Dever, Piper, Greear, and the organizations they lead), and how these
ministries are coalescing into the larger New Calvinism as “an overarching
movement of God.” Driscoll also highlighted Hansen’s work that identified and
named the movement. Later, Driscoll provided a brief history of the Calvary
Chapel and Vineyard movements, and pointed out how much more quickly Acts 29 is
planting churches than those two movements did. Acts 29, he explained, is
intentionally organizationally lean and noninstitutional; he stated: “What
holds us together is love and theology and mission.” His lecture was bookended
by two prayers, the first of which included: “We want to be part of a movement,
not simply because we want to have our way, but because we want the Church of
Jesus Christ to flourish.” And in closing, Driscoll prayed to God “that You’d
keep us from becoming a museum. I pray we would stay a movement.” For anyone
who saw or heard Driscoll’s lecture, whether in-person or online, the point was
clear: this expansive, young, urban, culturally savvy, complementarian,
Calvinistic energy is a significant, identifiable movement.
… Calvinism’s resurgence in the
Evangelical field, ironically, also reveals the field’s overall disorder,
weakness, fragmentation, and incoherence. There certainly remain pockets of
relative strength—most notably the New Calvinism, but also any number of
polished, thriving megachurches that did not even enter the story of this book.
But even with these pockets of strength, the underlying intractable conflict
and divergent institutional logics and interpretations portend rough new for
Evangelicalism in the hypermodern era. …
Page 235
… If an observer looks locally, these “churches like Piper’s”
and many non-Calvinist megachurches besides are thriving—and Evangelicalism
seems to be strong. But if one looks globally—that
is at the whole of American Evangelicalism—one sees fragmentation, division,
infighting, disorder, and doctrinal and ethical incoherence. In this sense,
there is no “the Evangelical movement”; there is only an Evangelical field … .
This is also how the New Calvinist movement, the Reformed resurgence, can be
strong and vital while Evangelicalism write large in America is divided.
Indeed, as should now be clear, the former cannot be understood or explained
rightly apart from the latter.
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