ANGLE? (via Daniel Merriman)

Myths of the Modern Mega-Church (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, May 23, 2005,
Key West, Florida)

Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Florida, in May 2005 for the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle conference on religion, politics and public life. Conference speaker Rick Warren, pastor of the largest church in America, addressed misconceptions many Americans have about mega-churches. He also discussed his best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, as well as current trends in the evangelical movement, the work his church is doing for AIDS and poverty relief in Africa, and some of his views on hot-button political and cultural issues.

Other conference speakers were John DiIulio (University of Pennsylvania), who spoke on faith-based initiatives, and Reuel Marc Gerecht (American Enterprise Institute), who spoke on Islam and democracy.

Speaker:

Rick Warren, Senior Pastor and Founder, Saddleback Church, Orange County, California

Respondent:

David Brooks, Columnist, The New York Times

Moderator:

Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life [...]

MR. WARREN: [...]

[I] have been asked today to speak on the evangelical mega-church and then a case study of Saddleback, and part of what I would like to do is share my journey – I would like to tell you the story behind the story of my life changed. You know, when you write the best-selling book in the world for the last three years, that changes your life and I'm not the same person I was three years ago. And, you know, maybe I can share that.

But since you're journalists, before we look at this idea of the myths about the mega-churches, I would like to just give you maybe four or five trends or stories I think you need to be aware of that have come in on the scene, because as I travel around the United States, and around the world, I see them over and over.

The first trend that I would say you need to be aware of is the return of the evangelical movement to its 19th-century roots; that is going to be a big story – the return of the evangelical movement to its 19th-century roots. What are those roots? Compassionate activism – and I am not talking about politics; I am talking about the fact that about a hundred years ago, Christianity split into two wings in the Protestant division and this hasn't been happening with Catholicism, but it did happen in Protestantism.

There is a fellow named Walter Rauschenbusch, who is the man who came up with the term "social gospel." Rauschenbusch was a liberal theologian and he basically said we don't need this stuff about Jesus anymore; we don't need the cross; we don't need salvation; we don't need atonement; we just need to redeem the social structures of society and if we do that people will automatically get better. This is basically Marxism in a Christian form.

And there were even magazines like The Christian Century, which was a pretty audacious title when it started at the beginning of the 20th century – as if to say, this is going to be the Christian century; we are going to bring in the millennium simply by changing the social structures of society. Well, nobody believes that anymore after two world wars and a bunch of other stuff.

But what happened is Protestantism split into two wings, the fundamentalists and the mainline churches. And the mainline churches tended to take the social action issues of Christianity – caring for the sick, for the poor, the dispossessed, racial justice and things like that. Today there really aren't that many Fundamentalists left; I don't know if you know that or not, but they are such a minority; there aren't that many Fundamentalists left in America.

Anyway, the fundamentalist and evangelical movement said they were just going to care about personal salvation when they split from the mainline churches. What happened is the mainline churches cared about the social morality and the evangelicals cared about personal morality. That's what happened when they split. But they really are all part of the total gospel – social justice, personal morality and salvation. And today a lot more people, evangelicals, are caring about those issues.

Bono called me the other day and said why don't you come up to the U2 concert at the Staples Center because we're both active in AIDS prevention. My wife and I have given millions to the prevention of AIDS and those afflicted and those orphaned by AIDS. And we were working together with him and he came back to us and I said, "What have you learned in this data plan that you've got?" And he said, "That I was wrong about the church. They have been the most receptive, and I didn't expect them to be receptive." And we began to talk about that, but that's a trend, and one of the trends you're going to be hearing about in the future is a thing called the Global Peace Plan, and we may get back into that a little bit later.

I would echo one of the things John DiIulio said earlier, that Washington isn't that important. It's not. I'm sorry to tell you that, but it's just not. And one of the things that evangelicals have is a true view of the limitations of politics. Politics is always downstream in culture. By the time it gets to law – I'm sorry, folks – it's already in the water system. There is not a high school person in America who has a politician's picture on his wall as a hero. Who do they have? Sports stars, entertainers, celebrities and things like that. And so, I would say that that's a key issue.

Another trend that I see is this 40 days phenomenon – this 40 Days of Purpose, which of course I'm right in the middle of. Ten percent of the churches in America have now done 40 Days of Purpose and that's just now. We will take another 10 to 15 thousand through it this year, and on and on and on. And there's a little story of how that got started in churches and then it spread to corporations like Coca-Cola and Ford and Wal-Mart, and they started doing 40 Days of Purpose. And then it spread to all the sports teams. I spoke at the NBA All-Stars this year because all of the teams were doing 40 Days of Purpose. LPGA, NASCAR, most of the baseball teams – when the Red Sox were winning the World Series, they were going through 40 Days of Purpose during the Series. So the story of the 40 Days of Purpose is more than the story of the book. And maybe we can get back to why that touched such a nerve around the world, because The Purpose Driven Life is not just the best-selling book in American history; it's the best-selling book in about a dozen languages. It's in about 30 languages right now and that's why I was at this meeting last night with the Spanish.

The next phase that you're going to see is we're actually doing citywide 40 Days of Purposes. We've already done one in Chattanooga; we're going to do one in Philadelphia this fall with 250 African-American churches. We're doing one in Orlando, and you're going to see this movement.

The third trend I think you need to be aware of is the signs of the possible spiritual awakening in America. You know we've had two Great Awakenings in the history of America and we're a hundred years overdue for the next one. If there is a second Reformation in the Church and a third spiritual awakening in the world or in America, it will come through two words – small groups.

The small group structure is the structure of renewal in every facet of Christianity – including Catholicism. And really "mainline" is sideline now. They're not mainline anymore, they're sideline denominations. The mainline is evangelicalism. The sidelines are the ones that used to be the mainline. And so, it's kind of like when we talked about the mainstream media. What is the mainstream media? There's old media and there's new media, okay, but what's the "mainstream"? It depends on what stream you're in. I think it was pointed out earlier that America is a pretty big place and there are lots of streams. And I could take you around America and show you forty different streams. And so it just depends on who you're listening to. But I do believe what David Brooks wrote in an article right after the election, what he called the two conversations going on in America. And I think that was a pretty seminal article; there are not just two conversations going on, but there are even more than that.

I think a fourth trend that you might be interested in as journalists is the move – the shift in power – in evangelicalism from what's called para-church organizations to local churches. In the last 50 years, most of what was new and innovative that's been done in Christianity was done by para-church organizations, not actual congregations. Things like World Vision, World Relief, Campus Crusade for Christ, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Billy Graham Organization and on and on. And America in its entrepreneurship has started thousands of these para-church organizations since the 1950s. And in the '70s and the '80s particularly, all of the bright minds were not going into local churches. They were all going into these para-church organizations.

But all the smart people I know are now working in local churches. They're moving there and the power is moving back to the local congregations. Regardless of size, they just happen to be there. And as a result, the pastors and the priests and the ministers of these churches are, I think, gaining a larger voice. And that's why, by the way, the religious right does not represent evangelicalism. I'm not a part of the religious right and I don't know any of my friends who are part of the religious right. It's a portion, but it's like when you take the elephant and you've got the nine blind men and one says it looks like a tail and one says it looks like something else – you know, it's what you're grabbing onto at the time. And a part of that is because the religious right has tended to limit the number of items on the agenda to three or four social issues and missed a bunch of others.

Another issue that I think you need to be aware of is what I call the three great questions of the next twenty years. And I think these are questions that we're going to be facing – they're all religious issues – and here is what I think they are. Number one, will Islam modernize peacefully? We're going to hear more about that a little bit later tomorrow. Will Islam modernize peacefully? – big implications on that one.

Number two, will America return to its religious roots and faith? It's questionable whether that will happen or not. Will America return to its religious roots and faith or will it go the way of Europe and basically reject its heritage?

And number three, which is a really big one and of particular interest to me, what is going to replace the vacuum in China now that Marxism is dead? What's going to replace it? In all likelihood, it's going to be Christianity. I've had two state dinners in China in Tienanmen Square and People's Hall with their government, with the bureaucrats there, with the Cabinet members. I've actually had them in our home and had them in our church, and they've given me pretty much carte blanche in China for some reason. I don't know why they trust me, but we've discussed this, and I've debated them. I said, "You know what the problem with China is? You want the economic freedom of the West without the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion and the freedom of information that you must have to get the other." And so, they're going through turmoil. But there are about 80 million Christians, maybe as many as 100 million Christians – most of them evangelical – in China right now. That's about 25 million above ground and about 75 million meeting below ground in house churches. And so it is a huge, huge wave that's taking place there.

Then the other story that I would encourage you to look at is this evolving alliance between evangelical Protestants and Catholics, particularly in the evangelical wing of Catholicism. In 2004, there were three big surprises in our culture. One of them was the success of the movie The Passion, which was roundly panned by everybody and then went on to become the third biggest best-selling movie in history – grossing $600 million. The second was, for the second year in a row, my book was the best-selling book in the world. A book by a pastor – how's a book by a pastor selling that many, almost a million a month? And the third was some of the so-called "values voters" from this past election. And really, I happen to agree with some of what's been said, that there's a lot of over-emphasis laid on that. But in all three of those, Catholics and evangelicals came down on the same side of the fence in many areas. Now when you get 25 percent of America, which is basically Catholic, and you get 28 to 29 percent of America, which is evangelical, together, that's called a majority. And it is a very powerful bloc, if they happen to stay together on particular issues.

Okay, now let's talk about what I was assigned, "Myths of the Modern Evangelical Mega-Church." I spoke at Harvard last month. I did a series of lectures for the faculty in the Kennedy School and also in the law school. I spoke to several groups of faculty and several groups of students and I started with this quote from Peter Drucker: "The most significant sociological phenonmenon of the first half of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. The most significant sociological phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century has been the development of the large pastoral church – of the mega-church. It is the only organization that is actually working in our society."

Now Drucker has said that at least six times. I happen to know because he's my mentor. I've spent 20 years under his tutelage learning about leadership from him, and he's written it in two or three books, and he says he think it's the only thing that really works in society.

Before we can talk about the myths, let me give you some definition. What is a mega-church? Technically it's a church that averages over 2,000 in attendance. That's the draw point, the break-off point for a mega-church – 2,000, not in members, but in attendance on a weekly basis. Now let me put this in perspective. In 1963 in America, only 93 churches in America had more than 1,000. Today, there are over 6,000 churches that run over 1,000 in America.

There is a shifting. There are 6,000 churches that run over 1,000, there are about 750 churches that run over 2,000 – so those are the real mega-churches, the 750 over 2,000. There are about 20 churches in America that run over 10,000 in attendance on a typical weekend. And there are three of us that run over 20,000. The three largest churches in America are Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, outside of Chicago; the Lakewood Church in Houston, which is on television, so you might have seen that one (the pastor is Joel Osteen); and then Saddleback is the largest church in America. We had our 25th anniversary on Easter this year. I did 12 services. We had 45,000 in attendance and I preached 12 services in a row. Two weeks later, we celebrated our anniversary and we had never had the church in one location, so we rented Angel Stadium and had 30,000 at Angel Stadium. I have 82,000 names on the church roll.

I started Saddleback in my home 25 years ago with my wife. And you need to understand, I am a country boy. I grew up in northern California in a town of less than 500 people. So the church I pastor is about a zillion times bigger than the town I grew up in and that has been cultural shock for me. And I've watched the church grow from just my wife and me over the past 25 years. One of the things we wanted to prove is that you don't have to have a building to grow a church, so we grew the church to over 10,000 before we had our first building. We went 15 years without a building. We met in 73 different facilities in the first 15 years. We said, "We're the church that, if you can figure out where we are, you get to come, because we only want really smart people." So we kept changing it. But we wanted to prove it's not a church. We met in warehouses, bank buildings, stadiums, tents, whatever. So today, we have a 120-acre campus, we have about 30 acres just in parking, if you can imagine that. It's like I'm in the Dumbo parking lot or the Goofy parking lot or whatever.

If I were to drop dead right now, Saddleback Church would keep growing, because it's not built on me. It is a purpose-driven church, rather than a personality-driven church. We've all seen what happens when churches or ministries are built on personality and that guy has a moral failure or he flames out or something and the whole ministry collapses. When I wrote "The Purpose Driven Life," I took off seven months and I did not preach, and I did not teach, and I did not lead my staff of 300, but I just wrote the book. And while I was gone, the church grew by 800 people because it's not built on me, it's built on the 9,200 lay ministers in the church.

We were talking about volunteers this morning – I know about volunteers. We have 9,200 lay ministers who lead 200-plus different ministries all over southern California. I know these numbers are a little overwhelming, but just to give you an idea, we have 2,600 small groups that meet from Santa Monica to Escondido in 83 cities. And so the church gathers on Sunday for a big service and then meets during the week in homes. That allows us to do all kinds of enormous things. For instance, in November, during our 40 Days of Community, we decided to feed every homeless person in Orange County three meals a day for 40 days. We went out and we found out that was 42,000 people. How do you feed 42,000 people three meals a day for 40 days? Well, it takes a lot of volunteers. And we did – we collected over 2 million pounds of food and those 9,200 lay ministers pulled it off and we fed 40,000 people three meals a day.

So when you talk about taking government money – we don't want government money. I don't want government money because I don't want them intruding in what we're doing. I love the point that John DiIulio made earlier, that there's a difference between teaching and transformation. I'm in the life change business. I'm in the transformation business. You know what motivates me? – not size; in fact, I don't even like big churches. I mean, my favorite size was 300 people. What motivates me is that I am addicted to changing lives. I love seeing lives changed and that is the untold story. Everybody tries to attribute the growth of churches to everything else but what makes them grow – and it's changed lives.

Now that's what a mega-church is, so what's an evangelical? Let's just review. An evangelical believes the Bible is God's Word, Jesus is who he claimed to be, salvation is only by grace – in other words, you can't earn your way to heaven – and everybody needs to hear the good news; information, not coercion. It is a funny thing to me that about every five years America and journalism reintroduces evangelicals to America. It's like starting with Carter – you know there was a headline – "Who are the Evangelicals?" And about every five years, we get a new article – "Who are the Evangelicals?" Well, it's not like they're a fringe group; they're 28 percent of the country. In a pluralistic nation, we are a lot bigger than most of the other sections. And it's not like they need an introduction. What needs an introduction is some of the smaller groups and it's just kind of funny. It's like people say, "Because I don't know about them, well, then maybe America doesn't know about them."

Well, the other thing that I would say is that we need – and I'm not speaking of you here – but we need to help journalists use the right terms. There is a difference between "evangelicalism" and "fundamentalism" and "the religious right." And people use them like they are synonyms. They are not – they are very, very different. I am an evangelical. I'm not a member of the religious right and I'm not a fundamentalist. And also, a pastor is not an evangelist. I get called an evangelist all the time, as if that's the only thing there is. I'm not an evangelist, I'm a pastor. An evangelist is somebody who travels around from town to town to town speaking. James Dobson is not an evangelist, he's a radio psychologist. But people call people evangelists like that's the standard term if you're an evangelical; no, I'm a pastor. What does a pastor do? He cares and comforts and counsels.

Toffler wrote a book many years ago – I'm sure you all read it – called Future Shock. In that book he says when life is changing rapidly, we need what he calls islands of stability to hang onto. We need some rocks in our lives that don't change when everything around us is changing. And when I went to start Saddleback Church, I had just finished my doctorate. I was out of seminary and I moved from Texas to southern California, and I said I want to spend my entire life in one location because I value being in a community, watching the kids grow up and go through stages. My daughter was four months old when I started Saddleback Church. She's now married and has a child and has one on the way. So I've watched an entire generation grow up in my church, and I've loved that – watched the kids be born, be dedicated, grow up; I've watched them go through grade school, graduate from high school, go off to college, come back, get married, come back, have a baby. It's that kind of stability that builds really strong churches. And so I just said, "I want to be pastor."

And so what is a mega-church and what are some myths about it? Well, I wrote down a bunch of them here. Here is the first one. The first myth is that mega-churches are a uniquely American phenomenon. That's a myth. Mega-churches are not a uniquely American phenomenon. The reality is there are far more mega-churches outside of the United States than there are inside of the United States. In fact, all of the largest churches in the world are outside of America and Saddleback is just a baby compared to some of them. For instance, William Kumuyi's church in Lagos, Nigeria, has 120,000 in attendance. Cesar Castellano's church has 250,000 in attendance. They're building a stadium right now that seats 250,000. Ten of the 11 largest churches in the world are in Seoul, Korea. The largest Baptist church, the largest Methodist church, the largest Presbyterian Church, and the largest Pentecostal church are all in Seoul, Korea. I've spoken in them. The largest church in the world is in Seoul, Korea – Central Church on Yoido Island, which has a half a million members. They have 50,000 home small groups. So this is not a phenomenon of America. In America, a mega-church is really tiny in comparison.

Here's the second myth. The second myth is that mega-churches are politically active. In fact, you don't get to be a mega-church if you get involved in other issues. You would find that most of the churches that are politically active tend to be medium- or small-size churches. They are not the largest churches. And because they tend to get caught up in a political agenda, they don't grow to the size of others. The largest churches tend to focus on issues like the ones that we're focused on.

A third myth is that mega-churches attract people because of their size. Now that one is laughable. Nobody goes to a church because of its size. Actually, the larger a church gets, the more headaches there are, the more hassles you have to put up with, the further you have to walk to get to the service. Can you imagine in our church checking in and out four or five thousand children into our Sunday school? Our Sunday school is bigger than any school in our district – it's just enormous. I mean, we have a computer system where you come in with your tag and you've got a bar code and you flip the thing and it brings up three tags and you put one tag on the baby and one on the bottle and one on the diaper bag and then you don't get them mixed up. And you don't check that baby out unless you come back with the right tag because we've got split homes, and we found one parent trying to come pick up the child when it's not their weekend. And so there are all kinds of things to think through. The truth is the only people who like large churches are pastors. (Chuckles.) And they like them because they like to speak to big crowds. But people put up with the size in order to get the benefits – they say, "I like the teaching, I like the programs, I like the music, and I like the ministries," and things like that. So it's a myth that people go because they want the size.

A fourth myth is that most mega-churches have televised services. That's just not true. In fact, until Lakewood Church grew up, Bill Hybels' church and our church – the largest churches in America – were not on the television. In fact, when I started Saddleback 23 years ago, I said we would never go on TV and we'd never go on the radio because I didn't want to be a celebrity. I think always being in the spotlight blinds you. I think that you get more done under the radar, behind the scenes. And I actually was able to do it for about 23 years until this blasted book kind of blew my cover. But I was able to just keep behind the scenes, and while I wasn't known like a Jerry Falwell or a Robert Schuler or some of these media personalities, every pastor in America knew who I was because I put all of my sermons on an Internet site and it gets 400,000 hits a day from pastors. And so, instead of me teaching it on the radio or TV, we put it on the Internet and we allow other pastors to take this material and use it.

Another myth is that mega-churches require little or no commitment. What I mean by that is that people think if you're big, you must be shallow. And I would just say to that – the reality is that most members of typical churches could not join Saddleback because they would not be willing to meet the requirements. We have very strong standards for requirements. They're pretty tough, and we're not interested in the big membership; we're interested in turning an audience into an army and mobilizing it for good.

The last one that I'll give you is the myth that mega-churches grow by marketing. I'm so tired of this story; I've heard it over and over and over – the latest being the most recent issue of Business Week, where it basically says the mega-churches are big business. Now that is just such a superficial, unrealistic view of what actually goes on. The implication is that if a church is this big, it must be because of marketing. No, it's because of changed lives. When peoples' lives are changed you'd have to lock the doors to keep them out, because they want to go where their lives are changed. We put people in a tent for three years where we would freeze in the winter and it would rain on us all spring and we'd burn up in the summer and the howling winds could come through – and people would walk about a mile through the mud to get to this tent. I mean, everything was inconvenient. And why did they come, why did they show up? Because their lives were getting changed; that is what was happening. So they put up with inconvenience.

The only guy I know who got this was a New York Times reporter who did an article on Saddleback a while back. And I like the way he said it. He said, "Marketing creates a message in order to sell a product. But Warren's doing the exact opposite – he's creating products in order to push a message." Well, it's true. I plead guilty to that. But that's not marketing, that's taking the message and trying to get it out as many ways as possible instead of creating a message to sell your product.

Really there are two kinds of mega-churches. They don't grow the same way. Some grow by transferred growth and some grow by conversion. And anytime you see a mega-church that grows instantly – it just kind of explodes – and all of a sudden they go from zero to 5,000, that's a church that's growing by transfer growth, which means they've just become the hot act in town and everybody goes, "Let's just all go over there. That's the place to go so we'll all go." And as a pastor, I don't consider that legitimate growth. Jesus said, "I'll make you fishers of men." This is like swapping fish in the aquarium. It's like we pop them from one place to another, and they grow at the expense of other churches.

Saddleback is unique in that 78 percent of the members of our church had no religious background prior to joining the church. It is a church of conversion growth. We've baptized about 14,000 adults in the last eight years. So that means this is not a church that grew at the expense of other churches.

The other thing that you need to understand is that most pastors in America are in small churches, while most of the members are in large churches. In other words, right now there are about 340,000 churches in America of all different sizes and shapes. A lot of those are out in towns of 50 people and there's nobody in them, but there's a pastor. So there are a lot of pastors in little churches. But today most of the members are in the larger churches. You know, I could go on, but I think I'll just stop on that and let David Brooks respond. [...]

MR. BROOKS: [...]

[S]ince Rick mentioned Bono, let me start with a little story of something that happened to me two weeks ago, which I think sort of exemplifies this. I got a call a couple of months ago from a friend of mine who works on the Hill, Mark Rodgers, who used to work for Santorum. And he said, "Do you want to go to a U2 concert?" And I love U2 and my wife especially does. So we went up there and he organized a little group and Gerson went – his first rock concert. (Chuckles.)

And we went out to an Italian meal in South Philly and there were some people from the Billy Graham organization, there were some Christian rock musicians from Nashville, and it was a great conversation. Everybody else at the table except my wife and I knew Bono and had long relations with him either through Africa work, through the Heartland Tour – remember he took this tour, where he went to Willow Creek, he went to Wheaton, he went up and down the Midwest, stopping at mega-churches, stopping at schools, doing a lot of conversation, a lot of awareness of AIDS, urging evangelicals to get involved in AIDS research. There had been a piece of research showing that evangelicals were less likely to get involved in combating AIDS than other groups. And I think when that came out I think a lot of people in the community felt embarrassed. And I've been told that he was instrumental in raising awareness among evangelicals.

I was told at this dinner by one of the guys who is a producer for Switchfoot of a meeting in Nashville where Bono was coming through, and he had a meeting just with Christian musicians. And he said – you know, it was a group of forty or fifty – he said, "I know what you guys are feeling. You're in this genre – in some way it represents who you are, but in some way you feel trapped by it. You feel trapped by the strictures of what you have to do. It's not quite fully expressing who you are as artists." And this guy from Switchfoot said, "That's exactly how we feel, that somehow we're constrained." And then my friend who was at the dinner put up a guitar, hoping Bono would get up and lead the group in some songs. And he played "They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love" – that was the song he played.

And what I found interesting was first the comfort these people felt with Bono –he doesn't call himself a Christian; he's very non-sectarian – but he has a faith in Jesus and at the end of the concert, he takes off his cross and puts it on the microphone stand and the last thing you see is the spotlight on the cross. And so there's a lot of Christian imagery in what Bono is and what he does. But he's not typical. But what I found was a great comfort between these two heterodox communities.

And then the second thing was what this guy from Switchfoot was saying – the sense of breaking out of the crust of a certain stricture, an ethic in the community. And people wanted to break out of it and express their faith and their lives in new ways, and there was a sense of frustration with that. And I think that's happened across the evangelical world. And I'm coming from outside that community – I'm Jewish, and so I'm sort of looking at it from the outside. I'm reminded of when the Human Rights Campaign, the gay and lesbian organization, had a group of people come in to explain Christian conservatives to them, and they invited me and Jonah Goldberg. (Laughter.) And so, I don't come from this community, but I speak for it.

MR. WARREN: Well, I'm actually speaking at the University of Judaism this next month, where I've been asked to come in and teach the rabbis my preaching seminar. So I'm speaking for Jews.

MR. BROOKS: Well, I was going to say – we don't actually have mega-gogues, because if you built a town with a mega-gogue, you'd have people saying, "Oh, I don't go to that mega-gogue." (Laughter.) "I go to that other mega-gogue, I wouldn't touch that mega-gogue."

But anyway, it's like popcorn. The popcorn is in that hard shell and then it just bursts out. And that doesn't mean the hard shell part is gone, but it's just much more complicated, what's going on, and in some ways softer. And I think that's what's happening. And so I'll just run down very quickly what I think some of the causes are of this transformation in the evangelical leadership and community and then some of the effects.

The first cause, I think, is the end of a certain sort of history since the 1920s – evangelicals pulling in after the Scopes trial, feeling embattled, defensive, and then more slowly over the decades feeling much more comfortable in American culture. I think that comfort derives from the home schooling movement, so there's less a sense that "My kids are being educated in ways that are alien to me." People are more comfortable with how their kids are being educated. Then Reagan and Bush. And then it was interesting to hear Rick talk about the repairing of the split between the social and the personal. And I think these are just long and historical trends that are creating a comfort level, and with the comfort level, less of a need to feel embattled and part of a remnant and a greater need to express yourself and not be quite so unified and disciplined. So that's one thing.

The second change, I think, is a certain embarrassment I sense with the putative leaders of the evangelical movement. A sense of embarrassment, to be honest – I can say this, I'm Jewish – with people like Jimmy Swaggert, Tammy Faye Baker, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, sometimes James Dobson. You know, I was with some evangelicals in Pennsylvania the day after Falwell made those 9/11-related comments. And the sense of revulsion was – I can tell you – natural and profound. And as we learned in the South Carolina primary in 2000, that doesn't necessarily mean people want to see outsiders coming in and blasting those guys, but within the community I think there's embarrassment. Evangelicals say, "They don't speak for me. A lot of people in the country think they speak for me, but they do not speak for me. That is not who I am." So that's the second cause.

The third cause, I think, is an embarrassment sometimes over the quality of the evangelical sub-culture. Mark Noll's book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was important for a lot of people that I run into. There's another book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. The musicians I was talking about feel that the music doesn't really represent who they are – and what was interesting when they talked about Bono and U2 was that he is an artist and because he's an artist he doesn't have pat answers for everything. He explores the problematics of a certain situation. And that's what they wanted to do, but they felt pressured to just give pat answers. And so they wanted to be more artists and less – I don't know what you want to call it – less doctrine promoters. And there was some embarrassment because of the paltry response to the AIDS crisis in Africa.

The fourth cause is a greater and perpetual desire to be Jesus-centered, which some of the putative leaders were not. I wrote a column a few months ago about John Stott, this great writer and pastor in England. And it was funny – he came to Washington and I had a chance to have breakfast with him, and when I tried to talk politics with him, you could see his eyes sort of cloud over. But whenever we would talk about Jesus, he was just alive and vibrant. And there's a gap between what Jesus was doing, which is so energizing to people, and what politics and Ralph Reed are doing.

The fifth cause is a frustration with a certain political style, where you go out and vote, you rally, you go to Washington, you meet with important people like presidents and cabinet secretaries. Everybody you meet – you know you're around powerful people but nothing ever seems to happen. And so I think there's just been a sort of exhaustion with that. It was interesting to hear Rick talk about the importance of culture, not politics – how gay marriage entered the culture a long, long time ago. Mark Rodgers, who is up on the Hill, is someone who is acutely aware of that, and spends a lot of time trying to go downstream to influence the culture.

Sixth – and this is what I wrote my book about – is just the changing demographics of America, and especially of the evangelical community. It's now an exurban community, an exurban culture. You know, 90 percent of the office space built in America in the 1990s was built in these far-flung suburbs. I mentioned at lunch that the population of Pittsburgh in the '90s shrunk by 8 percent. The developed land area of Pittsburgh expanded by 43 percent – fewer people, they're just spreading out. And they're spreading out to places like Mesa, Ariz. Mesa now has more people living in it than live in St. Louis, Cincinnati or Minneapolis. Mesa will soon pass Atlanta in population. Food courts come and 500,000 people just follow.

And the culture of these places – you don't want to hear my whole hour-long riff on these places – but basically, it's influenced by the game of golf. It's a state of spiritual grace suggested by golf, which I call living at par. And when you're living at par, your DVD collection is well organized, your cell phone rate plan is well tailored to your needs, your fingernail polish matches the interior of your Lexus, you've got your life so calm and together that next to you, Dick Cheney looks bipolar.

And what has really organized the exurban culture, if I had to pick one thing – there are many obvious reasons people move out to these fast-growing suburbs: lower mortgage, shorter commute, actually, because people can work out there – but the number one reason is they want an orderly place to raise their kids. It's all about finding a place where they can feel comfortable raising their kids. And the demographics of these fast-growing suburbs are basically 1950s America. I call them Mayberrys with Blackberries. They just have very low divorce rates, very low inequality, no rich people and no poor people. It's just 1950s Leave it to Beaver Land out there, with incredible fertility.

One of my favorite statistics from this last election was that George Bush carried 22 of the 23 states with the highest white fertility rates and John Kerry carried the 17 states with the lowest fertility rates. And that's really not about fertility; that's about church attendance. People who attend church have more babies than people who don't.

By the way, one of the myths about evangelicals is that they're prudes. This is the other thing I always quote at every one of these meetings. The group of women in America that have the most orgasms are evangelical women, according to the University of Chicago. (Laughter.) Of course, at the University of Chicago an orgasm is a theoretical construct. (Laughter.)

So anyway, those are the causes, and then I'll just, in five minutes, run down what I think the consequences are.

One, a new leadership cohort, much more influenced by Chuck Colson than anybody else, and much less by Pat Robertson. Rick Warren is a perfect example – not a guy on TV, not sitting up there preaching and crying with a potted plant next to him – someone who is not enriching himself. Rick reverse tithes; he gives away 90 percent of his money. He gave a check to his church that compensated the church for the 25 years of income it had paid him in the first 25 years of his service. So that's a new sort of leader.

And there are other people, people I know less about or read less about but I'm curious about. One is a guy named Brian McLaren, who is part of the "emerging church," which seems to be a Gen X thing. I've read about them, but I really don't understand them. They talk about motivating younger believers, they talk about being postmodern, but at the same time they emphasize Alistair McIntyre. I'm not quite sure what it's all about, but it's something.

Then there's Rich Cizik at the National Association of Evangelicals. And then Mike Gerson, who is another perfect example of a new sort of person, less combative, more uncomfortable with the Robertson-Falwell style, but someone who is much more comfortable in the world. When you read Carl Cannon's National Journal article on him, it's clear that he was not in the wilderness at any point in his life. He's been working for Sen. Dan Coats and doing more things in power. Instead of protesting against the mainstream culture, he's been energetically, positively working proactively to get stuff done. So it's not as much of a contrarian attitude. So, a new leadership.

Second, there are new causes, as Rick mentioned, beyond the normal family agenda of abortion, homosexuality and vulgarity in the media. Not to say those have faded away. But if you want to cover the Republican Party and want to care about politics, it's the social conservative wing of the Republican Party that cares about poverty, and that's where the energy comes from, whether it's Rick Santorum or Dan Coates or Jim Talent.

Of course, there's the AIDS issue, which Rick is very involved in with his peace movement, and the whole focus on Africa, which Rick is also involved with, leading thousands of people over there. Chuck Colson helped in trying to get the president involved in the civil war in Sudan. Rich Cizik has been a strong proponent of creation care – the environmentalism we're beginning to see in evangelical circles. Mark Souder, one of the more socially conservative guys from Indiana in the House, is very green in his voting record, and I think you're beginning to see more of that. There's the human trafficking issue. And the late Diane Knippers worked on a book called For the Health of the Nation, which really expanded the evangelical or social conservative agenda beyond the normal issues to a whole range of issues, which is just something new, and part of this flowering I'm talking about.

And finally, you have a new political style. One of them, I think, is alliances and not conversion. I think a lot of social conservatives came into politics and said, "We'll win followers the way we do it in faith; we'll convert them to us." And there is now much more effort in trying to build strategic alliances with people who are fundamentally not like us but who are operationally like us on certain issues. And so there's a different political style. There's also much more comfort in feeling crossways with the traditional Republican agenda. Social conservatives, according to Andy Kohut's recent Pew data, are just much more economically moderate or liberal than other Republicans. And you begin to see it on the Social Security issue where they feel free to divert away from the Republican movements on this issue. In fact, if I were building a political majority in this country, I'd start sort of where Gary Bauer is substantively. I'd take socially conservative and economically liberal, and I think that's a lower-middle-class majority in the making, which is the opposite of what you hear, that a party should be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I think that's not the way to build a majority.

And then finally – and I think this is the most problematic thing – the consequence of this transformation is the relationship with the mainstream culture. You know, The Times had a Sunday piece about a church – I think it was in Arizona – and the point of the piece was that this is "religion lite" – and you hear this all the time – and I happen to think that was overdrawn. I haven't been to that church, but for most of the people I know it seemed overdrawn, but not totally without point.

I do think there is a shopping-for-faith aspect – maybe there always has been in American culture. Henry Steele Commager had a line: "In the 19th century, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt." And he meant that Americans are not doctrinal in their faith. We had presidential candidates like George Bush who switched denominations in the middle of his life, but he couldn't quite tell why. You had Howard Dean who switched denominations over a bike path. And then you had Wesley Clark who switched four or five times. And that's not atypical for Americans.

And so we're just not a doctrinal people, but I think, nonetheless – not only in mega-churches but maybe throughout American culture – you have, I think, a lightening of religion, certainly a walking-away from the old Jonathan Edwards trembling before an angry God. It's certainly more happy, more upbeat, more optimistic. And to me, one of the most interesting things about this book is the way it's both part of the culture but in some ways very counter-cultural. It's very against the culture of narcissism, the culture of "me," but on the other hand, it's not Jonathan Edwards either.

And so it's the negotiating – being part of the world and being opposed to it, marketing and at the same time sort of counter-marketing – that's the great tension and the temptation, it seems to me, looking from the outside. For a lot of the evangelical community it's the temptation to just be so easy, so undemanding and sometimes so vacuous. That is also part of the consequences.

In any case, I thought what Rick said was fantastic, and he exemplifies a lot of the changes we're seeing. [...]

ELSA WALSH, THE NEW YORKER: So are you saying doctrine won't be important or is not important if you bring together all these –

MR. WARREN: No, no. I think, though, it's what Augustine said: "In the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity." And I think that's how evangelicals and Catholics can get together. And I don't know if you know this or not, but fundamentalists and Pentecostals don't like each other, okay? They don't. But they could get together. "In the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity."

The whole thing is fascinatinmg not just because of what Mr. Warren and Mr. Brooks have to say but because the members of the press who are there--many of them instantly recognizable pundits--seem like they've been granted an interview with Klaatu.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2005 11:28 PM