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To see ourselves as others see us has been more possible for North Atlantic evangelicals in the last 50 years than perhaps ever before. Since 1976, the so-called Year of the Evangelical, mainstream media have regularly featured evangelical churches, organizations, and leaders. At least as interesting to Books & Culture readers, however, is the flood of academic research that has poured forth from the presses since that time, and especially since George Marsden's landmark study, Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980).

Perhaps the last social scientific discipline to engage evangelicalism has been anthropology. In a new book, University of Winnipeg religious studies professor Paul Bramadat offers the first ethnographical study of a distinctive form of evangelical community: the Christian student fellowship on a secular university campus.

The Church on the World's Turf is based on Bramadat's doctoral dissertation at McMaster University, a major university located southwest of Toronto in Hamilton, Ontario. Bramadat studied the McMaster chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) for two extended periods: the fall term of 1994 and the entire academic year 1995-96. He attended most of the IVCF events and interviewed many of its leaders and rank-and-file members. He then went more than the proverbial extra mile as he concluded his field research by accompanying an evangelistic team of IVCFers to Lithuania in the spring of 1996.

The resulting study is a rich portrait of a group that will be generically familiar to many evangelicals, yet painted by a sympathetic outsider. Bramadat follows postmodern convention and identifies himself and his biases in his introduction. He is definitely an outsider: a Unitarian Universalist who, he says, "was predisposed to be tolerant of almost everyone except evangelicals or fundamentalists." Yet he seems to have made an earnest effort to become analytically sympathetic to his subjects. He recognizes that an interpreter fails to truly understand a group if he cannot discern, and then demonstrate, how such a group of people could possibly think and do that.

Indeed, Bramadat went an extra mile in this respect as well. He tried sincerely, he writes, "throughout this project to remain both intellectually and emotionally open to their Lord." The students who got to know him also thought, he says, that he had come very close to converting. Whether this measure of openness to one's subject is required for good social science is debatable. But Bramadat cannot be suspected of setting up his evangelical subjects merely as convenient pots at which to aim liberal, secular, or social-scientific missiles.

IVCF emerges here in dynamics quite recognizable to many B&C readers. Bramadat deploys the metaphors of "bridges" and "fortresses" to depict the ambiguous relationship of this group of students with its university home. The very title of the book, of course, implies this relationship. "The church" (IVCF) is not claiming the university as its own. Indeed, it has ceded the university to "the world." But it is present nonetheless "on the world's turf." And Bramadat indicates that IVCF members are involved not only in their classes but in other sectors of campus life as well. They are not merely huddling in a holy ghetto on campus.

Bramadat demonstrates, however, that IVCFers are more sectarian than churchly. In a chapter devoted to "Otherness," these evangelicals apparently perceive themselves as quite distinct from their fellow students and from the university as a society. Predictably, this alienation shows up as students feel pressure to toe certain lines of political correctness in class and in the dorms regarding evolution, homosexuality, and religious pluralism. Bramadat quotes McMaster Divinity College professor Clark Pinnock sounding like the late Francis Schaeffer as he tells the students that "there is no common ground between Christianity and secularism." While Pinnock encourages intellectual exchange with secularists on campus, Bramadat, at least, understands Pinnock as commending primarily a "fortress" mentality.

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