Beyond Evangelical Americanism and Apolitical Evangelicalism

This dissertation identifies the growing community of post-evangelicals in the United States and their need to construct a political ethic through the normative frames of global politic and systemic change for justice. Put another way, a post-evangelical political ethic will presume the normativity of a global, Kingdom of God citizenship and the Christian mandate to pursue systemic change for justice. Utilizing the See-Judge-Act methodology of ethical inquiry throughout the dissertation, the first section examines key events within evangelical political history from 1942-2024 and identifies two failed paradigms for political engagement: Evangelical Americanism and Apolitical Evangelicalism. The former overly associates evangelical identity with that of the United States while “othering” those outside its national or ideological borders. It was shaped by the big tent evangelicalism of the National Association of Evangelicals, the rhetoric and political influence of Billy Graham, and the political mobilizing of the US Christian Right. Partly a reaction to the culture-war iterations of Evangelical Americanism, Apolitical Evangelicalism offered a one-dimensional gospel absent its socio-political implications. Concerned that engaging socio-political struggle could interfere with sharing a gospel of personal salvation, Apolitical Evangelicalism was fueled by Donald McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle propagated through Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission and embodied in the Church Growth Movement of the 1970s to 2000s. At least in part a result of Evangelical Americanism’s over-association with the Republican Party and the absence of a substantive political ethic among Apolitical Evangelicals, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for US President garnered an overwhelming 81% of white evangelical support, a support that continued at the same level in 2020 and 2024. No longer defined by the theological convictions of Bebbington’s Quadrilateral, white US evangelicalism came to be defined by the ideology of Make America Great Again. In search of guides for the construction of a post-evangelical political ethic beyond failed evangelical paradigms, the second section of the dissertation turns to the scholarship of the Brown Church outside the borders of the United States, of those marginalized within it, and of three dissenting evangelicals within the United States who have critiqued failed evangelical politics in their commitment to a global politic and systemic change for justice. The chapter on the Brown Church historically introduces and theologically evaluates the contributions of Latin America’s Misión Integral, an evangelical sibling of Liberation Theology most notably propagated by René Padilla and Samuel Escobar, and Latina Evangélica—a Protestant theology constructed through the experience of immigrant women in the United States. The second section of the dissertation concludes with a close reading of three US evangelical scholars—Ron Sider, Kaitlyn Schiess and Soong-Chan Rah—who dissent against Evangelical Americanism, Apolitical Evangelicalism and the modern manifestation of Trumpist Evangelicalism. While each scholar comes from a different social location and generation, they all identify as evangelical and contribute to unique expressions of dissent in academic, organizing and prophetic forms. In the final section, the dissertation considers the historical critique in section one and the learnings in section two to propose a normative post-evangelical political ethic. The ethic offers six components which include ecclesial and public practices. This dissertation brings attention to the growing post-evangelical community in the United States and profiles scholars outside the white evangelical mainstream as those who will guide post-evangelicals away from the failures of their evangelical ancestors and toward a politic shaped by our global, kingdom citizenship and enduring commitment to systemic change for justice.