Kristin Kobes du Mez has written an eminently readable treatment of American evangelicalism that is this year’s runaway best-seller. I am grateful to be sharing the work with Kristin Kobes du Mez, and the critique that follows comes from a hope that we might work together on telling a true story, in order to live into it rightly. This is a burden for all of us who consider ourselves story-tellers, historians and theologians alike. The bigger question to ask, perhaps, is: What role should stories play in the telling of truth? And whose stories should be given epistemic priority? There are ethical obligations to hear not only the stories that correspond with our larger theories or social concerns, but also the ones that are conflicting. I am working in small quiet ways to reimagine this movement, and someday I hope it bears the marks of this labor. And so at this point I cannot cede the label “evangelical” to the men whom Kobes du Mez’s book names, or the many others left unnamed. Without exception, I love these students. They are without exception earnest, winsome, kind, committed to thinking through difference and most of all devoted to Jesus-that most basic, even embarrassing burden that ties the heart of a person to a God who can be known, even in flesh. The students I teach do not display the marks of a toxic movement, though admittedly some have scars from it.

This is because of a debt I owe to a few dear ones who have gone before me, and a love I have for those who follow. I have not given up on the label “evangelical”, though I consider it at least weekly. I am not calling for us to tell a flattering story of the movement, but I would like to tell a slightly more complex one. Evangelicalism, too, is diverse in all of these ways, and to tell a true story of it requires attending to multiple lenses. All of our engagements with religious belief and practice are mediated through culture, geographic location, political and socioeconomic factors. Rather it is that religion is not a pure spring from which we draw. It is not simply that “truth is stranger than fiction” that concerns me.

To flatten the story by giving it a sole author would be to miss the details entirely. The forces that led to the misogyny Kobes du Mez details and to the events at the Capitol are multi-factorial. In our attempt to root out damaging forces of prejudice and extremism, we are in danger of convicting evangelicalism of a crime it has not committed, or at least has not committed alone. And yet I am not sure that identifying all of the actors involved as “evangelicals”, nor identifying “evangelicalism” as what binds them together, is either helpful or accurate. What we saw that day was certainly more than “a few bad apples.” We must attend to systems as we think about those events. And yet some of my concerns about Kobes du Mez’s method apply also to my concerns with some treatments of the events at the Capitol on January 6.

When X is militarism, nationalism, and misogyny, and when we deeply desire to root out such things, this kind of sweeping treatment is appealing (as the book has proven to be). Because we see X in evangelicalism, therefore evangelicalism caused X, and also evangelicalism is X. I am concerned that Kobes du Mez’s use of evidence collapses into an easy theory of causation. But I have not edited my remarks on Kristin Kobes du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne in any way, and I stand behind my critique of the book. It is a difficult and a painful time to identify in any way with evangelicals, or to offer pushback on a sustained critique of the movement, as I have below. Since then there has been a deluge of think-pieces and journalistic treatments of the events and the role “evangelicals” had in them. I wrote and submitted this essay in advance of the January 6th events at the Capitol.

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