Evangelical Worship

Almost invariably, media stories with the word evangelical in their headlines are accompanied by a familiar stock photo: a mass of middle-class worshippers with eyes closed, faces tilted upward, and hands raised to the sky. Yet, despite the fact that worship has become symbolic of evangelicalism’s identity in the twenty-first century, it remains an understudied locus of academic inquiry. Historians of American evangelicalism tend to define the movement by its political entanglements (the “rise of the religious Right”), and academic trajectories (the formation of the “evangelical mind”), not its ecclesial practices. Theological scholars frequently dismiss evangelical worship as a reiteration of nineteenth-century revivalism or a derivative imitation of secular entertainment (three Christian rock songs and a spiritual TED talk). But by failing to engage this worship seriously, we miss vital insights into a form of Protestantism that exerts widespread influence in the United States and around the world. Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic models a new way forward. Drawing together insights from American religious history and liturgical studies, and putting both in conversation with ethnographic fieldwork in seven congregations, this book argues that corporate worship is not a peripheral “extra” tacked onto a fully formed spiritual/political/cultural movement, but rather the crucible through which congregations forge and negotiate the contours of evangelicalism’s contested theological identity.

Introduction

The introduction explains why corporate worship is central to evangelical identity. It sets the book in historical and cultural context and frames the study it in relationship recent scholarship on contemporary American evangelicalism. The author introduces the seven ethnographic case studies at the heart of the book, describing how each congregation represents a key “tile” or type of evangelical worship in the American mosaic. After delineating the scope and limitations of the study, the chapter details the main argument of the book: worship is the vehicle through which congregations express their theological identity by negotiating the three paradoxes of constancy and change, consensus and contestation, and sameness and difference.

Amway as Neoliberal Religious Tradition

Why do people desire their own continued oppression under neoliberalism? This essay seeks an answer to this confounding question through analysis of the Amway organization, an American multi-level-marketing (MLM) company that rose to a multi-billion dollar value in the 1980s and 90s. My argument is that Amway serves as a prime case study for the relation between neoliberalism and religious practices––people desire their continued oppression under neoliberalism in part because neoliberalism bears meaning at the level of culture and religion. What sets Amway apart from other MLMs, and makes Amway a prime case study for neoliberalism and religious practices, is its amalgamation of neoliberal ideology with ideas and trends from American evangelicalism, to the extent that it serves as a kind of neoliberal religious tradition. As this amalgamation demonstrates, people may defend neoliberalism with a similar fervor as defending cultural or religious traditions. The conclusion explores the possibility of a decolonial American evangelicalism, which would seek options for broadening the horizons of American evangelicalism beyond the relationship to neoliberalism and the possibility of a critical theology robust enough to thoughtfully critique neoliberalism. In pursuit of this thesis, the essay utilizes a theoretical framework guided by the contributions of scholars including Wendy Brown, Walter Benjamin, Olivier Roy, Walter Mignolo, and Carl Raschke in order to analyze Amway through the lens of contemporary political theories of neoliberalism.

The New Calvinism

This chapter looks at the origins and distinguishing features of the stream of American evangelicalism that has come to be known as New Calvinism. New Calvinism emerged at the end of the twentieth century among evangelical Christians frustrated by the perceived pragmatism and doctrinal shallowness of many evangelical churches. It is classically evangelical in its theology and preaching, eager to build coalitions across denominational lines (in particular, among Baptists and Presbyterians), founded on a selective appropriation of Reformed doctrine (especially the Reformed doctrines of God and soteriology) and committed to a complementarian view of gender roles. However, the New Calvinism’s most distinctive features are its energetic expansion into new geographical and denominational spaces and its cultivation of a unique form of revivalism and affective spirituality drawn from the writings of Puritans like John Owen and Jonathan Edwards.

Producing the Christian Right: Conservative Evangelicalism, Representation, and the Recent Religious Past

This essay explores how conservative evangelical Protestants have been represented by both sociologists and journalists of American religion through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right” beginning in the late 1970s. By exploring both popular and academic analyses of conservative Protestantism as understood through terms such as “the Christian Right” and “the Electronic Church”, one is able to identify a set of intellectual assumptions that characterize the study of American evangelicalism and politics in the recent past. In particular, this essay suggests that studies of conservative evangelicalism as understood through “the rise of the Christian Right” tend to reveal as much about their interpreters as they do their respective evangelical subjects. The essay first identifies what these barriers and limitations are by exploring the social scientific literature on conservative evangelicalism at the time. It then foregrounds news reports and academic studies of “the Christian Right” in order to connect journalistic and academic inquiries of the conservative Protestant to the emergence of the evangelical. It then suggests a number of historical and methodological avenues for future research on American evangelicalism and politics that foreground self-reflexivity, interdisciplinarity, and the close reading of conservative texts.

Revisiting the Scopes Trial: Young-Earth Creationism, Creation Science, and the Evangelical Denial of Climate Change

In the century since the Scopes Trial, one of the most influential dogmas to shape American evangelicalism has been that of young-earth creationism. This article explains why, with its arm of “creation science,” young-earth creationism is a significant factor in evangelicals’ widespread denial of anthropogenic climate change. Young-earth creationism has become closely intertwined with doctrines such as the Bible’s divine authority and the Imago Dei, as well as with social issues such as abortion and euthanasia. Addressing this aspect of the environmental crisis among evangelicals will require a re-orientation of biblical authority so as to approach social issues through a hermeneutic that is able to acknowledge the reality and imminent threat of climate change.