The Politics of Evangelical Identity


Book Description

Drawing on her groundbreaking research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada -- two in Buffalo, New York, and two in Hamilton, Ontario -- Lydia Bean compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics incongregational settings.




The Politics of American Religious Identity


Book Description

Between 1901 and 1907, a coalition of Protestant churches sought to expel newly elected Reed Smoot from the Senate for being a Mormon. Here, Kathleen Flake shows how the subsequent investigative hearing ultimately mediated a compromise between Progressive Era Protestantism and Mormonism and resolved the nation's long-standing "Mormon Problem."




The Politics of Evangelical Identity


Book Description

Drawing on her groundbreaking research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada -- two in Buffalo, New York, and two in Hamilton, Ontario -- Lydia Bean compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics incongregational settings.




Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life


Book Description

Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life provides a sociological and historical analysis of gender, family, and work among evangelical Protestants. In this innovative study, Sally Gallagher traces two lines of gender ideals--one of husbands' authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage--from the Puritans to the Promise Keepers into the lives of ordinary evangelicals today. Rather than simply reacting against or accommodating themselves to "secular society," Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on longstanding beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God. The author bases her arguments on an analysis of evangelical family advice literature, data from a large national survey and personal interviews with over 300 evangelicals nationwide. No other work in this area draws on such a range of data and methodological resources. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life establishes a standard for future research by locating the sources, strategies, and meaning of gender within evangelical Protestantism.




Moral Minority


Book Description

In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong—evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way—organizationally and through political activism—to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.




Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863


Book Description

During the revolutionary age and in the early republic, when racial ideologies were evolving and slavery expanding, some northern blacks surprisingly came to identify very strongly with the American cause and to take pride in calling themselves American. In this intriguing study, Rita Roberts explores this phenomenon and offers an in-depth examination of the intellectual underpinnings of antebellum black activists. She shows how conversion to Christianity led a significant and influential population of northern blacks to view the developing American republic and their place in the new nation through the lens of evangelicalism. American identity, therefore, even the formation of an African ethnic community and later an African American identity, developed within the evangelical and republican ideals of the revolutionary age. Evangelical values, Roberts contends, exerted a strong influence on the strategies of northern black reformist activities, specifically abolition, anti-racism, and black community development. The activists and reformers' commitment to the United States and firm determination to make the country live up to its national principles hinged on their continued faith in the possibility of the collective transformation of all Americans. The people of the United States—both black and white—they believed, would become a new citizenry, distinct from any population in the world because of their commitment to the tenets of the Christian republican faith. Roberts explores the process by which a collective identity formed among northern free blacks and notes the ways in which ministers and other leaders established their African identity through an emphasis on shared oppression. She shows why, in spite of slavery's expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, northern blacks demonstrated more, not less, commitment to the nation. Roberts then examines the Christian influence on racial theories of some of the major abolitionist figures of the antebellum era, including Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and especially James McCune Smith, and reveals how activists' sense of their American identity waned with the intensity of American racism and the passage of laws that further protected slavery in the 1850s. But the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, she explains, renewed hope that America would soon become a free and equal nation. Impeccably researched, Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863 offers an innovative look at slavery, abolition, and African American history.




Still Evangelical?


Book Description

Evangelicalism in America has cracked. What defines the evangelical social and political vision—is it the gospel or is it culture? Edited by Mark Labberton, this collection of essays offers a diverse and provocative set of reflections from evangelical "insiders" who wrestle with the question of what it means to be evangelical in today's polarized climate.




Political and Religious Identities of British Evangelicals


Book Description

This book examines the paradoxical relationship between the religious and political behaviors of American and British Evangelicals, who exhibit nearly identical religious canon and practice, but sharply divergent political beliefs and action. Relying on interviews with British religious and political elites (journalists, MPs, activists, clergy) as well as focus groups in ten Evangelical congregations, this study reveals that British Evangelicals, unlike their American counterparts known for their extensive involvement in party politics, have no discernible ideological or partisan orientation, choosing to pursue their political interests through civic or social organizations rather than electoral influence. It goes further to show that many British Evangelicals shun the label itself for its negative political connotations and in-/out-group sensibility, and choose to focus on a broader social justice imperative rendered almost incoherent by a lack of group identity. Placing itself at the forefront of an incipient but growing segment of comparative research into the intersectionality of religion and politics, the work satisfies a lacuna of how the same religious tradition can act differently in public squares contextualized by political and cultural variables.




Evangelicals Incorporated


Book Description

A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity. American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success? According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century. Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.




Political Religion and Religious Politics


Book Description

Profound demographic and cultural changes in American society over the last half century have unsettled conventional understandings of the relationship between religious and political identity. The "Protestant mainline" continues to shrink in numbers, as well as in cultural and political influence. The growing population of American Muslims seek both acceptance and a firmer footing within the nation’s cultural and political imagination. Debates over contraception, same-sex relationships, and "prosperity" preaching continue to roil the waters of American cultural politics. Perhaps most remarkably, the fastest-rising religious demographic in most public opinion surveys is "none," giving rise to a new demographic that Gutterman and Murphy name "Religious Independents." Even the evangelical movement, which powerfully re-entered American politics during the 1970s and 1980s and retains a strong foothold in the Republican Party, has undergone generational turnover and no longer represents a monolithic political bloc. Political Religion and Religious Politics:Navigating Identities in the United States explores the multifaceted implications of these developments by examining a series of contentious issues in contemporary American politics. Gutterman and Murphy take up the controversy over the "Ground Zero Mosque," the political and legal battles over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Health Care Act and the ensuing Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision, the national response to the Great Recession and the rise in economic inequality, and battles over the public school curricula, seizing on these divisive challenges as opportunities to illuminate the changing role of religion in American public life. Placing the current moment into historical perspective, and reflecting on the possible future of religion, politics, and cultural conflict in the United States, Gutterman and Murphy explore the cultural and political dynamics of evolving notions of national and religious identity. They argue that questions of religion are questions of identity -- personal, social, and political identity -- and that they function in many of the same ways as race, sex, gender, and ethnicity in the construction of personal meaning, the fostering of solidarity with others, and the conflict they can occasion in the political arena.