1 of 7
A real-life character in one of these books, a Mississippi Baptist insurance company executive, recounts an unusual Christian testimony. As a teenager, he had started pilfering from a local grocery store, but one day he was caught, taken by the owner into a back room, and directed to sit down facing the man's desk. A pistol lay on one side of the desk, a Bible on the other. Either, the storeowner told him, the lad would be handed over at gunpoint to the police, or he would listen to some Bible passages. He chose the latter option, found himself convicted of sin and ran home to ask God to change his life. "So," he concluded, "that's how I became a Christian." The menacing with a pistol may be exceptional, but the subsequent denouement was not. The Mississippi teenager went through the conversion experience that forms the entry gate to evangelical religion. He became one of the millions of Americans who form the subject of the volumes here under review.
Conversion is just one of the four characteristics that, in combination, evangelicals habitually display. Alongside that hallmark are an eagerness to learn from the Bible, an activism rooted in zeal for the gospel, and an appeal to the Cross as the means of redemption. It is welcome that all five books mention each of these four points, not neglecting, as many efforts to describe the key qualities of American evangelicals have done, the atoning work of Christ—even if the study by Monique El-Faizy relegates the Cross to a subordinate position. Only if some such set of criteria is deployed can the extent of evangelicalism in modern America be plotted. Self-identification is far from conclusive, since evangelicals do not necessarily use the term of themselves. In a recent survey undertaken by the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, a mere 15 percent of the respondents classed by the investigators as evangelicals employed the word as a self-description. So, even in studies where people are asked their religious allegiance, some such objective grid is also called for. When applied, it reveals that perhaps 25 percent of the adult population of the United States is evangelical. It is because so sizeable a proportion of the nation can be recognized as evangelical—a datum which, in conjunction with evangelical political activism, some observers find deeply alarming—that publishers have recently been producing a deluge of introductions to the subject. Here are five of them.
They can be arranged roughly in sequence according to their degree of overt empathy for evangelicalism. Douglas Sweeney, associate professor of church history and the history of Christian thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, identifies closely with the movement. In The American Evangelical Story he writes as an insider for insiders ("we evangelicals"), frequently quoting Scripture for his purpose. His is the only straightforwardly historical work among the five, recounting the main developments in America from the 18th century down to the present day. He argues that the Great Awakening brought urgency and a cooperative spirit to the heirs of the Reformation; that in the early 19th century American evangelicals moved to the center of their culture; that missions were a bright page on the evangelical record but race relations a much darker one; that new styles of spirituality around the turn of the 20th century transformed the movement; and that fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism wrote fresh chapters in the more recent past. These topics are skillfully chosen to bring out the main features of the story, and they are fluently discussed with a telling awareness of recent scholarship in the field. Nor does the sympathy of the author for his subject preclude criticism. Missionaries, Sweeney observes, often failed to distinguish between the gospel that they preached and the culture that they carried. Furthermore, he remarks at the end, evangelicals have often suffered from an insularity born of success and so have failed to draw on the doctrinal resources of the broader church in time and space. This is a good survey of its theme, and a wise one.
share this page
RSS Feed
