Evangelicalism in America

So I made an eHar­mony account about three weeks ago. I’m not actu­ally look­ing to find a wife on there, though. Yeah, I know; it’s strange, but that just means it’s not out of char­ac­ter for me.

The Rea­son

The main rea­son I made this eHar­mony account was to get a feel for the state of evan­gel­i­cal­ism in Amer­ica. I fig­ure that the infor­ma­tion peo­ple put in their pro­file is, for the most part, going to rep­re­sent those qual­i­ties for which they fig­ure most evan­gel­i­cal males are look­ing. Either that or it will—in some rare cases—represent who the per­son actu­ally is.

Now, I used my own infor­ma­tion to cre­ate the account so it’s been try­ing to match me with pro­fess­ing evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians between 18 and 25. By “pro­fess­ing evan­gel­i­cals” I just mean peo­ple that check the “Chris­t­ian” box and pick any of the pop­u­lar denom­i­na­tions or the non-denominational option (although non-denominational is often just another word for closet-Baptist).

The Find­ings

My find­ings are, I sup­pose, what I expected. The actual find­ing of the find­ings, though, was really sad and rather dis­turb­ing. I have to say that the major­ity of peo­ple on eHar­mony are either unsaved or com­pletely inca­pable of artic­u­lat­ing their beliefs. One young woman wrote that she was most thank­ful for her best friend and sec­ond most thank­ful for God because she never would have met her best friend apart from God.¹

Most of the things I saw were very vague state­ments about the impor­tance of faith. Some of them didn’t even make any sense, “If you don’t have faith there’s noth­ing worth believ­ing.” Now, I wasn’t look­ing for some sort of Wynonna Gru­dem,² but I was hop­ing to see some­one men­tion some­thing about Jesus or even salvation.

Not Atyp­i­cal

The White Horse Inn has done a decent amount of research on this sub­ject and their dis­cov­er­ies showed that my find­ings weren’t ter­ri­bly strange.³ The vast major­ity of pro­fess­ing evan­gel­i­cals in Amer­ica seem to have no idea what they believe. There is a very vague sense that God exists, wants them to do good things, and wants to bless them. Some­thing soci­ol­o­gist Chris­t­ian Smith called moral­is­tic, ther­a­peu­tic deism.⁴ There is no sense that a holy, perfection-demanding God sent His Son to die to save sin­ners who could never save them­selves. There is no gospel.

The Point

I write this, in large part, because so many of my read­ers are Bible col­lege stu­dents. A lot of you guys are going into the min­istry; you’re going to be coun­sel­ing, teach­ing, and preach­ing. I write this also to those of you who just inter­act with pro­fess­ing evan­gel­i­cals on a semi-regular basis. This is a plea for you to be explicit about the gospel. Many pro­fess­ing evan­gel­i­cals do not under­stand or believe the gospel; they don’t have Jesus and they’re going to hell. Please be explicit about Jesus. Make it clear what you mean when you say you’re a Chris­t­ian. Talk about His lit­eral, bru­tal cru­ci­fix­ion. Make a big deal out of His bod­ily, tri­umphant resurrection.

Preach Christ and him cru­ci­fied. Don’t soften the mes­sage. Don’t be vague. Offend peo­ple with this mes­sage. You shouldn’t be offen­sive to peo­ple need­lessly, but you need to be offen­sive about this. Tell them that Jesus is the only way to God. He’s not just a good per­son; He’s the only good per­son. He’s not just the only good per­son; He’s God become man. He’s not just God become man; He is our only hope.

Preach Jesus, please.