Caleb Stegall suggests that Evangelicals are more utopian than we think.  He reminds us that Evangelicals generally have a “whiggish” view of history: “a tendency to interpret human events as a progressive march through time, to produce a story that ratifies the present and promises an even more glorious future.”  This sounds as Utopian as anything proffered by the Left.

Because [Evangelicals'] faith is so dependent on stories of transformation and conversion, it “exists in tension,” as Wilfred McClay put it, “with settled ways, established social hierarchies, customary usages, and entrenched institutional forms.”

This may be true of those more “democratic” denominations with an emphasis on a “conversion experience” – like Southern Baptist churches, Churches of Christ, Churches of God, etc., but certainly not all reformed Evangelical churches, which focus less on “conversion” experiences and far more on covenantal hierarchies.

This whiggish spirit is the deepest Evangelical commitment, one that crosses political and ecclesial lines. This Evangelical praise song is sounded in the key of world immanent salvation with equal enthusiasm by right and left, by George Bush and Hillary Clinton, by Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama. The claims of liberal theologians like Jim Wallis about the welfare state’s ability to alleviate poverty are topped only by the claims of conservative theologians like Michael Novak that capitalism can end global poverty.

Is he right?  And is this whiggish view of history not too far from a Hegelian, dialectical, Darwinian, onward-and-upward, better-every-day-in-every-way, Utopian view of history?  Stegall contrasts the whiggish view with the Augustinian view of history, which is what he says we should have in its place.