Did the American Evangelical megachurch adopt the unchecked executive model because it wanted to emulate Disney World and its fantasy of American small town life? It’s a charge that’s worth looking at because it can shed some light on this issue. I’m going to be unabashedly churchy in this, so comment if you need a translation of the Evangelical jargon.

In my quest to understand why American Evangelicals have rejected the balancing of powers that the Reformation developed for the Strong Executive model (which we can even call the “Infallible Pope model”, and will when we look at Lord Acton’s lectures), I have returned to some books on Christianity and post-modernism written during the last decade by some friends of friends who teach at Evangelical-associated universities.

David Wells was a Distinguished Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and an ordained as a Congregational minister. He can be expected to argue for stronger theology among Evangelicals in his books. Or even any theology at all: many Evangelicals scoff at the need for “all that theology stuff”, which in his mind explains a lot.

In his Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, Wells discusses how the megachurch is a response to the new religious “consumer”. Religions of all types in America have seen massive amounts of “switching”, people who used to call themselves adherents to a particular faith but now don’t. Sometimes this is to another faith — and I’ll lump “atheist” in this — but it is increasingly to “non-aligned”. The switching isn’t just at Christian churches: in 2001, 33% became Buddhists while 23% left it.

[These numbers come from CUNY's 2001 The American Religious Identification Survey and the Pew Forum's 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. We'll cover this in a later post.]

Wells argues that this has driven Evangelical churches to be increasingly focused on how the newcomer feels when coming to the church. He believes:
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