American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving
Christian Smith
University of Chicago,
310 pp., $16.00

Christianity Today—among many, many others. Now with a half-century of history under its belt, how is this movement, then called "neo-evangelicalism," doing?

Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, sums it up in his subtitle: "embattled and thriving."

An assistant professor at North Carolina, Smith came to this conclusion after conducting a national survey and holding hundreds of personal interviews of both evangelicals and other churchgoing Protestants, examining evangelicals' "commitments, beliefs, concerns, and practices."

With insufficient space to describe the book in detail, let me highlight what were, for me, the biggest myth-busters produced by Smith's research.

I had thought American individualism, with its emphasis on personal choice, undermined members' commitment to their churches. After all, if people don't like what they're getting, they can just hop over to another church. Smith says no: because people in modern America choose their communities, they tend to be more committed to them.

I thought corporate and bureaucratic mass culture, which trains people to be distant and driven, undermined their ability to be in community. Not so, says Smith. It only makes people more hungry for personalized, intimate community—like the church.

I thought, a la Dean Kelly's classic Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, that evangelicalism thrived because it gave people an alternative, protected world to live in. No way, says Smith:

American evangelicalism … is strong not because it is shielded against, but because it is—or at least perceives itself to be—embattled ...