It bears pointing out that homosexuality and gay marriage are two distinct, though commonly conflated, issues. First, evangelicals must determine whether homosexuality is a sin and, second, whether that means that the state should ban homosexual marriages. The second  position does not necessarily follow from the first. Few evangelicals, Christian Reconstructionists excepted, believe that the state should enforce all biblical standards of behavior. It is possible to believe that a behavior is wrong but not support its criminalization. It’s hard to imagine modern laws criminalizing blasphemy, adultery, or poor attendance at church (all of which were penalized in Puritan New England), but other state-enforced, evangelical-supported moral norms remain, like strict bans on prostitution, drugs, and, until 2003′s Lawrence v. Texas, homosexuality. Among evangelicals, there are two categories of immoral behaviors: those which are considered wrong and should be banned by the state and those which are wrong but not deserving of state condemnation.

Interestingly, homosexuality appears to be shifting from the first category to the second, but gay marriage is not. For example, John Piper, a popular conservative evangelical author and the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, recently wrote a post which criticized the idea of gay marriage. Piper offers a traditional theological critique of homosexuality, citing Romans 1:25-27 and I Corinthians 6:9. Yet, he’s not a theonomist; he acknowledges that not all sins should be legally prevented, including pornography and even homosexuality itself, but he argues that the legal significance of marriage (tied to inheritance, taxes, and the like) requires a clear statutory definition. If gay marriage is codified, society will have institutionalized and sanctioned homosexuality. He writes, “The issue is not whether we block a sinful behavior, but whether we imbed [sic] it in our laws.” Piper would have the state permit homosexuality but ban gay marriage. His views represent the majority opinion among American evangelicals.

However, that kind of compromise does not satisfy other evangelicals. If you remember the statistics I mentioned earlier, a significant minority of evangelicals believe homosexuality to be wrong and oppose gay marriage but support civil unions as an alternative. Some left-leaning evangelicals, like Sojourners and its prominent founder Jim Wallis, have supported homosexual civil unions for some time. This does not make Sojourners or Wallis unqualified supporters of homosexuality. Recently the organization has been criticized by LGBT activists for not accepting homosexuality in full and, like Piper, they believe that marriage is foundational to American society and thus oppose homosexual marriage. Yet they believe that excluding homosexual citizens from the various civil, legal, and financial benefits which are only given to married people is a violation of homosexuals’ equality under the law with heterosexuals. Their solution is civil unions, which offer the benefits attached to marriage without the name itself. Speaking broadly, left-leaning evangelicals have lined up behind Wallis while right-leaning evangelicals, like Piper, oppose both civil unions and gay marriage. Until recently, support for civil unions appeared to be just another political litmus test between the two factions, an intractable issue with clear lines of division.

Nevertheless, a new option for evangelicals has emerged. Just this month, Thomas Kidd, a religious historian at Baylor University and a Southern Baptist, wrote a post for Patheos entitled, “Why Churches Should Stop Performing Marriages.” Kidd argues that Americans should extend the separation of church and state to marriage. He writes:

State-defined but church-performed marriage is a relic of medieval Christendom, or the idea that the functions of the church and of the state closely overlap. Some Protestant reformers, including the early Puritan founders of New England, rejected this intermingling of church and state. They saw marriage as an exclusively civil rite, and they refused to perform church weddings at all.

Yet today, most evangelical ministers happily serve as civil functionaries when they recite the words, “By the power invested in me by the state of…”. Kidd believes that this intermingling encourages a “harmful confusion” and leads “many people who otherwise make no serious pretentions to faith [to] still think that their marriage should be consecrated in a church with pews and stained glass.” This incentivizes church marriages for nominally religious couples who want the legal and financial benefits of marriage without having to seriously commit to a church. Kidd believes that evangelicals should stop “fighting to make the government defend a biblical view of marriage.” It’s “a losing battle precisely because the government can’t play the role of the church.” Evangelical ministers should perform matrimonies and leave marriage to the civil authorities. Marriage has become a cheap imitation of the real thing, a mishmash of tax writeoffs and shallow religiosity.

It’s plausible that Kidd’s opinion is informed by his expertise in the history of evangelicals during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Revolutionary America and during the Early Republic, many evangelicals, like Baptist minister John Leland, supported constitutional disestablishment at both the federal and state levels. Leland was not fond of the pre-Revolutionary system of established churches  in which a denomination (predominately the Congregationalists and Episcopalians) received a religious monopoly from the state while dissenting denominations (mostly evangelical groups like the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) were discouraged or even actively persecuted. Evangelicals allied themselves with humanist intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson and banned religious tests in the federal constitution and then defeated establishment state by state (Massachusetts was the last to topple in 1833).

Marriage, however, was not disestablished and, during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, the state attached a host of legal and financial privileges to the institution. Oddly enough, the collapse of the institution of marriage in the US came at the same time that marriage enjoyed its greatest level of formal government support. The state had instituted tax policies to try and encourage strong marriages but these incentives had little or even an adverse effect. State support may have vitiated rather than invigorated marriage.

Does that mean that removing state support for marriage might actually strengthen the institution of marriage? Although it may seem counterintuitive to modern day evangelicals,  removing state support for marriage might do just that. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, both prominent sociologists of religion, have argued extensively (see their brilliant book The Churching of America) that a religious free marketplace encourages vitality, innovation, and growth while state-protected religious monopolies cause stagnation, apathy, and decline. Indeed, contrary to the claims of Christian nationalists like David Barton, America has become steadily more rather than less religious over the past three hundred years. Finke and Stark argue that America’s exceptional religiosity among developed nations is a direct consequence of disestablishing religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By disestablishing marriage–severing the connection between state and church–might it also become a more meaningful and vital institution? Perhaps it’s still beyond the Pale of the evangelical imagination, but Kidd is just the latest in a long line of evangelicals to suggest an extension of the separation of church and state. The state can no more create healthy, biblical marriages than it can sustain healthy, biblical churches. Furthermore, if Finke and Stark’s “religious economies model” is any indication, disestablishing marriage may have a beneficial effect on the institution itself. People would no longer seek nominal marriages in order to gain legal and financial benefits. Matrimony would become a more exclusively religious institution and marriage a civil one.

Even more pragmatically, embracing the disestablishment of church and state in marriage could prevent a harmful anti-evangelical backlash in the future. If polling data is any indication, support for gay marriage has been steadily increasing and skews young and educated. If evangelicals continue to be the strongest opponents of gay marriage, they could one day find themselves in the shoes of their counterparts in Canada, where preachers are barred from speaking critically of homosexuality or gay marriage because ministers are representatives of both state and church.

John Leland’s 1776 warning of the consequences of a state-supported clergy remains timely:

“No man or set of Men are entitled to exclusive or separate Emoluments or Privileges from the Community but in consideration of Public Services.  If, therefore, the State provides a Support for Preachers of the Gospel, and they receive it in Consideration of their Services, they must certainly when they preach, act as Officers of the State and ought to be accountable thereto for their Conduct. . . . the Consequence of this is, that those whom the state employs in its Service, it has a right to regulate and dictate to; it may judge and determine who shall preach; when and where they shall preach.  The mutual obligations between Preachers and Societies they belong to . . . must evidently be weakened — Yea, farewell to the last Article of the Bill of Rights! [The fourth article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted in 1776].  Farewel (sic) to “the free exercise of Religion!”

In his previous work, Randall Balmer—professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University—has expertly woven highly readable historical chronicle with thoughtful, provocative critique. His latest book, The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, is no exception; in it, Balmer offers a concise survey of the relationship between evangelicalism and American culture since the 18th century that, while not without flaw, demonstrates his expertise as a historian and his insight as a critic.

Balmer structures The Making of Evangelicalism around four “turning points” in the history of the movement: (1) the transition from a Calvinist to an Arminian theology; (2) the turn from postmillennialism to premillennialism; (3) the construction of an isolationist evangelical subculture at the beginning of the twentieth century; and (4) the rise of the Religious Right. At each of these critical junctures, he argues, evangelicals dramatically re-aligned (either consciously or unconsciously) their beliefs and attitudes. Balmer peppers the study with what he calls “counterfactual speculation”—what-if questions that provide “ample opportunity to imagine a different course” for the evangelical movement (p. 2).

Balmer’s narrative begins in the 18th and 19th centuries with the surge of evangelical revivalism in America. He describes how an Arminian soteriology—the belief that God’s free gift of salvation extends to all people, not just a predetermined elect—supplanted Puritan Calvinism. That prerogative and its attendant focus on human agency, promulgated by evangelists like Charles Grandison Finney, reinforced the broader American culture’s emphasis on self-determinism while also unleashing “a reforming zeal unmatched in the annals of American history” (p. 30). Evangelicals set out to improve society by advocating the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s suffrage, but their optimism soon dampened in the wake of the Civil War and the cultural re-alignment caused by industrialization and urbanization.

Here, in Balmer’s estimation, is where evangelicals veered wildly off-track. Spurred by their embrace of dispensational premillennialism (which predicted the impending return of Christ to “rapture” His church) and driven from the the mainline churches over controversies regarding biblical inerrancy and Darwin’s theory of evolution, evangelicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century focused on the cultivation of individualistic inward piety and abandoned the amelioration of social ills to more progressive Protestants. Evangelicals retreated from the public sphere, adopted a fundamentalist outlook, and focused on the cultivation of a distinct subcultural identity.

While some might read this subcultural turn as evidence of evangelicalism’s rejection of American culture, Balmer—rooting his analysis in what that turn produced—sees it as evidence of capitulation to mainstream cultural preoccupations like consumer capitalism and the acquisition of political power: Evangelicals in the latter half of the twentieth century, he contends, became preoccupied with selling and defending their subcultural identity (and its attendant orthodoxies). Balmer credits the “neo-evagelical reawakening” of the 1950s with popularizing a marriage of revivalism and corporate culture aimed at “selling” salvation to the masses; he describes the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s as evangelicalism’s “pandering to power” (p. 73) and rejecting their heritage of progressive activism in favor of a conservative political agenda and a vigilant defense of their subculture.

Balmer caps off his study with an eight-page conclusion that presses evangelicals to “find a better vision for the future” (p. 81) by reclaiming their early 19th-century heritage of social reform. This reveals much about Balmer’s bias; it also points toward the weakness of his study: namely, his incomplete picture of evangelicalism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Balmer evinces a clear distaste for evangelicalism’s development since the Civil War: he derides dispensational premillennialism as a “theology of despair” (p. 5), and blames the Religious Right for “deliver[ing] the faith into the captivity of right-wing politics” (p. 76). Such critiques, while important for evangelicals to hear, prove troublesome in the context of Balmer’s study, as they prohibit the writer from detailing some of evangelicalism’s other developments in this era. For instance, Balmer ignores virtually all the global missionary activity set in motion by evangelicals’ interpretation of premillennialism. He neglects to mention the mid-century genesis of evangelical organizations like World Vision, Compassion International, and World Relief—modern-day iterations of the reform work done by evangelicals in the 19th century. And in placing such significance on the rise of the Religious Right, Balmer marginalizes the voices of theologically conservative but politically progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners) and Ron Sider (founder of Evangelicals for Social Action), which emerged as early as the 1970s. Failure to acknowledge these critical developments in the evangelical movement weakens Balmer’s overall argument.

Despite these obvious flaws, Balmer’s study has some praiseworthy elements. His treatment of the origins of the Religious Right will be eye-opening reading for many. Similarly, his ability as a historian to elucidate connections across the centuries will help lay readers recognize the role that both change and consistency play in historical development; for instance, his linking of George Whitefield’s itinerant evangelism in the late 18th century with Billy Graham’s urban revivalism of the 20th century demonstrates that evangelical preachers “have always understood the importance of communicating directly with the masses” (p.13)—an important realization for those seeking to understand evangelicalism’s continued popularity in America.

Overall, readers looking for a less polemical introductory historical survey should consult Balmer’s earlier Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America (1999); readers seeking a more in-depth critique of the Religious Right should pick up Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America (2006). Those wanting a fusion of the two will find The Making of Evangelicalism, while flawed, a sturdy resource.

Note: A version of this review is forthcoming in Brethren in Christ History & Life.