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George Marsden, concluding a chapter on evangelicalism since 1930 (published in 1991):

One of the striking features of much of evangelicalism is its general disregard for the institutional church. Except at the congregational level, the organized church plays a relatively minor role in the movement. Even the local congregation, while extremely important for fellowship purposes, is often regarded as a convenience to the individual. Ultimately, individuals are sovereign and can join or leave churches as they please. Often they seem as likely to choose a church because it is “friendly” as to do so because of its particular teachings. Denominational loyalties, although still significant for substantial numbers of evangelicals, are incidental for many others, especially those with a transdenominational consciousness who have attempted to bring unity to the movement.

Given this situation, it is remarkable that American evangelicalism has the degree of coherence it does. Little seems to hold it together other than common traditions, a central one of which is the denial of the authority of traditions. Nonetheless, one can attend apparently unconnected evangelical churches at opposite ends of the country and, as likely as not, find nearly identical teachings on most subjects. Probably the principles of the mass market, which emphasize standardization and national campaigns, are primary forces that help maintain this considerable evangelical uniformity.

Whether such centripetal forces for coherence or some countervailing centrifugal forces will prevail is difficult to tell. Perhaps what has been happening over the past two decades is that the traditional transdenominational core has become subordinate to several parties (the charismatic, the conservative-nationalistic political, the progressive evangelical), and that these parties will soon be as distinct as were the mid-twentieth-century fundamentalist and modernist heirs to nineteenth-century evangelicalism. One cannot predict with assurance. Yet, given evangelicalism’s typically informal sense of the church, it is difficult to see how any single party could come to dominate and hold the larger movement together. Perhaps it will continue to develop in the form of sympathetic parallel manifestations of related traditions.

One other chief consequence of the lack of an institutional church base, and of the declining role of the traditional denominations, is that evangelicalism’s vaunted challenge to the secular culture becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The movement depends on free enterprise and popular appeal. To some extent conservative churches grow because they promise certainty in times of uncertainty, in the name of the old-time gospel. Yet, with few institutional restraints on what message may legitimately be proclaimed, the laws of the market invite mixes of the gospel with various popular appeals. So the evangelical challenges to the secular “modern mind” are likely to be compromised by the innovative oversimplifications and concessions to the popular spirit of the age. Hence, as is so often the case in church history, the advance of the gospel is bound up with the advance of secularization within the church. Perhaps this conjunction is inevitable in a fallen world. The tares will grow with the wheat.