A New Evangelical Religion | Editorial

CBMW has existed for nearly forty years, contending from its inception that a proper understanding of the “complementary differences between men and women . . . are essential for obedience to Scripture and for the health of the family and the church.”^[1] We believed it then, and we believe it now.

The careful observer has noticed that the discussions and debates on these issues have taken a variety of forms over the years.^[2] And yet, despite the transformation that has happened in our society and in our churches — much of which was anticipated and predicted by complementarians — there are still some evangelicals who continue to believe that such issues aren’t as important as the Scriptures suggest.

Since the Danvers Statement was first composed in 1987, the feminist flattening of the sexes turned steadily towards the flattening of human sexuality in the acceptance of homosexuality. And once this sexual leveling had taken its course in the creation of so-called “Gay Marriage” via judicial fiat, the sexual revolution launched even more quickly into the transgender mania of which we are now beginning to see the fallout.

No matter how much of the created order was suppressed, no matter how many of God’s divinely established institutions were redefined, no matter how many of our embodied realities were denied and reinterpreted, some evangelicals remain resistant to the idea that these truths really matter.

For instance, in a clip posted earlier this year, hosts of the Holy Post Podcast ridiculed those concerned about truths extending beyond the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed as “American evangelical fundamentalist MAGA world,” who “want to know where you are on your politics and social issues . . . because they’ve lifted those up to credal importance.” According to these influencers, we shouldn’t draw dividing lines between “Christians” and “heretics,” for instance, on the issue of gay marriage. Like the doctrine of baptism, Christians of good will should be able to agree to disagree on what biblically constitutes marriage.

In a podcast devoted in part to celebrating last year’s 1700-year anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325), such statements reveal an historical naivete. Historically speaking, Protestants have never considered the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed to be the sole confessional grounds of Christian Orthodoxy. Had this been the case, my shelves would contain far fewer volumes of Protestant confessions. And unless one believes Protestants and Roman Catholics confess the same gospel, then we would have to consider these confessions superfluous, “MAGA world” stuff.

Furthermore, creeds and confessions have always arisen in the context of doctrinal debate and controversy and are written to provide a faithful summary of the biblical teaching on the issue at stake. In the fourth century, the divinity of the Son and Spirit were in question; in the fifth, the Son’s two-natures as God and man required clarification. In the Reformation, the doctrine of Scripture, salvation, the church, and the Lord’s Supper all received confessional attention. In more recent history, evangelicals composed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) to stake out a biblical position on the veracity of Scripture.

The point of this brief historical excursion? Christians did not stop confessing — even confessing first order issues — in the fourth century. And until Christ returns, Christians will need to confront issues facing the gospel with faithful, confessional clarity. While building on scriptural foundations as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and others, history tells us that further clarifying statements will be necessary.^[3]

This need for confessional faithfulness explains why CBMW was established so many years ago, beginning with the Danvers Statement (1987) in response to evangelical feminism, then renewing our efforts thirty years later with the Nashville Statement (2017) in response to homosexuality, same-sex attraction, and transgenderism.

Aside from this misunderstanding of creeds and confessions, the more concerning elements of the above-mentioned podcast discussion concern their theological evaluation of moral issues. While rightly recognizing the practical importance of questions related to female ordination, gay marriage, and gender identity, they fail to distinguish between first- and second-order issues. Instead, they lump all these ethical questions together as “non-essential doctrines” about which sincere “sisters and brothers in the faith” can disagree.

But it was to provide a biblical corrective to such notions that the Nashville Statement was written, as Article 10 states:

We affirm that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

We deny that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

On these matters of Christian orthodoxy, The Holy Post regrettably represents a segment within evangelicalism that desires a go-along-to-get-along relationship with the spirit of the age. In a previous era, Francis Schaeffer, writing in The Great Evangelical Disaster (1984), referred to this modus operadi as “accommodation.” In Schaeffer’s assessment, “the evangelical world most often has said nothing; or worse has said nothing different from what the world would say.”^[4] Is not the tolerance of same-sex marriage and transgender identity in the household of God evidence of such accommodation? And such accommodation, Schaeffer argued, “is nothing less than the most gross form of worldliness in the proper definition of that word.”^[5]

Now more than forty years after Schaeffer wrote his stinging indictment on evangelicalism, American and Western culture has grown more secular and hostile to Christianity — the recent vibe shift notwithstanding. More major Christian denominations are approving of the LGBT revolution than have held their ground. And those church bodies that have not formally bowed to the New Morality are nevertheless beginning to inch closer to compromise. Recent examples include the Anglican Church, whose first female Archbishop Sarah Mullaly played an integral role in promoting liturgical blessings for same-sex couples.

Similarly, Pope Francis carved out an “innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings,” so that Roman Catholic clergy can provide blessings to “couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples.” While we are told Pope Francis’s “innovative” pastoral recommendations can be carried out “without officially validating [same-sex couples’] status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage,” those of us who doubt the practical possibility of the late pontificate’s design plead for forgiveness.^[6]

A more recent commentary on the American church can help us to explain in part what is behind the evangelical demise on moral issues. According to John West,

Most Christians in America grow up in cultural captivity. They are immersed in a culture hostile to genuine Christianity at home, school, college, and the workplace. This is especially true of those who go on to be pastors, professors, ministry leaders, journalists, politicians, or to work in the entertainment industry. After they have been immersed for years in an elite culture that rejects orthodox Christianity, they can easily start identifying more with those who hate Christianity than those who embrace it. They become Stockholm Syndrome Christians.^[7]

Although West focuses his comments here in America, there is no doubt they apply to the West more broadly. We contend that recent accommodations to the spirit of the age in the Christian sexual ethic have more to do with a desire to make Christianity more attractive to its “cultured despisers” than it does the discovery of new insight into the biblical text.^[8] If it were otherwise, why are all such recent updates to the church’s sexual ethic exclusively following the dictates of the sexual revolution?

This “cultural captivity,” along with the desire to make Christianity more respectable in the eyes of the world, merely presents a reprise of theological liberalism. For this was the project of German liberal Friedrich Schleiermacher, who sought to rescue Christianity from the outmoded, passé form he inherited. In other words, what we might simply refer to as “woke Christianity,” in all of its varieties, is a repetition of the liberal project in a different key.^[9]

Ultimately, however, such endeavors result in creating a new religion. As J. Gresham Machen so powerfully warned just over one hundred years ago, “In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend.”^[10]

If Professor Machen were alive today, he would have to update his manuscript slightly to read, “In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” although his point would remain the same.

Faithfulness in our day demands that we draw clear biblical lines, regardless of whether those lines are drawn in the area of theology proper or anthropology. A Christianity that does not recognize the difference between man and woman, that redefines marriage, that reinterprets the Bible’s sexual ethic is not Christianity at all, but something else entirely.

^[1] See CBMW’s Mission statement: https://cbmw.org/about/vision-mission/.

^[2] See a very fine and brief history of those here: Claire Smith, “A History of Complementarianism,” Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 7.2 (Fall 2025): 86–106.

^[3] See Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith’s clarifying essay on this point: Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith, “Is Nicaea Enough?: On Moral Revisionism and Appeals to the Creeds” Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 7.1 (Spring 2025): 100–105.

^[4] Francis Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer: Volume Four: A Christian View of the Church, 2^nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1985), 4: 320.

^[5] Schaeffer, The Complete Works, 4:321.

^[6]https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20231218_fiducia-supplicans_en.html

^[7] John G. West, Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why Christian Leaders Are Failing — and What We Can Do About It (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2025), 16.

^[8] The phrase “cultured despisers” derives from Freidrich Schleiermacher’s essay, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799).

^[9] https://firstthings.com/the-failure-of-evangelical-elites/

^[10] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity & Liberalism, New Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 6.