What Lessons Can Progressives Learn from Evangelicals?

Recently, I blogged a series of essays titled "The Revolution Misses You," in which I called for progressives to revive the forgotten dream of practical yet radical change. Friends and colleagues immediately scolded me for using "extreme" terms such as "revolution" and "radical." "You'll only alienate people," they said. "This will come back to haunt you."

At first, I was surprised by what felt like a dramatic overreaction. But I soon realized why I had fallen out of sync with the progressive mainstream on the use of the "R-words": I had been spending time listening to and reading evangelical Christians who are preaching revolution.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., a 36-year-old evangelical pastor named Rob Bell regularly describes his ministry as "revolutionary," "radical" and "an insurgency." Far from alienating people with such language, Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church draws thousands of new worshipers each year from the mostly conservative and white suburbs of west Michigan. In one recent sermon, available as a podcast from MarsHill.org, Bell tells his congregation that the only time Jesus speaks of God directly taking someone's life is the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-22), a story about a man who builds bigger barns to store a surplus harvest instead of sharing it with those in need. He closed the sermon by listing a dozen places around Grand Rapids where congregants could unload their own surplus wealth.

In his book Irresistible Revolution, 30-year-old author Shane Claiborne, who is currently living in Iraq to "stand in the way of war," asks evangelicals why their literal reading of the Bible doesn't lead them to do what Jesus so clearly told wealthy and middle-class people to do in his day: give up everything to help others.

The popular evangelical Christian magazine Relevant, launched in 2003 by Cameron Strang, the son of a Christian publishing magnate, contains a "Revolution" section complete with a raised red fist for a logo. They've also released The Revolution: A Field Manual for Changing Your World, a compilation by radical, Christian social-justice campaigners from around the world.

Bell and Claiborne are two of the better-known young voices of a broad, explicitly nonviolent, anti-imperialist and anticapitalist theology that is surging at the heart of white, suburban Evangelical Christianity. I first saw this movement at a local, conservative, nondenominational church in North Carolina where the pastor preached a sermon called "Two Fists in the Face of Empire." Looking further, I found a movement whose book sales tower over their secular progressive counterparts in Amazon rankings; whose sermon podcasts reach thousands of listeners each week; and whose messages, in one form or another, reach millions of churchgoers. Bell alone preaches to more than 10,000 people every Sunday, with more than 50,000 listening in online.

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But this movement is still barely aware of its own existence, and has not chosen a label for itself. George Barna, who studies trends among Christians for clients such as the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Focus on the Family, calls it simply "The Revolution" and its adherents "Revolutionaries."

"The media are oblivious to it," Barna wrote in his 2006 book Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary. "Scholars are clueless about it. The government caught a glimpse of it in the 2004 presidential election but has mostly misinterpreted its nature and motivations." According to his research, there are more than 20 million Revolutionaries in America, differentiated from mainstream evangelicals by a greater likelihood of serving their community and the poor and oppressed within it, a more "intimate, personally stirring worship of God" in daily life, and a much greater chance of studying the Bible every day.