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.

Historical Context

This chapter presents a historical account that helps us to understand Latin America’s religious present. Latin American religious history gives us a better understanding of the Latin American cultural background. Western religious traditions (Catholicism, Protestantism, secularism, evangelism) came to Latin American with different colonial powers: Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. However, Latin America’s religious history also shows the agency of Latin American peoples, the ability to create and recreate practices and locations for religion in the public sphere, as we can find Native and Afro traditions like Umbanda and Santería. The agency of the people, and the influence of religious figures in the public realm, have been part of the Latin American religious experience.

Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America

ABSTRACT What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.

Battle for the Soul of a City: John Roach Straton, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York, 1922–1935

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a defining moment for New York in the 1920s and one of the most significant theological battles in the city's history, as key doctrines of the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the bodily resurrection of Christ were debated in the mainstream as well as the religious press. The principal figures in the controversy were John Roach Straton and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two prominent clerics whose intellectual and oratorical confrontation showed just how deep this nationwide religious divide had become. Straton and Fosdick used their New York pulpits as public platforms to articulate their opposing theological visions and to justify them as the correct expression of historic Christianity in the present. In doing so, they made the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy very much a New York story, remapping the city's Protestant evangelical culture and reorienting one of the most important episodes in American religious history. The aftermath of the conflict, however, reveals that the lines between “fundamentalist” and “modernist” as distinct categories of religious experience became blurred as each embraced elements of the other. By 1935, both fundamentalists and modernists in New York City had been transformed, just as they had transformed the city.

Continuing Revelation and Institutionalization: Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charismatic Leadership in Antebellum America

Nineteenth-century North American religious history is filled with divinely inspired people who received and recorded new revelations. This article presents Joseph Smith Jr and Ralph Waldo Emerson as charismatic prophets who promoted the idea of continuing revelation. Drawing on Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority, it will contrast their forms of new sacred writing with one another to show how both had experienced encounters with the divine. The second part will then explore how different conceptualizations of revelation led to opposing concepts of religious authority, with consequences for the possibility of institution-building processes. While Smith would reify revelation in hierarchy, Emerson eventually promoted extreme spiritual individualization by rejecting the idea of an exclusive institution as the centre of revelatory authority.

The psychic life of consumer power: Judith Butler, Ernest Dichter, the American marketing reception of Freud, and the rituals of consuming religion

First, a close reading of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power underscores the ways in which Butler’s account of power liquidates issues of political economy and problematically ontologizes Freudianism as a kind of first philosophy of the subject. Second, drawing largely from secondary sources, the religious studies reader is introduced to the life and work of Ernest Dicther, the father of motivational research, an influential American mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic school of marketing that Freudianized marketing discourse and transformed it into the present day. Third, drawing from primary sources in Dichter’s published archive, a comparative reading of Butler and Dichter reveals strong points of confluence around the psychology and performativity of (consumer) ritual, concomitantly highlighting scholars’ hidden participation in the American religious history Kathryn Lofton figures according to the terms of ‘consuming religion’.

Introduction

The introduction defines the scope of the book, its position in existing literature on African American religious history, and its sources and subjects for studying religion and race through African American jazz musicians. It defines the concept of race representation as it operates throughout the book, offers an overview of the consumer challenge to cultivating Christian race representatives, and discusses popular black religious representation in various forms of entertainment in the twentieth century. The introduction discusses the organization of the book: part 1, “Representations of Religion and Race,” and part 2, “Missions and Legacies.” Part 1 presents thematic studies of African American religious history through jazz artistry. Part 2 includes close studies of individual religious expression through the work of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, and a consideration of the posthumous legacies of these musicians. The introduction also outlines the chapter structure of the book and previews key takeaways for understanding Afro-Protestantism through artistic expression and religious culture in the conclusion.