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The Great Evangelical Disaster

One of Francis Schaeffer’s greatest strengths was his resolve to battle for truth and morality as an evangelical Christian in the midst of our secular culture. But Schaeffer also was not hesitant to confront fellow evangelicals who failed to do so. Schaeffer refused to rest content but instead called evangelicals out of their cultural ghettos in order to engage others with the Christian worldview. He felt unsettled as he observed that evangelicals had not been on the front lines, contending for the faith and confronting the moral breakdown of the twentieth century.

Schaeffer was confident that the battle for truth had to result in confrontation. “If the truth of the Christian faith,” said Schaeffer in The Great Evangelical Disaster, “is in fact truth, then it stands in antithesis to the ideas and the immorality of our age, and it must be practiced both in teaching and practical action. Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.”

Schaeffer argued that the “great evangelical disaster” was “the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth.” Schaeffer’s words were more on target than we could have imagined: “There is only one word for this—namely accommodation: the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age.”