The Traitor Mark Galli
Galli upon retirement not only leaves Protestantism but dares to speak inconvenient truths about the decline of Neo-Evangelicalism as a Movement
This week's @markgalli report was a bombshell in the world of Evangelical elites. He dared to not only speak his truth which others didn't know or appreciate, but he spoke a lot of other truths about the state of neo-evangelicalism.
Magazines are (almost) dead. Long live podcasts.
Molly Worthen's "Apostles of Reason" notes the status-rocket rise of @CTmagazine early on. As the heat in the Fundamentalist/Modernist wars cooled, there was a market for "safe" fundamentalists to try to bridge the gulf.
Carl Henry, Billy Graham and others tried to mainstream "The Fundamentals" and restore their credibility among cultural elites. In many ways their timing couldn't have been better because the cultural stock of the mainline was already in decline.
One of the best treatments of the cultural decline of the mainline is in @wellman4444 's "High on God" describing the decline of Fourth Presbyterian in Chicago.
Mainline influence peaked in the early 20th century while their numeric power peaked during the Cold War, but the neo-evangelicals were already supplanting them in terms of influence. Billy Graham had supremacy in the after war period filling stadiums and presidential ears.
Megachurch pastors inherited Graham's mantle as Bill Hybels became one of Bill Clinton's "spiritual advisors" and Rick Warren prayed at @BarackObama 's first inaugural. THAT page had turned by 2012 Gay marriage had become a national moral litmus test.
There are many moving pieces to this story. The decline of the magazine. The loss of alignment between traditional Christian morality and an emerging unchurched post-Christian morality, yet the imaginative goal of neo-evangelicalism persisted.
It's into this gap that the Galli Report piece really steps in. https://markgalli.substack.com/p/the-galli-report-100821
Magazines are dead. @CTmagazine 's success in @MikeCosper "Rise and Fall of Mars Hill" in the ITunes podcast charts revived some hope in the moribund platform. Could the old vision be revived?
The neo-evangelical project always was about holding ecclesiastical and theological tension. Could fundamentalists divided by theological distinctives act as one? Could a self-consciously conservative theological impulse be popularized to once again command cultural heights?
.@markgalli basically said "it isn't happening. Evangelicals are exchanging status for compromise." This coming from the man who went to the church of Rome after his retirement.
The 2020s is not the 1950s. The same-sex marriage debate disrupts Protestantism in ways it does not disrupt Catholicism nor Orthodoxy. Followers of my YT channel/podcast know my thoughts on this still as an ordained minister in the @CRCNA which is in the travails of this.
I expect @markgalli to be both celebrated and punished for daring to not only speak his truth but a number of convenient truths about the decline of neo-evangelicalism.
... "If it quacks like a duck..." A bureaucracy and /or corporation can call itself whatever it wants... in the end it's fruits will manifest it's roots... sick and dying roots equal sick and dying churches regardless of all of the convenient cultural finger pointing...