The coronavirus pandemic, of course, has placed religious communities under extraordinary strain. I reached out to dozens of pastors, theologians, academics, and historians, as well as a seminary president and people involved in campus ministry. As a person of the Christian faith who has spent most of my adult life attending evangelical churches, I wanted to understand the splintering of churches, communities, and relationships. The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches. What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within churches.” “The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more intense than I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he told me. Emerson, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that he and his research team have spent the past three years studying race and Christianity. (Like others with whom I spoke about this topic, he requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.) “It’s everywhere.” “Nearly everyone tells me there is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that aren’t sufficiently conservative or anti-woke,” a pastor and prominent figure within the evangelical world told me. One of those pastors, Bryan Pickering, cited mistreatment by elders, domineering leadership, bullying, and “ spiritual abuse and a toxic culture.” Political conflicts are hardly the whole reason for the turmoil, but according to news accounts, they played a significant role, particularly on matters having to do with race. The Christian Post, an online evangelical newspaper, published an op-ed by one of its contributors criticizing religious conservatives like Platt, Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, as “progressive Christian figures” who “commonly champion leftist ideology.” In a matter of months, four pastors resigned from Bethlehem Baptist Church, a flagship church in Minneapolis.
Influential figures such as the theologian Russell Moore and the Bible teacher Beth Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention both were targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC. What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world.
For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.” Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “ left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. “A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.
But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. T he election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event.