8
wing Evangelicals do exactly the same thing in trying to promote the interests of the Democratic
Party. Thus, Evangelicals do not appear to be distinctively Christian in what they advocate.
They both often seem merely to mimic what the secular Left and the secular Right are saying.
At what price has the success of the Evangelical engagement of contemporary American
culture been purchased? It seems to me that the price has been compromise with the world and
the steady diminution of the distance between the lifestyle and beliefs of Evangelicals and those
of American society as a whole. Ronald Sider's The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience
6
is
one depiction of the kind of thing I mean. But why has this happened? Why does a conscious
attempt by the church to transform society often result in society transforming the church?
Ironically, H. R. Niebuhr himself expressed the problem with much of the conservative
attack on liberal culture Protestantism when he pointed out that it so often itself also a form of
cultural religion because it seeks to replace conformity with contemporary culture with
conformity to some culture of the past. When Evangelicals promote "conservatism" they often
are promoting a culture of the past as superior to the culture of the present.
7
The problem with
doing this is not (as liberals often believe) that the culture of the present necessarily is superior to
all past cultures. But it is one thing to critique present day accommodation to culture on the
basis of the idealization of some period of Western history in the past and quite another to
critique contemporary accommodationism on the basis of the Gospel. We should hold it as
axiomatic that no period of past history can simply be identified with the Gospel. What the
Gospel pushes toward is the Kingdom of God, which is still future. The Gospel, in the final
analysis, is not conservative or liberal, but radical. For this reason, Christian witness that does
justice to the Gospel cannot be either merely liberal or merely conservative.
6
Ronald Sider. The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the
World? Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2005.
7
Christ and Culture, p. 102.