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.

In Search of Ancient Roots. The Christian past and the evangelical identity crisis

SummaryIn view of the fact that some North-American evangelical theologians have converted to supposedly more traditional Christian churches, Stewart calls on evangelical Christians to rediscover their historical roots and to overcome the historical oblivion. He proclaims: ‘Evangelical Protestantism is not the problem; evangelical Protestantism that has severed its roots in early Christianity is a problem.’RésuméConstatant que bien des théologiens évangéliques nordaméricains se tournent vers des Églises chrétiennes soidisant plus traditionnelles, à cause de leurs doutes sur l’identité évangélique, Stewart appelle les chrétiens évangéliques à redécouvrir leurs racines. Il soutient la thèse selon laquelle « le protestantisme évangélique n’est pas le problème ; le vrai problème réside dans le fait que le protestantisme évangélique a rompu avec le christianisme primitif ».ZusammenfassungAngesichts von Konversionen nordamerikanischer Evangelikaler zu vermeintlich traditionsreicheren christlichen Kirchen sowie von Zweifeln an der evangelikalen Identität zeigt Stewart hier facettenreich das Verhältnis des Evangelikalismus zur, vor allem frühchristlichen, Geschichte auf. Er fordert die Evangelikalen dazu auf, die eigene Geschichtsvergessenheit zu überwinden.

Altar Encounters

This chapter examines Latinx religious identities through the lens of change and continuity. For evangelicals, the experience of religious conversion becomes a marker of evangelical identity. Some Catholics, too, have experiences of religious renewal which closely approximate religious conversion. For evangelicals, conversion experiences are closely linked to rupturing with the past. For Catholics, religious renewal is a way to solidify ties to the past, both religious and ethnic. Essentially, Catholics have a stronger sense of continuity with the past and evangelicals tend to emphasize discontinuity with the past. Ultimately, the author addresses the dilemma of how experiences of religious renewal and religious change relate to ethnic identity maintenance. Understandings of the past matter for ethnic identity because they structure the collective memories that people have at their disposal to bolster a sense of shared history. Conversion experiences also shape how people understand themselves in relation to ethnic spaces.

Do People in Conservative States Really Watch More Porn? A Hierarchical Analysis

Recent studies have found that state-level religious and political conservatism is positively associated with various aggregate indicators of interest in pornography. Such studies have been limited, however, in that they either did not include data measuring actual consumption patterns and/or did not include data on individuals (risking the ecological fallacy). This study overcomes both limitations by incorporating state-level data with individual-level data and a measure of pornography consumption from a large nationally representative survey. Hierarchical linear regression analyses show that, in the main, state-level religious and political characteristics do not predict individual-level pornography consumption, and individual-level religiosity and political conservatism predict less recent pornography consumption. However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption. These findings thus provide more nuanced support for previous research linking religious and political conservatism with greater pornography consumption.

Evangelical Awakening: Becoming Protestant in the Arab Renaissance

Chapter 1 considers what it meant to become Protestant in the sectarian landscape of nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria in a period of widespread socio-cultural and political transformation. It compares and contrasts American missionary and Syrian Protestant views of evangelical identity and religious conversion as it examines Protestant conversion accounts written after 1860, including an account by the renowned scholar Butrus al-Bustani. Drawing upon shared values of literacy, Bible reading, and evangelistic printing, these narratives demonstrate how Syrian and American Protestants upheld the printed word as a cultural force, a concept that fit with the intellectual currents of the Nahda in the late Ottoman period. Whereas traditional studies of this literary renaissance characterize it as a secular movement, Syrian Protestants tell a story of nahdawi identity entwined with evangelical commitments.

Conclusion

A distinctive Irish experience of ministerial education and the commitment of Presbyterians in Ireland to the Union with Great Britain shaped a conservative response to modern criticism. There were a small number of ‘believing critics’ who sought accommodation with aspects of modern criticism, though they maintained their evangelical identity and there was no sustained opposition to them before 1914. Conservatism was also a product of transatlantic evangelicalism, and the significance of this tradition contributed to the exoneration of the ‘modernist’ Davey in 1927. All involved in the trial placed great emphasis on personal religious experience, though they understood experience in different ways. It is suggested that by the end of the century the confessional element in Irish Presbyterianism had been subsumed by non-denominational evangelical religion, the religious equivalent of the submergence of a distinctive Presbyterian politics into a general unionism.