Evangelical Born Again % of America
Neil J. Young on Steven P. Miller'due south The Age of Evangelicalism: America'south Born-Again Years
In 1976, as Jimmy Carter campaigned for the White Business firm, he flummoxed the reporters covering him past offhandedly mentioning he was a born-once more Christian. Carter had not thought this simple fact was particularly disruptive or controversial, but the comment sent shockwaves through the mainstream media. What did it mean to be born over again, they asked each other nervously. And where had all the evangelicals who rushed to Carter's defense come from? Hadn't evangelicals disappeared afterwards the embarrassment of the Scopes Trial in 1925?
Today, almost Americans, especially our media, would hardly admit such unfamiliarity with evangelical Christianity. At the aforementioned time, the questions those reporters raised in 1976 linger in a nation not known for its religious and historical literacy. Steven P. Miller'due south slim but forceful The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years offers a compelling and provocative guide to anyone seeking to understand the prominence and power of evangelicalism in modernistic America.
Past "the historic period of evangelicalism," Miller means the forty-two-year bridge from 1970 to 2012. This, Miller argues, was a menstruum of evangelicalism'southward rise and fall, an era that produced the sense, as Miller quotes political scientist Alan Wolfe, that "we are all evangelicals now." Wolfe meant this to describe the state of American religion at the start of the xx-starting time century when the private-centered theology of the suburban mega-church had cast a shadow over the country's varied religious expressions. Miller, withal, suggests an even larger meaning, as his title contends. Every bit he argues in his introduction, "born-once more Christianity provided alternatively a linguistic communication, a medium, and a foil by which millions of Americans came to terms with political and cultural changes."
Merely who are evangelicals? What is evangelicalism? Miller does non carp much with definitions, a task that has weighed heavily in other scholars' treatments of the organized religion. In a brief comment, Miller just describes evangelicalism equally "the label ordinarily given to the public expression of born-once again Christianity," a definition that feels about circular. Other scholars like George Marsden take tended to define evangelicals by three fundamental traits: belief in the Bible as the inspired and revealed Give-and-take of God, experience of a "born once more" conversion, and commitment to proselytizing others.
More than recently, Molly Worthen, in her path-breaking Apostles of Reason, has suggested nosotros ought to empathize evangelicalism non every bit a matter of doctrines, but rather as a shared prepare of questions, including how believers reconcile spiritual and rational knowledge, how they translate private beliefs into the public foursquare, and how they obtain personal salvation and holiness in their earthly lives. Worthen's model allows her to expand her report of evangelicals to groups not usually considered office of the mix, including Wesleyans, Anabaptists, and Pentecostals.
Miller, too, casts a wide net in populating his report of American evangelicals. The usual suspects announced: Southern Baptists and nondenominational megachurches; Billy Graham and Rick Warren; Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition; Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. But Miller draws us into a far richer and deeply entertaining story of lesser-known evangelical actors and forces that exerted an outsized influence on American civilization and politics.
That story largely begins in California, the hotbed of nondenominational Christianity and the birthplace of the Jesus Movement. At that place, amidst the wreckage of free love and complimentary-flowing psychedelics, thousands of burned-out hippies turned from the counterculture to born-over again Christianity, meeting Jesus through evangelical ministers who ready up shop in Bay Surface area coffee houses or at beachside worship services in Southern California.
The Jesus People or Jesus Freaks, every bit they were known, made an absorbing sight. It would be hard to imagine these long-haired, tie-dyed, barefoot converts fitting in to the staid evangelical churches of the Bible chugalug, only the Jesus Movement had reverberations far across California. Adopted starting time in California-based church associations similar the Calvary Chapels and the Vineyard Churches, the relaxed just enthusiastic worship style of the Jesus Motility chop-chop became de rigueur in evangelical churches across the nation. The pulsating rhythms of "Jesus Rock" and the nearly hypnotic refrains of Contemporary Christian Music replaced traditional hymns. Pastors traded in their suits and clerical robes for casual habiliment. Fire and brimstone sermons gave way to messages nigh God's arable love and grace. Hardline theology remained but it adjusted to an American society suspicious of dominance (religious or otherwise) in the wake of Watergate.
Millions of Americans poured into these evangelical churches in the 1970s, as Miller documents, transforming the nation's culture and politics. Outside of the sanctuaries, Americans fabricated bestsellers out of books from evangelical authors like Hal Lindsey and Marabel Morgan. Lindsey's The Belatedly Not bad Planet Earth translated premillennial dispensational eschatology — an end-times theology popular amid bourgeois evangelicals — into a page-turning potboiler about the terrors that await unbelievers in the menstruation betwixt the rapture and Jesus' 2nd coming. Published in 1970, it sold ten 1000000 copies past the stop of the decade to an American public receptive to prophetic interpretations of the tumultuous events shaking the Eye East at the time. Meanwhile, Morgan'southward The Full Woman offered a self-help guide for those women who believed wifely submission rather than liberation promised the best route to personal fulfillment and marital happiness. If that sounded like an especially prim prescription, Morgan sprinkled her book with sexual activity tips so naughty information technology read more like Cosmopolitan magazine than an evangelical primer. The Total Woman became the best-selling nonfiction book of 1974.
Other books from evangelical authors like James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and, of course, Billy Graham flew off the shelves. Christian rock filled the airwaves. And celebrities similar Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton testified to a born-once more experience. Everyone, it seemed, had caught the evangelical bug. The Gallup organisation pronounced 1976 the "Twelvemonth of the Evangelical," but Miller makes a case that the entire decade had really been theirs.
That cultural and political power revealed itself most plainly in Ronald Reagan's presidential election in 1980, achieved in office by the nascent Religious Right motion. Of course, Reagan had booted Carter, the first president to tout his evangelical bona fides, from function. But past the finish of Carter's first term most evangelicals wondered if he really belonged in their camp given his support for liberal policies on matters of gender and sexuality. After the White House, Carter would resuscitate his public paradigm through humanitarian piece of work with Habitat for Humanity, but most evangelicals continued to heart him suspiciously.
Other evangelicals on the left endured similar treatment from their bourgeois friends, though this tended to play out in the much more than insular world of evangelical institutions and publications. For a time, the prominence of folks on the evangelical left like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider suggested that evangelicalism could span a broad spectrum of political conviction. By the bourgeois 1980s, however, liberal evangelicals looked like a dying breed. Miller paints this land of diplomacy mostly as consequence of shifting politics, but the marginalization, if non demonization, of liberal evangelicals was foremost a theological matter, an underdeveloped theme of this volume.
As a people deeply committed to religious organized religion, evangelicals take worked hard to define and defend their beliefs. In the 1970s, those efforts erupted in the "battle for the Bible" over biblical inerrancy, on which Miller touches just briefly. The inerrantists — those who insisted the Bible was without error in all matters — largely won the fight, and they pushed moderate and liberal evangelicals out of their denominations, seminaries, agencies, and publishing houses. This is what left Jim Wallis and others like him exterior the established evangelical fold — at least as far as the triumphant conservatives were concerned. When conservative evangelical leaders wrote Wallis disapproving letters — and I take read dozens of them stored in the archives of the evangelical Wheaton College — they remonstrated him not for his politics, but for his theological positions on the Bible, sin, and personal salvation.
Miller is right, of course, to include Wallis in his study of evangelicals, not least considering Wallis himself has insisted on his evangelical self-identity. But how do we empathize a subculture, to borrow Randall Balmer's term for evangelicals, that ranges, at to the lowest degree in Miller'due south accounting, from the shapeless theology of mega-church pastor Joel Osteen to the hardline orthodoxy of Francis Schaeffer, the noted evangelical intellectual? Does anyone who calls themselves an evangelical get to exist one?
It seems Miller would say yes. And honestly, given the rigid border-defending of the faith by evangelical leaders and the tight defining of evangelicalism by scholars, Miller'south expansive vision seems refreshing, generous, and fair, although this capaciousness also strains confronting his own argument. If evangelicalism does not have an verbal pregnant and so information technology is hard to know if nosotros accept been living in an evangelical historic period.
Instead, it seems that historians covering the same menstruation equally Miller have a more convincing case that it had actually been an era of conservatism or the age of Reagan — an argument that would include evangelicalism every bit a component of the age only not its defining characteristic.
Despite Miller's all-time efforts, readers may even so conclude that evangelicals are those white suburbanites who desire abortion outlawed, oppose gay marriage, and vote Republican. That reputation was secured in the exciting days of 1980s conservatism. Fifty-fifty as the Religious Right crumbled through the political setbacks and religious scandals of the late 1980s and 1990s, as Miller richly details (his account of the public embarrassments of several televangelists is peculiarly delicious), the conservative evangelical voter has remained a potent image in America's political and cultural consciousness, a tired foil the media constantly pulls out to prepare confronting the nation'south secularizing trends. But, as Miller masterfully shows, American evangelicalism is far more than what happens at the ballot box. We may not now be or always accept been living in an evangelical age. But we can hardly know ourselves or our nation if nosotros do not empathise how much evangelicals have been trying to make information technology one.
Source: https://themarginaliareview.com/when-america-was-born-again-by-neil-j-young/
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