“Embodying Evangelical: Progressive White Evangelicals, Racial-Ethnic Otherness, and the Narrative Redemption of Evangelicalism”

Writing in the New York Times in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne refused to cede the definition of evangelicalism to the vast number of White evangelicals who voted for the Trump-Pence ticket.  These voters were not representative of US evangelicalism writ large, Claiborne and Campolo averred.  Instead, they were proof that the evangelical tradition had been co-opted by conservative political operatives.

Staunch right-wing partisanship is a contemporary departure from the longer history of US evangelicalism, Campolo and Claiborne insist.  On this point they echo what Matthew Avery Sutton refers to as a normative understanding among scholars of evangelicalism in the US.  In his 2024 article “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right,” Sutton traces this understanding to a close network of influential historians who began their work in the 1980s and 1990s.  These “consensus historians,” as Sutton calls them, set out to counter the “partisan politics, racism, sexism, and nationalism” they believed were fueling the religious right and its so-called Moral Majority.  They did so by writing historical accounts that defined faithful evangelicalism as a reform-minded force for social good.  Though focused disproportionately on White evangelicals, Sutton says, his consensus historians also obscured this racialized focus by suggesting that there was a timeless and benevolent theological essence to evangelicalism that transcended the contingencies of “race, class, gender, and sexuality.”  In other words, in their efforts to reclaim evangelical tradition from the religious right, Sutton’s consensus historians abstracted it from embodied categories of identity. 

The progressive White evangelical leaders I cited earlier offer a useful contrast here.  These leaders are similarly committed to freeing the contemporary definition of US evangelicalism from its popular associations with right-wing partisans.  As I observe in this paper, however, they do this by materializing the exact categories of identity that Sutton’s consensus historians abstract.  I demonstrate this with close readings of Claiborne’s work, in particular, showing that his writing seeks to redeem evangelicalism—and White evangelicals, especially—through a form of narrative encounter predicated on the materiality of racial-ethnic otherness.

Claiborne’s opposition to the Trump campaign was not surprising.  For much of the decade before, he was heralded as an heir apparent to an earlier generation of progressive evangelical leaders like Campolo, Ron Sider, and Jim Wallis.  After graduating from Eastern University, where Campolo and Sider taught, Claiborne co-founded The Simple Way, an intentional living community in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.  He has been a spokesperson for the New Monastic movement and the organization Red Letter Christians, both of which are popular vehicles for millennial White e(x)vangelicals looking for spaces in which to critique their parent’s brand of evangelicalism.  His first book, The Irresistible Revolution, which was published in 2006, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and he has authored or co-authored countless articles and op-eds and more than a dozen books since.

One of the terms that repeats across Claiborne’s writings is “proximity.”  The “good news” of the gospel, Claiborne summarizes in his most recent book, Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person, is that Jesus left “all the comforts of heaven” to be proximate to the “suffering…of those on the margins.”  Faithfulness to such proximity is at the heart of Claiborne’s definition of true evangelicalism.  Much like Sutton’s consensus historians, his publications hold up as evangelical exemplars of the past the abolitionists, reformers, and civil rights activists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  All of these people moved toward the suffering and injustice of their time, Claiborne suggests.  The problem with the White evangelicalism of his upbringing, which Claiborne identifies with the culture war politics of the Moral Majority, is that it did the opposite.  It sidled up to political power and thereby distanced itself from the lived realities of those far from that same power.

This is the critique that drives Claiborne to Kensington, an under-resourced and predominantly non-White neighborhood.  His books are replete with stories of the racial and economic injustices faced by Black and Brown neighbors he comes to know.  These stories bear witness to the proximity to suffering that Claiborne practices in his own life.  They also serve as a kind of proximity by proxy for readers who remain insulated in the form of White evangelicalism that Claiborne critiques.  “I invite you to imagine you are in the scenes with me…and having face-to-face conversations with the same people,” Claiborne urges readers in Rethinking Life.

My paper gives close readings of two such conversational scenes in Claiborne’s corpus, one from Rethinking Life and the other from The Irresistible Revolution.  Drawing on bell hooks’ work on race and representation in Black Looks, I show how Claiborne narratively consumes the racial-ethnic otherness of his neighbors in order to convey proximity textually for his readers.  He does so with subtlety—by describing a foreign language his neighbors speak, the types of food they deliver to his door, and the physical experiences of suffering through which their lives teach him about Jesus’ concern for embodied struggle.  In the process, the differences between Claiborne and his neighbors become material in a double sense.  They take physical forms, and they are essential to Claiborne’s insistence that faithful evangelicalism is a practice located at the social margins. 

Claiborne writes his definition of evangelicalism through recurring stories about the embodied experiences of his Black and Brown neighbors.  I argue that he exercises in this way a definitional freedom and narrative license fraught with contradiction.  His stories criticize a normative White perspective in US evangelicalism and also narratively reproduce a similar norm.