I’ll say it again – as a matter of fact, I’ll keep saying it as I have for the last 25 years: We are approaching our own Gorbachev moment, the point at which we realize that this country’s political animosities and divisions have grown so deep and our the  mechanisms of compromise established in our constitutional framework so seemingly ineffective that compromise no longer seems possible

As conservative columnist and Alabama native Byron York intimated recently in the disturbing Tweet above, the impending presidential election may prove to be a catalyst for any number of things: a protracted constitutional crisis, massive rioting and perhaps even threats of nullification or even secession by one or more states.

We seem to be faced with a remarkably similar set of circumstances – something a handful of astute political sages perceived as far back as three decades ago but, predictably, were scarcely heeded.

Some 30 years ago Mikhail Gorbachev, faced with a somewhat similar set of deep social political divisions set out to negotiate a new Union Treaty that would have transformed the Soviet Union from a tightly knit federation into a loose Union of Sovereign States. But he was eventually outpaced by events.

The raging animosities so conspicuously evident in our poisoned and dysfunctional political discourse simply have underscored to millions of ordinary Americans that our divisions not only are perilously deep but also unbridgeable.

I recently ran across this thought-provoking read about the future of Anglicanism in Britain. I’m a conservative, more or less a Disraeli conservative, though, like most of you one who acknowledges the absolutely indispensable role that the Enlightenment legacy has played in advancing the fortunes of the West and, for that matter, human civilization in general, despite our having broken a great many eggs to make this omelette. 

Moreover, and despite my lack of orthodoxy, I readily acknowledge how orthodox Christian belief has simultaneously worked to accommodate as well as to soften the rough edges of scientific/technological progress. Yet, with the effective end of Christendom, as it commonly has been known, fast approaching, I am not at all convinced that a rational technological society fully equipped to ensure upward progression for us all is even possible. 

Quite a few secular philosophers have expressed confidence that humanity sooner or later will construct a new ethos that not only will effectively supplant Christianity but that also will ensure our moral and technological progress proceeds apace. 

I, for one, remain less convinced of this than ever. 

Evangelical Christianity always has functioned as the de facto faith of the South and much of the rest of the red American hinterland, though not in the same way that Catholicism historically has served as the faith and the basis for national identity in Poland.

Yet, there seems to be a rising concern among evangelical Christians that the faith – this cultural bulwark of red heartland culture – is becoming unmoored from its historical distinctives. Yet, there is an element of irony bound up in this, namely because the strong case could be made – and has on occasion – that evangelicals have never managed to develop significantly strong distinctives. And partly because of this, contemporary evangelical Christians have failed to cultivate a sufficiently strong and enduring grasp of what defines their faith tradition – what sets them apart from others.

As one who took up a rather exhaustive and disciplined study of evangelical history a generation ago, I don’t find this anomaly all that surprising. While all faith traditions are the product of significant improvisation on the fly, evangelicalism, as far as improvisation goes, arguably represents an extreme outlier.

So much of the American Back Country was populated by people who were to a significant degree unlettered and culturally deracinated – essentially poor people desperately in search of land on which they could lay down roots and to construct the foundations of a culture – indeed, what many of these egalitarian-minded pioneers hoped would be a new culture constructed from scratch and that reflected a radical departure from many beliefs and practices that distinguished the old culture of Europe.

The evangelical identity that emerged within this cultural milieu is unique among all the other forms of Christianity throughout the world. While resembling European Anabaptists in some respects, its adherents undertook a conscious abandonment of older traditions, setting aside the creeds and the ecclesiastical structures and liturgies of older traditions in favor what could be accurately described as a lean faith emphasizing the absolute primacy of scripture, the radical priesthood of the believer (which, interestingly enough, mutated over the course of time into a unique American theological concoction known as soul competency), and an unyielding emphasis on congregational autonomy.

Within the last two centuries, these distinctives have contributed both to what could be accurately described as its adaptive genius – a strong factor contributing to its expansion into a worldwide faith – as well as to its obstinate shortcomings and weaknesses.

Speaking as a strictly amateur historian of American evagelicalism, I often wonder how these profound contradictions ultimately will play out. A faith tradition that has been unusually well-equipped to adapt to and to weather all manner of socioeconomic change has also been encumbered by the very factors that have accounted for its enormous growth and spread: its emphasis on soul competency as well as on para-church structures (at the expense of individual parishes) to facilitate evangelical outreach, and its longstanding and arguably excessive reliance on charismatic leaders who inevitably pass from the stage and must be replaced by others.

Only time will tell if evangelicalism ultimately manages to adopt to prevailing cultural winds that threaten not only them but expressions of the Christian faith.