Thank you to my friend Diane for sending a link to this article in The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/on-religion/at-a-private-meeting-in-illinois-a-group-of-evangelicals-tried-to-save-their-movement-from-trumpism
It's about a recent meeting at Wheaton College to try to extricate evangelicals from the snares dt has set for them.
The first afternoon session at Wheaton began on a sombre note. “This gathering is not an occasion for celebration of evangelicalism,” Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, said. “This gathering emerges instead from worry, sorrow, anger, and bewilderment—whether we are Democrats or Republicans.” That so many white evangelicals supported Trump had created a “a toxic evangelicalism” that has turned “the Gospel into Good News that is fake.” He charged that U.S. evangelicalism had been complicit in violence against people of color over centuries, and that where denunciation was needed there had only been silence.
Thank you to author Katelyn Beaty, former managing editor of Christianity Today, for reporting on this conference.
Among those present were the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena CA and Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
The main organizer, Doug Birdsall, had hoped that a statement refocusing the word evangelical on Jesus Christ and the Church would be hammered out.
But, days before we arrived at Wheaton, Birdsall clarified to attendees that our gathering was not meant to be held in opposition to the June meeting. He pointed out that he had planned the event long before the one with Trump became public. Organizers seemed to be getting nervous that their efforts would be seen as partisan and anti-Trump. After two days of often tense conversations, it became clear that no statement would be released at all.
Thank you to those who organized and tried to do something. Katelyn ends it on a positive note, but clearly she is disappointed.
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