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.

Spirit in the Air

This chapter traces out the long and complex relationship between Holiness-Pentecostals and technology, innovation, and mass media. One of the most significant religious phenomena of the 1980s was the emergence, or at least widespread public awareness, of the electronic church. Indeed, in 1987, four of the most-watched religious programs on television were hosted by southern Pentecostals. In coming years, African American Word of Faith and Pentecostal ministers like T. D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar would join the ranks of these highly visible religious stars. The link between Holiness and Pentecostal faith and tech savviness was not accidental. Pentecostals have used these resources to spread the movement. While media-driven Pentecostalism made enormous headway in the Global South, it also gained ground in other unlikely places as well. Pentecostal ministers outside the states proved just as adept at using radio, TV, and, later, social media to champion the cause.

Digital Religion and Media Economics: Concentration and Convergence in the Electronic Church

The economics that push every medium toward market concentration have historically done likewise to every religious medium. “Online religion” is now, in its turn, colonized by an “electronic church” industry that, due to media deregulation, is dominated by religious media conglomerates—through whom North Americans are most likely to engage in digital religion. The largest conglomerate alone generates 110 million computer sessions and 79 million mobile sessions per month. This study reviews the economics of media concentration and applications to religious media, surveys the digital footprint of the institutional electronic church, and advocates integration of media practices into Digital Religion Studies.

The Theology of E. W. Kenyon: Plain Heresy or Within the Boundaries of Pentecostal-Charismatic "Orthodoxy"?

Essek William Kenyon (1867-1948) is a figure not readily identified by students of American religious history, and yet his influence on the twentieth-century religious history (particularly its Pentecostal and Charismatic expressions) is profound....Although Kenyon himself was never a Pentecostal, his influence on this segment of Christendom is extensive. Indeed, the earliest and most profound split among Pentecostals came as the result of William Durham's sermons on "the Finished Work of Christ"teachings that he apparently had received from Kenyon....Kenyon's writings have been widely plagiarized, thus spreading his teachings, if not his name, to millions worldwide. This last trend is especially evident in the independent Charismatic movement (led by Kenneth E. Hagin), whose entire doctrinal framework has been lifted from Kenyon without acknowledgement. Through its virtual domination of the electronic church and the thousands of graduates of its Bible training schools, the independent Charismatic movement has helped to spread Kenyon's influence on an ever-widening scale.