Postmortem Reflections on the New Calvinism

Once upon a time my friends I was young, restless, and reformed. Calvin was my bromance. I had a Charles Spurgeon therapy toy, which, whenever I was depressed, I would squeeze to bosom, and whisper to myself, “It’s okay Mike, all the Arminians are going to hell!” I owned enough R.C. Sproul books for R.C. Sproul to buy a private jet! I taught my girlfriend the five solas and all the TULIPs. I was there when the New Calvinism kicked off, a resurgence of Reformed theology, back in the late 90s and early 00s. A movement of agitated young men in America and the wider Anglophone world. I wasn’t just reformed I was righteously reformed!

I’m in a different place now, obviously, but lotd of memories of blogs, books, and conferences.

But, precisely because of my time in that space, I was curious and excited to read Brad Vermurlen’s book Reformed Resurgence: The New Calvinist Movement and the Battle Over American Evangelicalism (Oxford: OUP, 2020). The book’s blurb is:

One of the most significant developments within contemporary American Christianity, especially among younger evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Brad Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this phenomenon -- known as New Calvinism -- and what it entails for the broader evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can be strong and thrive in the hypermodern Western world. His paradigm uses and expands on strategic action field theory, a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations that has rarely been applied to religion. This approach to religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders' strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. For the same reasons conservative Calvinistic belief is experiencing a resurgence, present-day American evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Vermurlen argues that in the end, evangelicalism in the United States consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within the "cultural entropy" of secularization, as religious meanings and coherence fall apart.

It is important to note that Vermurlen’s book is not a valorization of the New Calvinism (NC) nor a take-down of it. He is offering a study of the NC in light of the sociology of religion in the American context. And, let me say, it is a truly fascinating read.

In a nutshell, Vermurlen thinks that the rise of the NC was less about marketing and religious consumerism, but the direct result of religious leaders’ strategic and conflictual actions which demonstrates a new way that religion can thrive in a pluralistic, hyper-modern, secular, and western world (p. 2). The rise of the NC was indicative of the “cultural struggle going on in the Evangelicalism field for symbolic capital and symbolic power” (p. 79). The success of NC was because “NC leaders strategically position themselves as having clear, compelling, ‘black and white’ answers to pressing ethical, social, existential, and doctrinal questions, and especially to young persons” (p. 159).

The NC was attractive because it avoided the moral therapeutic deism of “seeker churches” and the “Protestantism without the Reformation” in mainline churches, and it offered instead an “alternative worldview in which Jesus - not Self - sits on the throne” (p. 172). The downside is that NC leaders often portrayed themselves as the self-appointed gatekeepers of evangelical orthodoxy. Personal note, I once had a student have a book review rejected by TGC because it was not critical enough of Scot McKnight. So, yeah, that’s very true!

The book provides a great introduction to key people (e.g., Piper, Keller, Carson, Mohler) and key institutions (Crossway Publishers, Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel). There’s a great section on the black exodus from NC which presages the black exodus from largely white evangelicalism around 2016.

I did find it a bit odd that Vermurlen pits the NC against what he calls the “Neo-Anabaptist Evangelicalism,” but he notes people like Preston Sprinkle who seem to zig and zag between both groups (pp. 73-75). Vermurlen even argues that what separates the American evangelical tribes is their primary “ologies.” For the NC, it’s ontology, for Emergent evangelicals it is epistemology, and for neo-Anabaptist evangelicals it is deontology (ethics).

Vermurlen also states that the NC tend to be more nonpartisan and apolitical, I think that’s generally true, even Kevin De Young warned against Trump’s character, and John Piper said he was not going to vote for Trump. But there are undoubtedly some NC folks who also overlap with Trumpian Christians. For instance, Al Mohler changed his tune pretty quickly from 2016 to 2020.

There’s lots of critiques of the NC by folks like James K. A. Smith, Scot McKnight, Roger Olson, Rachel Held Evans and others. Many wonder if is neo-Fundamentalism or even neo-Puritanism. But that’s enough for now!

Otherwise, Check out Colin Hansen’s interview with Brad Vermurlen about his book!