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This is an important and also an unusual book, because it combines an authoritative and superbly annotated summation of historical and sociological work about American evangelical Christianity with what amounts to "A Devout and Serious Call" to fellow evangelicals, especially in the United States. As a summation it will be essential reading for myriad courses where its subject figures. As a "call" it offers a theological reading of the political implications of the gospel which reminds me of Cromwell's exasperated appeal to the Scottish Puritans in 1650: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be wrong."
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American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction by Mark A. Noll Blackwell, 320 pp. $29.95, paper |
A conscientious reviewer has to deal with both of these aspects separately. Responding to the implicit comparative history and sociology of evangelicalism is relatively easy, and my way of doing so is to run some of Noll's themes through my personal experience of how they have played in Britain. However, once one comes to his discussion of Canada one finds that an interesting case for comparison, intermediate between the United States and Britain, is also used as an example for American evangelicals to follow. Thereafter the heart of the book is Noll's account of how theological norms could and should inform Christian political theory and practice. This is a very distinct kind of intellectual enterprise, obliging me to engage both as sociologist and as theologian. The change of gear is palpable.
There is another important matter which bears on the tenor of what follows. It is clear from several indications that Noll is exercised by the question "Whatever happened to Methodism?", though he only offers an explicit response to it in the chapter on Canada. So, I treat that question as the hidden issue behind the whole book. After all, the revivals and awakenings so specially characteristic of English-speaking peoples, most influentially in the contrasting cases of Britain and the United States, amounted to a dramatic conversion and expenditure of accumulated theological capital. Theology as the reflection on the deposit of faith by established Christian intelligentsias became translated into a direct appeal to the heart of the emergent masses (or "outcasts of men" in Charles Wesley's phrase). It was one of the ways in which outcasts mobilized and became self-conscious. Coolness of head became warmth of heart, with evangelical revivals moving mightily on the American frontier and in industrializing Britain; and we now see something similar happening on an even bigger scale as Pentecostalism takes off among the poor of the developing world.
At the same time, the demotic principle of sincere and enthusiastic hearts, so central to Methodism as well as to the early formation of the United States, also embodies a spirit of self-improvement which aspires to Gothic sanctuaries, social reform, and academic respectability. So doing it has fractured in myriad directions, both in terms of its social constituency and its original theological capital. Methodism now fulfils all political righteousness and is the theologically most confused church in the English-speaking world, to the point where its very existence in Britain is in doubt. Though I personally have every reason to be grateful to Methodism and its aspirations, its trajectory remains a cautionary tale implicit in all the interstices of this book, even though the focus is on the whole evangelical spectrum.
Alan Wolfe in the Atlantic Monthly for October 2000 saluted the way a number of conservative Christians has succeeded recently "in creating a life of the mind broader and more imaginative than anything previously found in their tradition," having been hitherto bottom of the pile, and he singles out (among much else) Books & Culture, Wheaton College, and Mark Noll. He also asks "But can they maintain it?", a doubt which maybe undergirds the pain motivating Noll's urgent text. One senses that the costs and tensions have been severe.
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