The Internet Monk recently wrote a piece predicting the collapse of evangelicalism. He gives it ten years. I honestly thought his post was intended as a kind of Monty Python's Flying Circus historical comedy; I didn't think it was very funny and it certainly was not properly documented, so I blew it off. The Christian Science Monitor and a few other internet swill shops picked it up, which I thought was cute.

One evangelical took exception to the notion and set himself the task of predicting evangelicalism's looming survival.

That's when it started to get a little funnier.

Mark Galli is one of the vacant drones over at Christianity Today. Senior managing editor, actually. He started out his piece by telling us that Michael Spencer [the Monk] sees the Roman and Orthodox communions benefiting from the exodus of evangelicals. Here's what Galli said:

Spencer might have added Anglicanism as a beneficiary. As an Anglican, I wish it were true. But in my experience, the number of evangelicals entering these communions is not as great as those leaving these communions for evangelical faith. I don't know of any studies that have, or even can, measure this phenomenon accurately. So we might have to simply debate our impressions.

Fascinating brainwork here. I wondered two things: 1) how much Mark Galli is pulling down per annum for his important work, and 2) how stupid does one have to be to get hired as a junior managing editor at CT?

Had Spencer said evangelicals were fleeing to Anglicanism, I could see why Galli might want to quarrel. But since Spencer said no such thing, one wonders how desperate (or lonely) a man Galli must be to make this response a matter for discussion. And on top of that, Galli concedes he doesn't know of any studies that support anyone's impressions about the number of evangelicals becoming Anglican, Roman or Orthodox. So Galli is taking issue with something Spencer never said and for which he has no evidence to support either side—assuming there were two sides.

I think I wasted part of my life reading that third paragraph.

From the fifth paragraph:

For all our cultural influence and religious impact, evangelicals are "like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales ... [they] are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness." This quotation, from Isaiah 40:15-17, refers to "the nations," but it applies just as well to the "evangelical nation."

While I am impressed that Mr. Galli could find this quotation in his Bible (or that he has a Bible to find stuff in), it hardly makes a relevant point. It seems to me that Spencer is not intending to show the significance (or lack of significance) of evangelicalism as compared to God, his piece has to do with the movement's significance in this historical moment. No movement when compared to God himself carries more weight than dust on the scales. All the movements throughout the whole of human history multiplied by ten thousand are still "as nothing before him".

And Galli goes on like this for 16 paragraphs!

Here's another one:

In this sense, the history of the Christian faith is littered with evangelicals, from the apostle Paul to Antony of the Desert, from Francis of Assisi to Teresa of Avila, from the monastic movement to camp meetings, from Beth Moore to Mimi Haddad, from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to Evangelicals for Social Action.

Oy, vey!

I can assure both these chaps of one thing: evangelicalism is not going to collapse. It is not going to collapse for the same reason the Hindenburg is not going to burst into flames.

If anyone wants insight into the failure of evangelicalism, I could suggest nothing more informative than three easily-obtained documents:

No Place For Truth, by David Wells
Evangelical Affirmations, May 1989
An Evangelical Manifesto, May 2008

and for a brilliant exposé on the quality of thought amongst evangelical apologists:

http://www.markgalli.com/galliblog/?p=125