A Decades-Old Warning for Evangelical Christians Is More Relevant Than Ever

In the years after the Second World War, an American theologian delivered a dire forecast about the future of Protestant Christianity. Unless the Evangelical church in America grappled with the great social questions of its time, warned Carl F. H. Henry, it “will be reduced either to a tolerated cult status” or become “a despised and oppressed sect” within two generations. That was in 1947.

Henry’s book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, published 75 years ago, challenged the Evangelical church to tackle problems such as racism, materialism, economic injustice, and international aggression. Although himself a thoroughgoing Evangelical, Henry had worked as a reporter for the New York Times and got his Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University. He was attuned to the issues that were shaping America’s future — and that demanded, in his view, a Christian response. “There is no room here for a gospel that is indifferent to the needs of the total man nor of the global man.”