In church history, the phrase “captivity of the church” has been used in different contexts with varied meanings. In the context of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther wrote the tract On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,²⁰ likening the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on the sacraments to the capture and exile of the Israelites by the Babylonians. To Luther, the church’s lack of understanding and application of faith and grace revealed a doctrinal captivity of the church. Luther asserts that the medieval Catholic Church held little resemblance to the characteristics of the community of God found in Scripture.

In more recent years, R. C. Sproul has written the “Pelagian Captivity of the Evangelical Church,”²¹ about a church that is held captive by the Pelagian view of the basic goodness of humanity rather than reflecting Scriptural perspectives on original sin and human fallenness. Authors such as H. Richard Niebuhr, Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Hauerwaus, Rodney Clapp and others have written about the relationship between the church and the culture—employing concepts that speak to the potential danger of the church’s captivity to the culture around it. Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey is an attempt at “liberating Christianity from its cultural captivity.” Gibson Winter seeks to address the Suburban Captivity of the Churches, while Cornel West alludes to a Constantinian captivity of Christianity.²²

The phrase “captivity of the church” points to the danger of the church being defined by an influence other than the Scriptures. The church remains the church, but we more accurately reflect the culture around us rather than the characteristics of the bride of Christ. We are held captive to the culture that surrounds us. To speak of the white captivity of the church is an acknowledgement that white culture has dominated, shaped and captured Christianity in the United States. At times, the white evangelical church has been enmeshed with Western, white American culture to the great detriment of the spread of the gospel. This state of American evangelicalism cannot continue if we are to move toward the future of a next evangelicalism.

In some portions of the book, I will use the term white captivity as a synonym for Western captivity. In my description of the white captivity of the church (individualism in chapter one and materialism/consumerism in chapter two), many of these attributes may appear more simply to be characteristics of Western culture, rather than specifically of white America. The phrase “white captivity of the church” is used to remind us that Western culture has been dominated by whites throughout its history. It is also used to help us distinguish the significant role of racism in Western culture and subsequently, American Christianity (chapter three). A significant oversight that will be confessed from the onset is that, in our focus on the issue of race in this work, we will not invest the necessary time and effort to discuss the white male captivity of the American evangelical church. We must recognize, however, that the issue of gender captivity also plays a prominent role in the cultural captivity of the church.