Thread by @drantbradley

The Ockenga/Henry/Graham(OHC) evangelical era is officially over (1942-2022). It will not survive the current fissures of race (CRT, anti-racism) & politics (tribalism). It was already on life-support, then Trump happened followed by George Floyd's murder. It was a good run.

I've surveyed a few articles on the current evangelical divisions and they all focus on the wrong issues. How the gospel is defined is *not* the issue, nor merely views of politics, etc. What really matters is how sin and evil are defined. In other words, "what's the problem?"

American Protestantism was doomed from the beginning because of a lack of consensus about the meaning of sin. Is sin primarily an individual issue (demanding substitutionary atonement) or systemic/structural (demanding social justice)?

Compare Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, & Billy Graham and you'll see exactly why. OHC built many great institutions & launched all kinds of ministries but they all failed take Henry's pleading keep "social concern" essential. Henry lost. Eschatology & revivalism won.

OHC held the line that sin was primarily individual, not structural. The mainline churches? Structural. Fact: Protestants do not have the capacity to mediate this tension. It never had. OHC evangelicalism became an individualistic, "personal relationship with Jesus" religion.

American Protestants usually split whenever this tension becomes too great: slavery, the social gospel, Jim Crow, political syncretism, abortion, & now critical theories(CRT), etc. Orthodox & Catholic Christian have social thought traditions that teach "both/and" to defining sin.

Catholics, for example, don't have to debate whether or not sin is individual or systemic because the Vatican says "both." Done. Catholics have a more nuanced (maybe too nuanced) understanding of sin. It includes individual sin *and* "structures of sin." vatican.va/content/john-p…

OHC evangelicals will never be able to resolve the tensions between sin (individual vs. structural) because there is no authoritative place for evangelicals to arrive at consensus definitions of sin. For Calvinists, The Gospel Coalition attempted unity. Progressives? Sojourners.

Recently, whenever OHC institutions start to die the first thing they do is start hiring visible Southern Baptists figures. They believe SBCers, as the last OHC stronghold, would save their institutions as well. Won't happen. The SBC won't survive 2016/2020 either.

Because of OHC's individualistic Christianity, which opens Christianity at Gen 3 and reduces the gospel to substitutionary atonement, it could not withstand the cultural tidal waves of 2016 and 2020. Trump and Floyd were the two nails in the coffin.

Twitter isn't the place for details, but OHC inadvertently oversimplified sin in reaction to liberals & created a revivalist Christianity whose only solution to collective evil was evangelism, new churches, & social ministries. By 2021, OHC religion *was* 1950s Protestantism.

Today you'll find echoes of Tillich, Niebuhr, & Graham(TNG) *within* OHC institutions today. In the same way that followers of TNG broke fellowship in the 1960s/70s, OHCers will do so in the years to come. Therefore, RIP OHC Evangelicalism (1942-2022). Memory be eternal!

(FN: 1. I'm not saying that "evangelicalism" is gone. That will never happen but the OHC world is being lowered six feet under as we speak and blogging, Tweeting, getting published in the NYT, starting a new .org, planting churches, etc. won't stop this historic Protestant cycle

2. Instead of trying to figure out how to unite OHC evangelicals back to the glory days, which is a fools' errand, what really matters is thinking through what new movement is going to emerge from the ashes!).

C= Billy Graham "C"rusades

Here’s a great example. Read his solution to racism. He doesn’t believe in systemic sin.

https://twitter.com/laurchastain22/status/1459144523947384838?s=20