{"id":1754,"date":"2010-11-01T01:00:03","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T09:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/10\/20\/show-me-the-silent-majority\/"},"modified":"2010-10-31T14:53:02","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T22:53:02","slug":"show-me-the-silent-majority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/11\/01\/show-me-the-silent-majority\/","title":{"rendered":"show me the silent majority"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Bauder\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/sharperiron.org\/article\/now-about-those-differences-part-eighteen\" target=\"_blank\">latest installment<\/a> tells the history of separation from a point of view totally foreign to me. Essentially, he seems to be arguing that there has been a silent majority within evangelical Christendom that never was actually new-evangelical.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This silent majority was at first willing to be identified as fundamentalists but had little stomach for the fight the fundamentalists waged against the liberals.<\/li>\n<li>This silent majority wasn\u2019t new-evangelical, but it sided with the new evangelical forces on the left of the NAE against the fundamentalists. (??)<\/li>\n<li>The silent majority didn\u2019t approve of Billy Graham\u2019s cooperative evangelicalism, but they didn\u2019t break with Graham over it. (???)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You know, I\u2019d really like to see some evidence of these last two points especially. I see many \u2018attaboys\u2019 on SI about it, but really, shouldn\u2019t we demand some evidence and not just rely on Bauder\u2019s say-so?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One bit of evidence he offers is with respect to Dallas Theological Seminary. The critical issue with DTS was Explo 72, an event involving new-evangelicals and, Bauder admits, <strong>non-evangelicals<\/strong>. What would \u2018non-evangelicals\u2019 be, we wonders? Would it be possible that these would be liberals (a.k.a., modernists)? How much more classically new evangelical can you get if you are cooperating with <em>non-evangelicals<\/em>? Yet Bauder calls DTS a \u2018moderate institution\u2019 and seems to dismiss William Ashbrook\u2019s subsequent identification of them as neoevangelical.<\/p>\n<p>Bauder goes on to say:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By the end of the 1970s, the evangelical majority had staked out a position midway between separatist fundamentalism and neoevangelicalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Man, when I hear this I wonder if we are living in parallel universes? In my universe, the evangelical churches were fully supportive of the Graham compromises. Maybe things were different in the USA, I don\u2019t know. But in Canada, every evangelical church in our area bussed people in to hear Billy\u2019s brother-in-law, Leighton Ford. As a high-schooler, I was there. In my own city, not more than 10 or 12 years ago, a member of Billy\u2019s team held meetings in Victoria, BC. I think it was Ralph Bell. NOT ONE evangelical church stood aloof from these meetings. I ask, where is this silent majority?<\/p>\n<p>I am really astonished at two things: I am astonished that Kevin Bauder seems to think there was some huge evangelical majority that really didn\u2019t agree with Billy Graham but just didn\u2019t \u2018distance\u2019 themselves from him and the rest of the new evangelicals. And I am astonished that credulous readers of Kevin Bauder seem to swallow this revisionism as if it were entirely accurate.<\/p>\n<p>Kevin seems to be leading us to a conclusion that the conservative evangelicals are good fellows, really, and people whom we should cooperate with. Their heritage isn\u2019t the heritage of compromisers and betrayers of the gospel, it is the noble heritage of the moderate middle.<\/p>\n<p>The moderate middle cost the fundamentalists their denominations, schools, mission boards, etc., in the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\n<p>The moderate middle cost the Christian church most of its impact on the culture of our day through the new-evangelical compromise.<\/p>\n<p>What is the moderate middle going to cost us today?<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"display: inline; border-width: 0px;\" title=\"don_sig2\" src=\"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/don_sig23.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"don_sig2\" width=\"150\" height=\"50\" \/><\/p>\n<p>[<span style=\"color: #ff6600;\"><strong>UPDATE: <\/strong><\/span>This post originally posted Oct 20, 2010 @ 14:18.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kevin Bauder\u2019s latest installment tells the history of separation from a point of view totally foreign to me. Essentially, he seems to be arguing that there has been a silent majority within evangelical Christendom that never was actually new-evangelical. This silent majority was at first willing to be identified as fundamentalists but had little stomach [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[37,71,77],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-si","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1768,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754\/revisions\/1768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}