The mainstream to which [Billy] Graham and the Evangelicals of his day spoke to were more reachable because they shared a common culture, with a more or less common set of assumptions. Graham’s message echoed in the hearts and minds of Americans who heard it, even if they rejected it. You may not have responded favorably to Graham’s appeal, but you knew what he was talking about.
Today, not so much. Moreover, theological conservatism is highly contested even within Evangelicalism. On the one hand, among many, it has become thoroughly entwined with political conservatism, in a way that makes it toxic to many. Billy Graham avoided the Falwell-Robertson kind of political engagement, and after having been burned by his close association with Richard Nixon, made a special point of staying clear from politics. Today, though, it’s hard to disassociate the Evangelical “brand” from hardcore GOP activism.
On the other hand, theological liberals like Rachel Held Evans are pioneering an Evangelicalism that is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as practiced by angry and emotive liberals. If Falwell Jr. and his followers are the Republican Party’s Aging Religious Auxiliary, then RHE’s people are Woke Low-Church Progressives At Prayer.
I find myself thinking about that meeting of Catholic conservative thinkers and academics at which I was present a few years back — in particular the stark differences between the world that older Catholics see, and younger ones see. The older ones were working from a cultural framework that presumed a certain commonality, and the efficaciousness of rationality within that shared set of assumptions. The younger ones kept pointing out that that world is gone. What (in my view) they were talking about is two very different Catholic churches, though the division isn’t precisely like that of Evangelicals. The Catholic “conservatives” (a more precise term: the orthodox) still believe in the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The contemporary Catholic progressives believe in the primacy of their own consciences — and in their right to baptize as “Catholic” whatever they happen to believe.
How a church like that holds together, I don’t know. I bring it up here simply to point out that American popular culture strongly catechizes contemporary Americans toward the progressivist way of thinking. If you are going to be a theologically orthodox Catholic, you are going to have to be consciously and forcefully countercultural in all things.
