Spring 2025 · Vol. 54 No. 1 · pp. 148–150
Book Review
Jesus v. Evangelicals: A Biblical Critique of a Wayward Movement
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023. 256 pages.
This book makes for painful reading. It is a detailed, devastating, and sometimes pedantic critique of American evangelicalism, a movement that finds itself at the center of U.S. culture wars. It is the story of a once-mainstream evangelical who, upon going through divorce, is shocked to find himself outside of the community he assumed was his home. It is a sweeping argument that will be read positively or negatively depending on the presuppositions of the reader. It is not a dispassionate argument. p. 149
Constantine R. Campbell is professor and research director at the Sydney College of Divinity (Sydney, New South Wales). He grew up, received his complete education, pastored, and taught in Australia. But he also spent significant time in the U.S., teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago. In addition, he has traveled and lectured extensively in the States. Hence, his qualifications as a critic of U.S. evangelicalism are not that of a complete outsider. While the book and its critique heavily focus upon that form of evangelicalism, it is also deeply shaped by his life in the Australian evangelical churches that were his home.
Most of Campbell’s writing and teaching concern the Greek Scriptures. This sets up his argument’s paradigm: “My central evangelical conviction is to allow the Bible to shape all other convictions” (8). His biblicism is the basis for his critique, but he no longer identifies as evangelical. Thus, anticipating the standard challenge, he adds, “My increasing disillusionment with the movement we call evangelicalism has not weakened my respect for Jesus or the Bible” (8).
The book begins with Trump and the consistent eighty percent of white U.S. evangelicals who support him. For those who have an antipathy for Trump and what he represents, the table has been set. And vice versa.
The first chapter, “God and Country,” describes and digs into the roots of U.S. evangelicalism’s relationship with Trump and links it to the deep political partisanship within that group. As a whole, evangelicals are Republican; voting Democrat is railed against by evangelical preachers. From here the argument goes through the next chapters, titled “Exclusion Zones,” “Bad Judgment,” “Tribalism,” “Acceptable Sins,” “Till Death Do Us Part,” “Megaperch Pastors,” and “The Lunatic Fringe.” In each case he engages the Bible for his assessment, but in my judgment he does so not as we would expect, in the dispassionate language of a Bible scholar, but in ways that reflect the harshness of his own experience.
There is no shortage of people and churches that represent the worst of Christianity, let alone evangelicalism. The poster child of this is Mark Driscoll. Campbell, however, places too much under sweeping categories like “The Lunatic Fringe.” Detailed critiques are warranted for the prosperity gospel, the nationalism gospel, American civil religion, and the life-coach gospel, but labeling them all as a lunatic fringe goes too far and weakens his case.
As a person who wholeheartedly agrees with the thesis that evangelicalism, especially measured by its affinity for Trump and all he stands for, is a tragic misrepresentation of Jesus’ legacy, I nevertheless found the book p. 150 frustrating. I think this is because it actually is not designed to change the minds of those who need it most.
The predictable and valid rejoinder to Campbell’s sweeping thesis is that evangelicalism is a very big house with many different rooms. Counterexamples to each example cited by Campbell are easy to find. But it is the overwhelming, undeniable, evangelical support for Trump and what he stands for that is evangelicalism’s obvious indictment. The book would have been far stronger if it had focused where it began.
The book closes with Campbell’s path forward in a chapter titled “Saving Faith.” Here he justifies his sweeping and scathing language as necessary to make the point that something is very wrong in evangelicalism, specifically that evangelicals value the wrong things, such as cultural dominance, celebrity, popular success, and wealth. Further, they also trust the wrong things, such as politics and other forms of power. Campbell in addition believes evangelicals have a distorted view of Jesus, and he urges that they seek out the real Jesus who sacrificially and counterculturally shocked the people of his day. He ends with a discussion on the utility of the term evangelical as a label. Three choices are presented: keep the label, refine the label, and ditch the label. He has chosen the latter.
