“There are a lot of angry homosexuals out here today,” the man holding the megaphone barked. He had come to Fort Worth’s Trinity Pride Day to speak for God. Much to my wife’s chagrin, I couldn’t let his crude comment pass.
“I just see a lot of good people having a great time,” I said.
“That’s just on the surface,” he assured me. “Deep down, they’re angry because they know their lifestyle is an abomination in the eyes of a holy God.”
“Are you representing a church?” I asked.
“I am representing Jesus,” he said, jutting a finger skyward.
“And did Jesus send you to come down here and make a public nuisance of yourself?” I inquired.
Alan Bean
“I’m here because I love you,” he assured me.
“You love me?” I asked. “Somehow, I don’t feel loved.”
“Because I love you,” he explained, “I am giving you an opportunity to repent and turn to Jesus.”
“Well, Jesus told me to come down here and love everybody,” I replied, as calmly as my rapidly accelerating heart rate would permit.
“You’ve got the wrong Jesus, man” he said.
“Well, you’ve got every right to be down here,” I replied, dialing things back a bit. “And I’ve got to admire your courage.”
Although my Broadway Baptist Church “Always Be Love” T-shirt suggested I considered myself a Christian, it didn’t matter. He knew he was right and I was wrong. I was dealing with a “certainty evangelical.”
The evangelical quest for certainty
Most evangelicals believe belief and doubt are incompatible. This is why evangelicals are forever giving one another little pep talks: God is in control, God is good, God will never forsake his children.
“Most evangelicals believe belief and doubt are incompatible.”
Evangelical pastors are paid to project confidence. Their job is to assure us they are absolutely certain about the big stuff. God is real. God is good. God is love. The Bible says so, and evangelical pastors believe the Bible.
In a recent Substack post, Ryan Burge cited a study in which participants were asked to rate their belief using a sliding scale from “believe, no doubts,” to “don’t believe.”
While 85% of white evangelicals said they believed in God without any doubts at all, only 56% of Protestant Mainline Christians and 55% of Catholics made the same claim. There is almost a perfect correlation between the percentage of white Christians who believe in God without question and the percentage who voted for Donald Trump. Might there be a connection?
Unavoidably, the quest for certainty throws up a wall between the people who are right and the people who are wrong. The more certain we become, the higher the wall rises. The higher the wall, the more frightened we become that it might come crashing down.
Presuppositional certainty
Evangelicals are certain the Bible is the inerrant word of God. They don’t come to this belief after carefully weighing opposing options; the inerrancy of Scripture is a foundational presupposition that can be neither proved nor disproved. You either believe it or you don’t. Conservative evangelicals believe in God because they believe the Bible. Apart from the Bible, many suggest, there is no reason to believe in God and no solid foundation for moral behavior.
“Conservative evangelicals believe in God because they believe the Bible.”
Because belief in an inerrant Bible is a response to the testimony of the Holy Spirit, those who reject biblical inerrancy are rejecting God. Or, if you are a good Calvinist, you believe God opens the eyes of the elect and consigns everyone else to spiritual darkness.
Presuppositional thinking drives a wedge between believers and unbelievers. An old Sunday school song captures the spirit perfectly: “One door, and only one, and yet its sides are two; I’m on the inside, on which side are you?”
Heaven-hell eschatology
According to a 2021 Pew survey, 91% of evangelicals believe in hell, a belief shared by 69% of American Mainline Protestants. But for most evangelicals, hell isn’t just a destination for really despicable people; everybody who doesn’t publicly profess faith in Jesus Christ is destined for eternal conscious torment.
This explains why evangelism and foreign missions have been evangelical preoccupations and why the street preacher I mentioned earlier felt moved to interrupt a celebratory Pride parade with warnings of perdition. “There is no RIP in hell,” his poster read.
There is no point in listening to hell-bound sinners, in this view, until they repent and get saved.
Signs and wonders certainty
When I was in my mid-teens, my Canadian Baptist parents were mesmerized by the signs and wonders of the charismatic movement. They had embarked on one version of an evangelical certainty quest. Baptized as a boy by the Social Gospel preacher T.C. Douglas, my dad was a true believer who read his Bible every day and knelt beside his bed in prayer at the end of the day.
But something was missing. The folks at our mid-sized Baptist church were conservative evangelicals but, like most Canadians, they didn’t show a lot of passion unless they were at a hockey game. They were kind, helpful people, and they believed enough to get through the pearly gates; but they seemed to be missing something.
And then my parents were baptized in the Holy Spirit at a charismatic meeting. They were slain in the Spirit. They spoke in unknown tongues. Claiming to be healed, my mother threw away her thyroid medication. All doubt melted away. God was real. They were certain. Their Baptist church was preaching an incomplete gospel and settling for a partial blessing, but my parents remained loyal.
Although signs-and-wonders certainty remains controversial within American evangelicalism, it is the fastest-growing expression of Christian faith in the United States and through much of the developing world.
Worship as a quest for certainty
Contemporary Christian music trades in the ecstasy of adoration. The faithful pay metaphysical compliments to the Most High: You are great, good, loving, forgiving, tender, strong, bold, all-powerful.
And we sing of our extravagant love for the Creator, his Christ, and his kingdom (in this world of discourse, God is decidedly male). In signs and wonders congregations, the singing can go on for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour or even longer.
“A good praise band can induce a spirit of corporate euphoria that reinforces evangelical certainty.”
A good praise band can induce a spirit of corporate euphoria that reinforces evangelical certainty.
Prosperity gospel certainty
The prosperity gospel often walks hand-in-hand with charismatic Christianity. Prosperity religion flows from the conviction that God wants to pour material blessings into the laps of the faithful. This is an extension of the power of positive thinking mantra Norman Vincent Peale popularized in the latter half of the 20th century.
Donald Trump attended Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan as a boy and was mesmerized by Peale’s teaching. Positive thinking appealed to businessmen like Fred Trump (Donald’s father) because it suggested wealthy people are favored by God. But the doctrine also resonates with impoverished Christians in America, Africa, Asia and Latin America. If material blessing is part of God’s covenant with the believer, there is always hope.
Economically disadvantaged parishioners are rarely offended by the lavish lifestyles flaunted by prosperity pastors. The very success of the pastor is a powerful advertisement for the faith-prosperity connection. This pastor is very certain and very wealthy; you can’t argue with success.
This blend of charismatic and prosperity religion is controversial even within evangelical circles, but it is the only brand of Christianity that is flourishing in America. Prosperity preachers like Paula White claim divine authority while characterizing non-Christian America as a haunt of demons. Churches informally associated with the New Apostolic Reformation led the assault on the Capitol on January 6.
Paula White showed up on Trump’s radar screen when he saw her on television in 2002. Like Trump, she has been married three times and is a bankruptcy survivor. Game recognizes game.
The tension between evangelical certainty and liberal democracy
Just under half of Mainline Protestants, Catholics and Reform Jews report their belief in God is tinged with doubt. Center-left Protestants, Catholics and Jews see the religious path they have chosen as one path to God among many. For this reason, liberal and moderate believers favor ecumenical religion, diversity in civic life and liberal democracy. Even atheists and agnostics are welcome at the table because they, too, are children of the God they reject and are a vital part of the American mosaic. Believers who live with doubt are not surprised some give up on the religion altogether. They understand and so, they believe, does their God.
“Religious pluralism is fully compatible with liberal democracy, but at the cost of religious certainty.”
Religious pluralism is fully compatible with liberal democracy, but at the cost of religious certainty. Pluralists rarely evangelize. The pluralistic God loves everyone, doesn’t dispense favors to favorites and wants everyone to get along.
Suppose a newcomer who has visited a particular church a few times confesses to the pastor that she isn’t sure she believes in God. A stalwart defender of evangelical certainty will see this admission as an opening for an evangelistic pitch. A pluralist pastor will likely assure the visitor that doubt is a vital part of faith.
In 2009, journalist Bill Bishop argued in The Big Sort that Americans were rapidly dividing into conservative and liberal camps, not by state or region, but by city and neighborhood. The educated, and those comfortable with diversity and liberal democracy, move to neighborhoods where most people share these values; those supporting a more homogenous and conservative vision of civic life follow suit.
Sixteen years after Bishop published his book, it is clear a version of the Big Sort is reshaping America’s largest denominations. Hot-button issues like same-sex marriage propel the religious version of the Big Sort, but evangelical certainty is the fundamental issue. Certainty sells, but it also repels.
There always has been a market for unapologetic, uncompromising, wall-erecting clarity, and there always will be. But the divisive — we’re-right-and-you’re-wrong — implications of evangelical certainty also arouse feelings of revulsion because religious certainty is seen as incompatible with liberal democracy.
The greater the commitment to pluralism, the greater the revulsion.
The Big Sort and the future of the Democratic Party
An expression of evangelical certainty that combines passionate worship, faith healing, glossolalia, end-times speculation, heaven-hell eschatology and a fascination with angelic visitation and demonic possession is growing rapidly in the American heartland, just as more traditional forms of American religion are in a statistical free fall. When the folks who check “none” on religious preference surveys think of “Christianity,” it is these extreme manifestations of evangelical certainty they have in mind.
“Viewed from this perspective, evangelical certainty looks like Medieval quackery.”
In America’s most liberal and educated sectors, the quest for certainty surfaces in anti-religious forms of scientism. The scientific method, it is argued, brings us as close to certainty as we will ever get. Viewed from this perspective, evangelical certainty looks like Medieval quackery.
If the Republican Party has been captured by evangelical certainty, the scientific quest for certainty has taken over broad swathes of the Democratic Party, a fact that helps explain the defection of many Black and Hispanic voters from the Democratic fold in the 2024 election. Secular journalists are inclined to associate the Democratic Party’s problem with minority voters with economic insecurity; but the problem could be primarily religious.
In the 1990s, Ryan Burge points out, 67% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats claimed to believe in God without a trace of doubt. In the 2020s, 63% of Republicans and only 39% of Democrats made the same claim.
This “certainty gap” is likely to grow over the next decade, and that could be an ominous sign for Democrats. The more Republicans sell religious certainty, the more secular Democrats are inclined to be repelled by religion in general.
If the next generation of center-left politicians ignores, or minimizes, the God Gap, the trickle of minority voters abandoning the Democratic Party could become a landslide.
Alan Bean leads Friends of Justice based in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is a member of Broadway Baptist Church.