The Rise of Root-Seeking Evangelicals

I was speaking at a campus event at Hillsdale College, an extraordinary place where Protestants and Roman Catholics read Cicero, fall in love with one another, and contemplate their ecclesial identity. My goal was to help students understand some of the challenges of such ecumenical relationships.

“Why did you convert to Roman Catholicism?” I asked a former Protestant, who was sitting beside his Roman Catholic girlfriend. At once, he looked into her hazel eyes, full of warmth and wonder, took a deep breath, and then, without missing a beat, quoted John Henry Newman: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” Her halting smile suggested that Newman hadn’t been his only inspiration.

Unfortunately, a large swath of Protestant engagement with history makes our movement vulnerable to Newman’s critique. Many Protestants in recent years have indeed decided to abandon their churches and swim the Tiber over to Rome. So how did a Reformation movement that began with such rich theological foundations evolve into something that could be so easily abandoned by its brightest minds?

the newman divide

Newman was a convert to Roman Catholicism who later became a cardinal in the Roman church. His celebrated observation about history and Protestantism wasn’t made in a theological vacuum—it emerged from intimate familiarity. His own brother Francis had become a prominent voice in the Plymouth Brethren, a movement dedicated to stripping Christianity of what its leaders viewed as centuries of corrupting tradition. Francis championed a strict biblicism that rejected creeds, councils, and the accumulated wisdom of the church fathers as dangerous departures from the primitive New Testament faith.

This approach, intended to preserve biblical purity and stimulate personal evangelism, led Francis and his evangelical brethren into a trap of their own making. Where John Henry discovered in the church fathers a treasure trove of wisdom that illuminated the gospel, Francis saw only barnacles on the ship of faith that needed to be scraped away.

But the more he stripped Christian tradition from Scripture, the more his faith became hostage to his own judgment and the popular opinions of his day. What he thought would produce deeper discipleship instead yielded something theologically shallow—a Christianity so severed from its historical roots that future generations would hunger for the very depth that their ancestors had abandoned.

contemporary protestantism

In many evangelical churches today, you’ll find Francis Newman’s spiritual descendants. Whether they explicitly advertise “No creed but the Bible” (which is itself a creed) or simply assume that two thousand years of Christian thought add little to personal Bible study, they’ve inherited his fundamental premise: that history corrupts rather than illuminates the gospel. This suspicion runs so deep that many evangelicals can name more celebrity pastors than church fathers, more worship songs than ancient hymns.

For all its flaws, this evangelical tradition hasn’t been entirely harmful. At its best, it has produced Christians who treasure Scripture, congregations where ordinary believers embrace their call to ministry, worship services that pulse with genuine devotion, and evangelistic fervor that treats the gospel as a matter of life and death. These churches have cultivated biblical literacy and missionary zeal that puts many historic churches to shame, while evangelical scholars have produced biblical and theological insights that enrich the broader Christian conversation.

shallow soil

And yet, for all its strengths, the evangelical tradition often lacks the depth to sustain souls over time. So often cut off from the rich soil of doctrine and the church’s accumulated wisdom, evangelicalism grows shallow and showy. With no deep roots to anchor it, the movement easily confuses emotional intensity with spiritual maturity and numerical growth with genuine fruit.

Video screens and fog machines replace sacramental mystery; manufactured experiences substitute for the slow cultivation of holiness. Worship becomes performance, aimed more at producing a mood than forming character. Add corporate metrics of success and the result is a greenhouse Christianity: impressive from a distance but lacking the hardy growth that weathers storms. The predictable wilting follows: celebrity scandals, authoritarian excess, and exodus to Rome and Constantinople in search of the very roots that evangelicalism has abandoned.

Evangelicals who once severed ties with tradition now wander through a famine of the soul, hungering for the very riches that they once discarded. But before embracing the romanticized antiquity of Rome or Constantinople, they might consider that these traditions too have their own innovations—papal supremacy, transubstantiation, and purgatory among them.

The theological riches, liturgical beauty, and moral wisdom that these seekers crave aren’t the exclusive property of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches—they’re buried treasure within their own Protestant inheritance, a tradition far more historically rooted than Francis Newman’s heirs ever acknowledged. The tragedy isn’t that evangelicals lack ancient roots but that we’ve forgotten how to cultivate the garden we inherited. Today’s root-seeking evangelicals need not abandon ship—they need only dig deeper into soil that was theirs all along.