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My entire extended family seems to be engaged in a conversation about the persistence of evangelical Christianity. Recently, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, visiting my sister. We were driving around one Saturday afternoon, shopping for pottery, when we passed a sign that said "Old Fashioned Tent Revival Meeting Next Week—Get to Know Jesus and Be Saved." My sister chuckled and said, "It boggles my mind that stuff like that still happens. Seems like it belongs in the nineteenth century. I don't understand how people can really believe stuff like that anymore." (I have learned, finally, to keep quiet when Leanne starts down this line of inquiry.) A few days before the pottery-shopping episode, I had been speaking to my cousin, who, taking a tack opposite from Leanne's, began praising God for the miracles he was creating in the church by having evangelical Christianity continue to blossom. "There's really no other explanation for it," Claire said, "other than the hand of God working in this country. I don't know how these watchmaker deity people would explain it. Here we are, the most dissolute, morally backwards country, and yet God is working here to make evangelicalism the strongest, most popular religion going."
Christian Smith and his fellow researchers are asking the same question that my cousin and sister are asking, and, not surprisingly, they think there is another explanation than the hand of God working in people's daily lives. It is not, after all, the job of sociologists to decree when God is working in human life. In short, Smith posits that "American evangelicalism is thriving—not only that, it is thriving very much because of and not in spite of its confrontation with modern pluralism." The conjunction in the subtitle is the only misleading word; if the subtitle read "Embattled, Thus Thriving" rather than "Embattled and Thriving," the reader would have Christian Smith's thesis before opening the book.
It may seem obvious to some readers—like my cousin, for example—that evangelicalism is thriving, but Smith takes great pains to prove the claim. Contemporary American evangelicalism, writes Smith, "is more than alive and well. Indeed … it appears to be the strongest of the major Christian traditions in the United States today." Refreshingly, Smith offers a broad conception of religious vitality. Other scholars have focused only on one criterion for religious vitality: Roger Finke, for example, has focused on church attendance and membership; others have focused on a religious group's ability to maintain social control, or on a religious organization's resources, assets, and likelihood of long-term survival.
In contrast, Smith offers a six-pronged definition of religious vitality:
[W]e will consider any American Christian faith tradition to be strong when its members (1) faithfully adhere to essential Christian beliefs; (2) consider their faith a highly salient aspect of their lives; (3) reflect great confidence and assurance in their Christian beliefs; (4) participate regularly in a variety of church activities and programs; (5) are committed in both belief and action to accomplishing the mission of the church; and (6) sustain high rates of membership retention by maintaining members' association with the tradition over long periods of time, effectively socializing new members into that tradition, and winning new converts to that tradition.
Of these six criteria, perhaps the only one that Smith does not flesh out sufficiently is the first one. Unlike the other five, the first is inherently normative, and Smith does not explain how he determined what beliefs constitute the core of "traditionally orthodox Christian" theology and what was peripheral. He seems to consider a "literally true" view of the Bible, for example, to be more traditional and orthodox than a "true, not always literally" view of Scripture. Such quibbles aside, however, Smith's six-tiered approach to religious vitality is a welcome alternative to the more narrow approaches of many other scholars.
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