The New Evangelicals

The New Evangelicals
Author: Marcia Pally
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2011-11-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780802866400

Documentary portrait of Christian evangelicals who have "left the Right" Over the past forty years the Religious Right has largely spoken for America's evangelicals. But this groundbreaking book by Marcia Pally reveals the "new evangelicals" -- a growing movement that espouses antimilitaristic, anticonsumerist, and liberal democratic ideals and promotes poverty relief, immigration reform, and environmental stewardship. Combining shrewd analysis with numerous fascinating interviews, Pally creates a compelling snapshot of a significant trend that is likely to impact American politics for years to come.

The Evangelicals

The Evangelicals
Author: Frances FitzGerald
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 607
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1439143153

* Winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award * National Book Award Finalist * Time magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year * New York Times Notable Book * Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 This “epic history” (The Boston Globe) from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America—from the Puritan era to the 2016 election. “We have long needed a fair-minded overview of this vitally important religious sensibility, and FitzGerald has now provided it” (The New York Times Book Review). The evangelical movement began in the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known in America as the Great Awakenings. A populist rebellion against the established churches, it became the dominant religious force in the country. During the nineteenth century white evangelicals split apart, first North versus South, and then, modernist versus fundamentalist. After World War II, Billy Graham attracted enormous crowds and tried to gather all Protestants under his big tent, but the civil rights movement and the social revolution of the sixties drove them apart again. By the 1980s Jerry Falwell and other southern televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, had formed the Christian right. Protesting abortion and gay rights, they led the South into the Republican Party, and for thirty-five years they were the sole voice of evangelicals to be heard nationally. Eventually a younger generation proposed a broader agenda of issues, such as climate change, gender equality, and immigration reform. Evangelicals now constitute twenty-five percent of the American population, but they are no longer monolithic in their politics. They range from Tea Party supporters to social reformers. Still, with the decline of religious faith generally, FitzGerald suggests that evangelical churches must embrace ethnic minorities if they are to survive. “A well-written, thought-provoking, and deeply researched history that is impressive for its scope and level of detail” (The Wall Street Journal). Her “brilliant book could not have been more timely, more well-researched, more well-written, or more necessary” (The American Scholar).

Evangelicals Incorporated

Evangelicals Incorporated
Author: Daniel Vaca
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-12-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0674243978

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.

The New Evangelical Social Engagement

The New Evangelical Social Engagement
Author: Brian Steensland
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199329540

Evangelicals are increasingly turning their attention to such issues as the environment, international human rights, economic development, racial reconciliation, and urban renewal. The New Evangelical Social Engagement maps this new religious terrain and spells out its significance.

After Evangelicalism

After Evangelicalism
Author: David P. Gushee
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1646980042

Named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year in 2020 by the Academy of Parish Clergy "Drawing on his own spiritual journey, David Gushee provides an incisive critique of American evangelicalism [and] offers a succinct yet deeply informed guide for post-evangelicals seeking to pursue Christ-honoring lives." —Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Calvin University Millions are getting lost in the evangelical maze: inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, racism, LGBTQ discrimination, male dominance, and Christian nationalism. They are now conscientious objectors, deconstructionists, perhaps even "none and done." As one of America's leading academics speaking to the issues of religion today, David Gushee offers a clear assessment and a new way forward for disillusioned post-evangelicals. Gushee starts by analyzing what went wrong with U.S. white evangelicalism in areas such as evangelical history and identity, biblicism, uncredible theologies, and the fundamentalist understandings of race, politics, and sexuality. Along the way, he proposes new ways of Christian believing and of listening to God and Jesus today. He helps post-evangelicals know how to belong and behave, going from where they are to a living relationship with Christ and an intellectually cogent and morally robust post-evangelical faith. He shows that they can have a principled way of understanding Scripture, a community of Christ's people, a healthy politics, and can repent and learn to listen to people on the margins. With a foreword from Brian McLaren, who says, “David Gushee is right: there is indeed life after evangelicalism,” this book offers an essential handbook for those looking for answers and affirmation of their journey into a future that is post-evangelical but still centered on Jesus. If you, too, are struggling, After Evangelicalism shows that it is possible to cut loose from evangelical Christianity and, more than that, it is necessary.

The Evangelicals You Don't Know

The Evangelicals You Don't Know
Author: Tom Krattenmaker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Evangelicalism
ISBN: 9780810895805

To many Americans, evangelical Christians have been the chief culprits in the divisiveness of our times. But in surprising and hopeful ways, a new generation of evangelicals is inventing how to be publicly and persuasively Christian without falling into the old stock roles and stoking the usual animosities. The Evangelicals You Don't Know introduces readers to these Christian innovators embodying this stereotype-busting, boundary-breaking inclusiveness, with each chapter offering insight for how we all, regardless of our own faith persuasion, can become part of this broadening new pursuit of the common good.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Author: Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1631495747

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

The Next Evangelicalism

The Next Evangelicalism
Author: Soong-Chan Rah
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2009-08-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830878033

Soong-Chan Rah calls the North American church to escape its Western cultural captivity and to embody a next evangelicalism that is diverse and multiethnic. This prophetic report casts a vision for a dynamic evangelicalism that fully embodies the cultural realities of the twenty-first century.

White Evangelical Racism

White Evangelical Racism
Author: Anthea Butler
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469661187

The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.