When I asked how my podcast listeners would evaluate the claim that evangelical Christianity is deeply dysfunctional, one listener wrote:

“Be careful. Very careful. Unless you have some kind of supernatural insulation (which some people believe they have), it’s going to be an uphill battle.”

I could not agree more.  Indeed, my experience in every context where I have tried to engage Evangelicals about the claim that evangelical Christianity is indeed deeply dysfunctional is not simply lack of interest but hostility.

This is why my goal for the podcast and for my work with Integration Project in 2019 is to begin with “the question” of Evangelical Dysfunction rather the phenomenon (or the problem) of Evangelical Dysfunction.

The difference is that focusing on the “phenomenon” begins with the understanding that this dysfunction is or could very well be real, and proceeds to investigate the factuality claim.  The first approach, focusing on the “question,” is more modest and preliminary.  It begins with investigating the nature of the claim, the one receiving the claim, and the one making the claim.  So it begins with trying to understand:

a) how we would go about even assessing such a claim, including considering:
i) what are our feelings and responses to such a claim (and what these may indicate),
ii) what our ability/inability competently to consider (or even to know how to start  considering) such a claim might mean,
iii) what type of person the claimant needs to be in order for us to believe that the claim could be valid,
iv) what would be required to create “trust” in the claimant if s/he were not the type of person whom we would find it easy to believe,
v) what the manner and/or context in which the claim is expressed would mean for our ability to believe it / take it seriously.

b) what it might take to convince us that such a claim is possible,

c) what resources we would be able to access in our churches or Christan communities.

In short, the main issue to confront in considering Evangelical Dysfunction is not the claim itself, but how evangelical Christianity seems completely insulated against such a claim, to the point that Evangelicals not only resist contemplating it but are in fact essentially incapable of doing so.

For this reason it is impossible to start with the claim of Evangelical Dysfunction as such.  Instead we must start with “the question” of evangelical dysfunction and so examine all of the preliminary and related pieces in order to show how (and how much) evangelical Christianity is predisposed not to taking such claims seriously (and indeed, how this pervasive insularity has debilitated Evangelicals to the point that they actually even lack the skills, dispositions and knowledge to do so even if they were so inclined)!