The modern evangelical movement arose from the Second American Great Awakening (late eighteenth and early nineteenth century), which was characterized by big emotional camp meetings and revivals.
Though they are basically Assembly of God or Baptist, their churches are often called “nondenominational,” as though real Christianity is identifiable outside religious organizations and independently exists. And an example of the bullying that is second nature to them. Incredibly, this sort of evangelicalism is now thought to be what Christianity IS. The evangelical bullies (heretics are usually bullies) believe it. And they seem to have caused others to believe it too. “Christianity” equals evangelicalism and vice versa. Like I said, the Second Great Awakening was focused on emotional gathering. Emotionalism was thus sanctified, without the knowledge that emotions belong to the body, and “God” is completely beyond the body.
On an individual level, there is this Born-Again experience one must have. This also is verified by emotions that arise in an individual when he or she encounters God, makes him their savior, to whom loyalty is due. And, second, one immediately heeds everything that comes out of the mouth of whatever powerful preacher one has given oneself to. The person with the born-again experience will then believe whatever their powerful preacher says is in the Bible. It’s a hard gig from which to extricate oneself. Unless one admits one has been wrong. But admitting one’s faults is hard to do, when one has been speaking so loudly and compulsively for so long about a god who is completely other. And that’s the idea, that has to happen when these people get tired of it. They just quit going to their megachurches, and often they affect a new atrophy. But the less said about that the better.
This person-with-the-born-again-experience then, has only one value: getting others to have that born-again experience. So if an evangelical claims to be helping the poor or feeding the hungry, they are only doing it to get more people “saved” by their lights, thus getting them into heaven. There would be no reason to, say, feed the hungry, unless it was to trick them into becoming evangelicals themselves.
Just read their conversion stories (a genre they invented) to see what I mean. For one thing, I have noticed this, and it has never changed: becoming instant experts: like they need only have tried Buddhist meditation briefly and they instantly become an expert on “eastern religion” forevermore. Say woman quits shaving her legs for a week or so in college. She becomes an expert on feminism for the rest of her life. Without having to resort to all that pesky reading.
I will now write about the evangelicals who are now taking over the American Orthodox Church. Both the Orthodox Church in America (the OCA, mainly the Slavs) and the Antiochian Archdiocese (the Arabs). Read their conversion stories to see how (I, myself, have read the ones by Rod Dreher, and Revs Gillquist and Whiteford). They are very telling. They don’t come into the Church with anything like repentance. They supposedly had that taken care of long time ago. That’s understood. They only were attracted to Orthodoxy because it fulfilled a liturgical need they didn’t know they had or because it was (finally!) a place where their movement conservatism could find the religious element of their political philosophy. Supposedly the Orthodox Church was place where nothing ever changed. That is not true. But they view Christianity as a rule book anyway. Not reading the Bible themselves (though they make a big deal of it) but relying instead upon what their powerful preacher says is in it.
The proper way for anyone to come into the Orthodox Church is with repentance, with gratitude, with a new understanding about salvation. To seek the ignorance that is greater than all knowledge, as St. Isaac of Syria put it. With a silence appropriate to one who previously got things wrong. These people exhibit none of those qualities. They come in as evangelicals and do not change. They have already taken over the OCA and the Antiochians. I think it’s too late to think it will be otherwise. They will next try to take over the Greeks. But I don’t feel the Greeks are ready for them. The Greeks underestimate them. Thinking them to be naive misguided Protestants, like Frs. Schmemman and Meyendorff did. They are not naive at all.
That said, it’s strange that evangelicalism even exists. It is a totally an American phenomenon. It arose because the English reformation didn’t go far enough. It wasn’t extreme enough. English Protestantism only existed so that Henry VIII could divorce his first wife. This inferiority complex when it came to reformation migrated to America along with the English colonists. It resulted in the sanctification of emotions and thus of the body, and then did a weird reverse migration to Africa and Europe, and then became, incredibly, what Christianity is thought to be. That is not true. What we call “God” is totally beyond the body. But because of the evangelicals, that is forgotten, and even fought against. “God,” properly understood, is an idol for most people. Concepts about God are generally inadequate, and we are constantly casting them aside and looking beyond them, continuing to look in that direction. But the evangelicals, by keeping “God” so low, are heretics. But that is only our tendency as humans.
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