American Evangelicalism in Hypermodernity

The concluding chapter takes stock of what the preceding argument entails for American Evangelicalism today. It begins with evaluations from Evangelical leaders themselves about the state and health, or lack thereof, of Evangelicalism in the United States. It then addresses two frequently asked questions: “What’s new about the New Calvinism?” and “What are the boundaries of the Evangelical field?” Not able to identify any definitive boundaries, the chapter moves on to an exploration of what Evangelicalism in the United States centers on (the Bible? Jesus? The Gospel? Mission? Politics?). As with boundaries, it is argued this religious tradition lacks any coherent, agreed-upon, substantive center. American Evangelicalism is increasingly fragmented and incoherent. The chapter—and the book—ends by suggesting a new vision of secularization not as declining belief or practice but as dissolution or “cultural entropy,” a process by which an entire religious cultural system falls apart.

Background, Clarifications, and Overview

This introductory chapter opens with a brief summary of the big picture. It then establishes the existence of a New Calvinist movement in the United States since the turn of the millennium while acknowledging that the reality of the movement is itself a part of the puzzle. The chapter then provides an overview of the empirical data collected for this book, which includes participant observation at three (wildly popular) New Calvinist megachurches across the country, personal interviews with seventy-five Evangelical leaders (including New Calvinists and their religious challengers), and content analysis of printed and online materials, as well as how these data were analyzed. This chapter includes a section that responds to five common misconceptions about the nature and approach of this project. It ends with a summary of the narrative arc of the rest of the book, broken down by chapters.

Demonstration of the Model, Part I

Chapter 5 presents Part I of a field-theoretic model of religious strength, focusing on the most powerful social mechanisms and ecological factors that precipitated the rise of the New Calvinist movement. The author describes three aspects of the American cultural backdrop along with three discursive opportunities, which together facilitated the onset of contention in the American Evangelical field. The chapter maps the correspondence between Evangelical leaders’ positions in the field and their corresponding religious dispositions. Additional precipitating factors are identified. The chapter ends by empirically establishing the “rules of the game,” which are the elements of the Bebbington Quadrilateral (i.e., crucicentrism, biblicism, activism, and conversionism), to which is added the more all-encompassing field rule of “the Gospel,” broadly defined. These rules are understood as endogenous to the social system such that the battle over American Evangelicalism is a battle with and over these rules.

The Tribes and Their Comparative Strengths

Chapter 3 identifies and details the other tribes of American Evangelicalism against which the Reformed resurgence is said to be resurging. These are mainstream American Evangelicalism, neo-Anabaptist Evangelicalism, and progressive or Emergent Evangelicalism. Next, this chapter clarifies a possible confusion about how these three alternatives and the New Calvinism relate to the Emerging Church, and then it briefly acknowledges some intermixing and blurring between these four tribes. The latter half of the chapter employs the limited data available to address these tribes’ comparative sizes and sociological strengths. The findings suggest that the New Calvinism enjoys strength and prominence disproportionate to its numerical following and sets the stage for an explanatory model of institutional religious strength that relies more on the strategic and conflictual actions of religious leaders to gain symbolic power in and over their field than on simple additive growth.

Demonstration of the Model, Part II

Chapter 6 presents Part II of a field-theoretic model of religious strength, demonstrating the game-like contest and battle in the American Evangelical field, which created and fortified the New Calvinist movement. The chapter begins by showing multiple ways New Calvinist leaders strategically positioned themselves in relation to their field competitors to secure a “competitive advantage” (especially among university-educated young people) over other expressions of Evangelical Christianity. The analysis then shifts from strategy to gatekeeping and outright conflict, including in-depth accounts of two very public controversies: those regarding Rob Bell and World Vision-USA. The author further highlights the issues of charismatic authority and regional contextualization. In total, this chapter demonstrates the field-theoretic model of religious strength by showing how the Reformed resurgence is significantly a relationally constructed phenomenon, enjoying qualitative institutional vitality which has been fought for and won by Christian leaders’ strategic and conflictual actions.

A Field-Theoretic Model of Religious Strength

Chapter 4 develops a field-theoretic model of religious strength. It starts by revisiting the question of religious strength vis-à-vis the secularization thesis, and then it lays out the five leading theoretical frameworks currently on offer in the sociology of religion for making sense of religious vitality. Next, this chapter critically reviews each of these theories, drawing out the “nugget of truth” in each but finally showing how each is ill-suited, or at least incomplete, for explaining the New Calvinist movement sociologically. What each framework gets right is integrated into a new approach to religious strength based on Fligstein and McAdam’s strategic action field theory. After working through some “nuts and bolts” of this theory, the chapter concludes with a systematization of the theory/model, in which seventeen general social mechanisms are specified as causes that together produced the Reformed resurgence.

Institutions, Leaders, and Features of the New Calvinist Movement

Chapter 2 provides a basic, introductory description of the New Calvinism. The chapter begins with short descriptions of the three New Calvinist megachurches at which I conducted participant observation, followed by a number of other key organizations, institutions, conferences, networks, and religious leaders constituting the Reformed resurgence. It then describes the beliefs and convictions which taken together delineate the New Calvinism within the broader landscape of Evangelicalism in the United States, including a Calvinistic view of salvation, traditional complementarian views of men and women, and social conservatism. The chapter addresses several other descriptive and analytic concerns. Altogether, this chapter offers a succinct descriptive introduction to the major organizations, networks, conferences, leaders, doctrines, convictions, and features of the New Calvinist movement.