Why the Emerging Church Movement Failed

Part 5, Going Woke

This is my last post in this series. Again, do check out the Emerged podcast hosted by Tony Jones and Tripp Fuller, their oral history of the emerging church movement (webpage here, Apple podcast here, and Spotify here).

As the emerging church movement grew, many within the movement began to gravitate toward social justice concerns and activism. Issues of "justice" and "oppression" began to dominate. Liberationist readings of the Bible, taking a cue from Catholic liberation theology, were increasingly common, using Scripture to call out oppression and center the voices of victims.

As time went on, Twitter became more and more of a force. At the peak of emerging church conversation, in the mid-2000s, blogging was starting to take off, and while blog comment sections were fractious and unruly, they could be monitored and controlled by their hosts. After 2006, Twitter de-centralized the emerging church conversation. The discourse could no longer be controlled by the leaders of the movement. 

Trouble was brewing on this front. The leaders of the emerging church movement were largely white males. So when Twitter unleashed the social justice impulses that were beginning to dominate the movement, something predictable, in retrospect, happened: the emerging church began getting called out and canceled. 

From a social justice perspective, exemplified by the work of Rachel Held Evans (as a Millennial "second generation" member of the emerging church conversation), the movement in the mid-2000s was focused on gender justice in the church. Younger than the leaders of the original emerging church network, Rachel quickly became a social media phenomenon among those interested in reforming evangelicalism. Rachel began to demonstrate the power of Twitter in calling out and taking on leading evangelicals. Rachel's fights with Al Mohler, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, and Doug Wilson became legendary.  

Soon, however, emerging church voices began to be called out by people of color, even Rachel's as a white woman. And then, soon after that, by queer folks. Events in the culture pushed the conversation deeper into the social justice movement. Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. The Obergefell ruling came down in 2015. #MeToo happened in 2017. The word "intersectionality" started showing up. Talk of "centering" POC voices and calls for white people to "check your privilege" became ubiquitous. Allies were told to stop talking, asked to listen, and to hand their platforms over to women of color and queer folk. Emerging church leaders began to describe themselves as "activists" in their bios. (They still do.) Largely white and male conference lineups were called out and cancelled. To this day, conferences hosted by voices once associated with the emerging church conversation reflect the impact of these years, when deconstruction fused with social media activism, featuring largely female, queer, and "spiritual but not religious" speaking lineups.

Basically, though we didn't have the word for it then, one of the reasons the emerging church movement failed is because it went woke.

In this, I'm merely being descriptive. Depending upon how you viewed the emerging church, then and now, going woke might be exactly what needed to happen. Certain voices needed to get marginalized and others centered. Conversely, you might read what happened as another sad example of social justice warriors turning the knives on their own. For example, in 2015 I described what I called the "purity culture" of progressive Christianity, observations later echoed about the "new puritanism" exemplified in callout and cancel culture. During this season, white emerging church voices were increasingly tagged as "problematic." For example, I was a progressive ally and was called "satan" on Twitter. Not from my right, but from my left. 

It was a disorienting time. After my progressive purity culture post, Rachel and I had some conversations about water she was taking on from her left. Rachel was deeply embroiled in her fight with the evangelical establishment over patriarchal gender roles. She was surprised to suddenly find herself being criticized from her left for being a white women and for ignoring the LGBTQ community. Rachel quickly found her footing in this rapidly shifting landscape to became a better ally in the estimation of many of her POC and queer critics.

But how did going woke contribute to the failure of the emerging church? In three ways.

First, when the issues switched from gender roles to sexuality a split emerged within the emerging church. Many of the churches sympathetic to the emerging church were willing to make moves toward egalitarianism, but were not quite ready to jump to the full inclusion of LGBTQ folks. Pastors who had successfully led their evangelical churches into more inclusive views concerning gender roles discovered that their churches weren't quite ready for the LGBTQ conversation. Facing this resistance, many pastors went into a holding pattern and didn't force the issue. Other pastors felt called to leave their churches. Other pastors pushed and were fired. Some churches split.

A couple of things need to be said here. First, the conversation about sexuality took nearly everyone by surprise, not just the emerging church. Many forget that, in 2008, Barack Obama couldn't publicly endorse gay marriage. But within the span of a few years, traditional and mainstream views on sex and marriage had become equated with hate and bigotry, a sin on par with racism. Unaffiliated with local churches and denominational structures, authors and social media voices in the emerging church movement could keep pace with the rapidly changing moral landscape to take their isolated stands on their social media platforms. The only voice that mattered was their own. Churches, however, change more slowly, and the rapid moral flip-flop left many faith communities behind. 

The second thing to note here is that this wasn't (and isn't) a problem with evangelicalism. For example, the issue of LGBTQ inclusion has cracked both the United Methodist and the global Anglican communions. It also appears to be pushing the Catholic church to the edge of schism. So, to say that LGBTQ issues cracked the emerging church conversation shouldn't be surprising. LGBTQ issues cracked global Christianity.  

The second way going woke caused the emerging church to fail was that, when social justice Twitter pushed the white male leadership of the emerging church off the stage, many of the voices who filled the void were not associated with the vision and networks that started the movement. When the voices of the early emergent church conversation were marginalized for being too white and too male, the movement lost both its history and forward momentum. In many ways, the emergent church faded to gave way to what we now call "progressive Christianity," with its emphasis on woke, social justice activism. People who once labeled themselves as "emergent" now grab labels like "progressive" or "activist." 

The final way becoming woke caused the emerging church movement to fail has to do with what I describe as "the mystical-to-moral shift" in Hunting Magic Eels. Specifically, when Christianity becomes reduced to social justice activism then politics, rather than God, becomes the binding agent of the community. Recall, the root of the word "religion" means "to bind." Religion is what binds a group together. Among the progressive Christian crowd, social justice politics has become the new religion, the new faith that binds the group together. Churches are replaced with spiritual seekers who are social justice warriors.

For example, take a look at any progressive Christian conference. The table is open to any spiritual seeker, from pagan to Christian to atheist, as long as you share the social justice faith. "All are welcome" the conference invites, but you better not show up wearing a MAGA hat. Simply put, among progressive Christians social justice is required but God is optional. 

And again, I'm just being descriptive here. You might feel that this history and trajectory is exactly what should have happened to the emerging church, and what must continue to happen to Christianity going forward. But you also might lament how social justice impulses, once again, caused people to cannibalize their own given the inexorable logic of its own purity culture. Personally, as someone who now describes themselves as a "post-progressive Christian," I work to retain a social justice emphasis, supported by a liberationist hermeneutic, while resisting the impulse to reduce God, church, salvation, and faith to political activism. This seems obvious to me, but you'd be surprised to find how rare this impulse is and how difficult it can be to maintain this balance in a faith community.

But no matter how you view what happened to the emerging church, as either good or bad, as the necessary and proper marginalization of white male voices or the failure to join together in centering social justices concerns in evangelical spaces, when those attracted to the emerging church embraced social justice as a new religion, a faith defined by progressive politics and activism, both God and the church were quickly left behind.