The Left Should Adopt Evangelical Megachurch Organizing Methods to Build Durable Mass Membership Organizations
Source: Eric Blanc. "Leftists Should Learn to Organize Like Evangelicals." October 16, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
Evangelical megachurches have grown while most other American membership groups have shrunk, and they did it with practical, tested methods for making lonely people feel they belong. The Left struggles to build lasting organizations and often does the opposite, demanding the right beliefs up front and mistaking activity for success. So leftists should borrow Warren's playbook, adjusting it to their own politics, to build movements that last.
Conclusion
Socialists and progressives should study and adapt the systematic organizing methods in Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Church (deliberately building belonging, lowering the bar for entry, listening to the local community, treating recruitment as an experimental science, and appealing emotionally as well as intellectually) in order to build durable, growing membership organizations capable of countering the Right.
Premises
- Evangelical megachurches are among the few American membership institutions to have grown during the past half-century of community collapse, while institutions like unions have seen participation decline.
- The contemporary American Left has not figured out how to build durable membership organizations that recruit, retain, and develop large numbers of people beyond a small core of staff or self-selecting activists; it is good at one-off moments but poor at turning them into lasting organizations.
- Warren's methods are a systematic, trial-and-error-tested response to the same conditions of atomization and loneliness that the Left faces: building belonging deliberately, letting people belong before they believe, listening to the local community, measuring results rigorously, and winning hearts rather than only arguments.
- Many of the Left's habitual practices are the reverse of these methods: it assumes community already exists, demands correct beliefs and vocabulary at the door while expecting little real engagement, sets its positions before listening, counts activity or political righteousness instead of results, and treats being right as an excuse for marginality.
- Ideological differences and structural challenges do not prevent adapting these methods, since the underlying organizational problems are similar and comparable methods have been used by the Workers' Party of Belgium to build thick organization in a socially thin era.
Assumptions
- Evangelical megachurch growth is explained substantially by their organizing methods rather than by their theology, culture, or demographic and regional factors.
- Organizational techniques are largely separable from the ideological content they serve and can be transferred to a socialist context.
- Recruitment and membership methods that work for religious congregations will work for political organizations with different goals and higher demands for democratic deliberation.
- Raw membership growth and durable organization are what the Left most needs in order to counter the Right.
- The Left's organizing deficits are mainly methodological rather than the result of structural, political, or economic constraints.
- The author's characterization of the Left as uniformly deficient is accurate enough to be actionable, with a few partial exceptions.