The Politics of Evangelical Identity

The Politics of Evangelical Identity

Author: Lydia Bean

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-12-13

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0691173702

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Drawing on her groundbreaking research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada -- two in Buffalo, New York, and two in Hamilton, Ontario -- Lydia Bean compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics incongregational settings.


The Politics of American Religious Identity

The Politics of American Religious Identity

Author: Kathleen Flake

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780807855010

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Between 1901 and 1907, a coalition of Protestant churches sought to expel newly elected Reed Smoot from the Senate for being a Mormon. Here, Kathleen Flake shows how the subsequent investigative hearing ultimately mediated a compromise between Progressive Era Protestantism and Mormonism and resolved the nation's long-standing "Mormon Problem."


Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life

Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life

Author: Sally K. Gallagher

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780813531793

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Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life provides a sociological and historical analysis of gender, family, and work among evangelical Protestants. In this innovative study, Sally Gallagher traces two lines of gender ideals--one of husbands' authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage--from the Puritans to the Promise Keepers into the lives of ordinary evangelicals today. Rather than simply reacting against or accommodating themselves to "secular society," Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on longstanding beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God. The author bases her arguments on an analysis of evangelical family advice literature, data from a large national survey and personal interviews with over 300 evangelicals nationwide. No other work in this area draws on such a range of data and methodological resources. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life establishes a standard for future research by locating the sources, strategies, and meaning of gender within evangelical Protestantism.


Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change

Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change

Author: Janelle S. Wong

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 161044874X

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As immigration from Asia and Latin America reshapes the demographic composition of the U.S., some analysts have anticipated the decline of conservative white evangelicals’ influence in politics. Yet, Donald Trump captured a larger share of the white evangelical vote in the 2016 election than any candidate in the previous four presidential elections. Why has the political clout of white evangelicals persisted at a time of increased racial and ethnic diversity? In Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change, political scientist Janelle Wong examines a new generation of Asian American and Latino evangelicals and offers an account of why demographic change has not contributed to a political realignment. Asian Americans and Latinos currently constitute 13 percent of evangelicals, and their churches are among the largest, fastest growing organizations in their communities. While evangelical identity is associated with conservative politics, Wong draws from national surveys and interviews to show that non-white evangelicals express political attitudes that are significantly less conservative than those of their white counterparts. Black, Asian American, and Latino evangelicals are much more likely to support policies such as expanded immigration rights, increased taxation of the wealthy, and government interventions to slow climate change. As Wong argues, non-white evangelicals’ experiences as members of racial or ethnic minority groups often lead them to adopt more progressive political views compared to their white counterparts. However, despite their growth in numbers, non-white evangelicals—particularly Asian Americans and Latinos—are concentrated outside of swing states, have lower levels of political participation than white evangelicals, and are less likely to be targeted by political campaigns. As a result, white evangelicals dominate the evangelical policy agenda and are overrepresented at the polls. Also, many white evangelicals have adopted even more conservative political views in response to rapid demographic change, perceiving, for example, that discrimination against Christians now rivals discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. Wong demonstrates that immigrant evangelicals are neither “natural” Republicans nor “natural” Democrats. By examining the changing demographics of the evangelical movement, Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change sheds light on an understudied constituency that has yet to find its political home.


Moral Minority

Moral Minority

Author: David R. Swartz

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-09-07

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0812207688

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In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong—evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way—organizationally and through political activism—to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.


Power, Politics and the Fragmentation of Evangelicalism

Power, Politics and the Fragmentation of Evangelicalism

Author: Kenneth J. Collins

Publisher: IVP Academic

Published: 2012-09-27

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 9780830839797

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Kenneth J. Collins tells the narrative history of the political and cultural fortunes of American evangelicalism from the late nineteenth century through the contemporary era. He traces the establishment of the evangelical enterprise in American culture and its influences on the political and social values of the American landscape throughout the twentieth century, as well as its fragmentation into competing ideological camps. Underlining how both sides of the liberal-conservative divide have diluted their message through political idioms, Collins suggests a way forward for evangelical political identity that avoids the pitfalls of fundamentalism and liberalism. Will American evangelicalism outlive its partisan history? As Kenneth Collins tells the story, there is reason to think so.


Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863

Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863

Author: Rita Roberts

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0807146137

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During the revolutionary age and in the early republic, when racial ideologies were evolving and slavery expanding, some northern blacks surprisingly came to identify very strongly with the American cause and to take pride in calling themselves American. In this intriguing study, Rita Roberts explores this phenomenon and offers an in-depth examination of the intellectual underpinnings of antebellum black activists. She shows how conversion to Christianity led a significant and influential population of northern blacks to view the developing American republic and their place in the new nation through the lens of evangelicalism. American identity, therefore, even the formation of an African ethnic community and later an African American identity, developed within the evangelical and republican ideals of the revolutionary age. Evangelical values, Roberts contends, exerted a strong influence on the strategies of northern black reformist activities, specifically abolition, anti-racism, and black community development. The activists and reformers' commitment to the United States and firm determination to make the country live up to its national principles hinged on their continued faith in the possibility of the collective transformation of all Americans. The people of the United States—both black and white—they believed, would become a new citizenry, distinct from any population in the world because of their commitment to the tenets of the Christian republican faith. Roberts explores the process by which a collective identity formed among northern free blacks and notes the ways in which ministers and other leaders established their African identity through an emphasis on shared oppression. She shows why, in spite of slavery's expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, northern blacks demonstrated more, not less, commitment to the nation. Roberts then examines the Christian influence on racial theories of some of the major abolitionist figures of the antebellum era, including Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and especially James McCune Smith, and reveals how activists' sense of their American identity waned with the intensity of American racism and the passage of laws that further protected slavery in the 1850s. But the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, she explains, renewed hope that America would soon become a free and equal nation. Impeccably researched, Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863 offers an innovative look at slavery, abolition, and African American history.


Still Evangelical?

Still Evangelical?

Author: Mark Labberton

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0830880429

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Evangelicalism in America has cracked. What defines the evangelical social and political vision—is it the gospel or is it culture? Edited by Mark Labberton, this collection of essays offers a diverse and provocative set of reflections from evangelical "insiders" who wrestle with the question of what it means to be evangelical in today's polarized climate.


Evangelicals and Identity Politics

Evangelicals and Identity Politics

Author: Jacob Alan Cook

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 870

ISBN-13:

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This project is an inquiry into evangelical identity, particularly the identity politics of white, American evangelicals as played out both within the broader evangelical stream and in public. I focus my study through the “world-view” concept that has been a key instrument for generating an evangelical identity by analyzing three of its most powerful expositors: Abraham Kuyper, Harold John Ockenga, and Richard J. Mouw. Each of these figures has operationalized a world-view concept vis-à-vis the evangelical identity (in Kuyper’s case, the “Calvinist” identity as paradigmatic of true, evangelical Protestantism) for cultural engagement and sociopolitical transformation. Their attempts to both define, galvanize, and limit membership in the movement and take their views public with thin, publicly-available expressions like “as an evangelical” and “the biblical world-view” has made these terms the stuff of an evangelical identity politics. To date, evangelical scholarship on the world-view concept has focused primarily on cataloging its intellectual resources and rendering it increasingly serviceable in the consolidation of evangelical identity—over against threatening alternative world-views as well as the perceived breakdown of traditional sources of moral authority. Along the way, the language of world-view has been used intentionally and explicitly in ways ranging from naïve to authoritarian. Thus, it will not do to fixate on the concept while allowing the impulse that generates it to escape scrutiny. The world-viewing impulse, I contend, drives its evangelical devotees to narrate human lives in this world (including their own) in ways that warp Christian identity as a personal, social, and theological reality. I offer several kinds of tests (psychological, sociological, and theological) that dispute the adequacy of the world-viewing concept to the cases under study themselves and that demonstrate the potential such concepts hold for deceiving the world-viewing person or community and for facilitating deleterious uses of social power. The scale of this thinking and the unquestioned normativity of the world-viewing subject, I maintain, are functions of the racial logic (viz. whiteness) that pervades power structures in the modern West. When the highly-specified world-view of this or that white evangelical is allowed to pass as the logical extension of the Bible—synced up with God’s intended order for creation and merely identifying the moral structures of reality itself—the powerful world-viewer evades responsibility for what are, in fact, their own judgments. Furthermore, the typical way of framing these matters as epistemological in nature participates in a more fundamental problem: denying humans’ creatureliness and, thus, rejecting the manner of knowing and relating that is appropriate to humans as God’s creatures. Ultimately, in conversation with the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I submit that proper, creaturely knowing is characterized by a sociality that encourages us to renounce our false world-view security and to hear the word of God in Christ calling us to discover others and ourselves in encounters powered by God’s gift of faith.