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The second work, Sam Reimer's Evangelicals and the Continental Divide, is again by an evangelical insider, an associate professor of sociology at Atlantic Baptist University, Moncton, New Brunswick, but it has a more detached tone. The book reports the results of surveys made in 1995 of evangelicals in Canada as well as in the United States in order to compare and contrast their attitudes. Much of the text consists of analytical tables and related commentary, giving the case an air of social scientific objectivity (and it is none the worse for that). But the author also includes some splendid illustrations of grassroots attitudes. One gem comes from the lips of a Manitoba Baptist, who, when asked what he thought of various specified groups, remarked as he went through the list, "I don't know what a secular humanist is, but I am probably against it." The overall findings of the monograph are clear: the web of evangelical opinions showed few differences on the two sides of the border, precisely because it constituted a single subculture.
Richard Kyle, professor of history and religion at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas, is the writer of the third title, Evangelicalism: An Americanized Christianity. Kyle is an insider, a Mennonite and already the author of two books published by InterVarsity, but he engages in a sustained critique of the contemporary movement. Evangelicalism has capitulated, he argues, to the forces of Americanism—individualism, pragmatism, populism, democracy, free enterprise, and so on. In trying to convey the gospel to the United States, the movement has assimilated the values of the nation. In a manner reminiscent of the challenge of David Wells in No Place for Truth (1993), Kyle excoriates the willingness of evangelicals to absorb so much from popular culture: "many evangelicals," he warns, "are in danger of trivializing Christianity." He devotes four chapters to the history of the movement, showing that the assimilation of Americanism was already proceeding apace over the centuries, and then examines in turn its politics, megachurches and lowbrow culture in the contemporary world. The verdict is pessimistic. Evangelicals have tried to be countercultural, but, paradoxically, they have been thoroughly pressed into the mold of their setting.
The fourth book, Believers, is by a journalist who was once an insider but who became an outsider. Jeffery L. Sheler started as a fundamentalist Baptist, shifted his allegiance to the more open-minded but still definitely evangelical Nazarenes, and then joined a mainline Presbyterian church. There was no sharp turning away from his origins, but when he decided to explore the evangelical world he found it unfamiliar. He traveled around the country visiting representative evangelical centers in Virginia, Massachusetts, Colorado, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington, D. C., and New York, and even ventured to Guatemala with a missionary team from Alabama. The stimulus to his enterprise, he explains, was the ignorance displayed by his colleagues in journalism concerning all things evangelical. He wished to demonstrate that, far from being rustic, irrational and intemperate, evangelicals were mostly sensible Americans, hardly different in many respects from their neighbors. There is, he concludes, "nothing alien or weird about evangelical Christianity." Evangelicals' greatest asset, he suggests at the end, is the gospel message itself. Perhaps the author discovered that he was less of an outsider than he himself had supposed.
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