Well into The Age of Evangelicalism, when charting the 1990s, Steven Miller attributes the success of the "emerging church" to its postmodern fusion of a "prophet's moral gravitas with the hipster's inquisitive playfulness." Inspired by Brian McLaren, "emergents" shunned the church establishment with their openness to God's influence in "unexpected places," embraced the dissonance of a post-Christian age by innovating a "generous orthodoxy" that rolled with the times, and traded dead certainties for life-giving curiosity and dialogue. "Doesn't the religious community see that the world is changing?" McLaren queried. "Doesn't it have anything fresh and incisive to say? Isn't it even asking any new questions?" Miller's mantra is similar to McLaren's. Testing the establishment in religious history, he identifies evangelicalism's influence in unexpected places, invites a generous reading of its past as synergistic with the times, trades tired narratives for life-giving curiosities, and begs scholars for fresh inquiry of recent days. He writes with both gravitas and playfulness, with deep seriousness about America's born-again dispensation and an energizing wit that entices us to follow along. The result of Miller's sparkling skill is a short but enthralling book which, like McLaren's earliest texts, will be seen as conversation-shifting.
On what grounds do the shifts occur? Besides its artistry, Miller's book stands out for its assertion that we are on the cusp of something different. In this immediate sense, his is a provocation for today. As indicated by his title, Miller captures a moment in the life of evangelicalism and American society that started around 1972, closed around 2012, and peaked with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. During this forty-year stretch, he argues, "born-again Christianity provided alternately a language, a medium, and a foil by which millions of Americans came to terms with political and cultural changes." Not wanting to fuel mass media's "cycle of obsession" in which the God factor is repeatedly pronounced dead, Miller shies away from declaring evangelicalism's day in the sun finished. In the wake of President Obama's reelection, he writes, evidence did suggest that "the Age of Evangelicalism was winding down." The fact that neither Obama nor his rival "could muster a faith story that fit comfortably within an evangelical narrative" illustrated this. But Miller also admits that it's unclear whether evangelicalism is merely "waving" or truly "drowning" in churning political waters. Always looking to remake things, surely evangelicalism itself will, yet once more, be "born again." Still, while hedging as good historians do, Miller doesn't shy away altogether from passing judgment; at a minimum, he asserts, we must acknowledge that today's evangelicalism is far from the commanding political and cultural force that it was c.1980-2000.
Careful in his punditry, Miller's bolder in calling for a new day in the study of evangelicalism. He suggests what this new day might look like by using six snappy chapters to describe what launched this movement to its apex. Anyone who has read about the Religious Right will be familiar with some of his emphases. Roe v. Wade, "The Year of the Evangelical," Jerry Falwell, Randall Terry: these signposts for conservative reaction lend explanatory power to Miller's tale of an ascendant evangelicalism, as they should. Yet by and large, they are relatively minor dimensions of a story that's more textured than anything we've seen before. With the benefit of fuller hindsight, Miller ably connects these familiars to lesser-knowns, people and concerns that historians are just now processing. Marabel Morgan, Karl Rove, and Michael Geron; faith-based initiatives, Tea Partiers, homeschools: these and other once-obscured agents occupy key terrain in Miller's fuller history of evangelicalism's right-wing revolution.
And crucially, Miller's richer account gives equal billing to evangelicalism's other political sides. Seizing on the recent flourish in the study of the evangelical Left, he integrates those progressives who long resisted popular assumptions that right-wing warriors set the terms of all evangelical engagement. As he insists, evangelical influence "emerged not solely from the conservative end of the born-again spectrum, but rather from the interplay of its left and right factions, even while the latter almost always maintained a decided upper hand." He proves this by weaving Jim Wallis' allies through the heart of his story. Neither left behind in the 1970s nor stilled by the commanding presence of the 1990s Right, Wallis' Left, Miller shows, always remained vibrant and vocal in its call for a different born-againism. Miller also recovers the center—that tested terrain between Wallis and Rove where most citizens reside. In one of his book's most refreshing retakes, he foregrounds politicos who moved right-to-left, vice-versa, or never found sure footing on either side.
The life of Congressman John Anderson, brushed over by historians but profiled by Miller, is illuminating in this regard. A lawyer with experience in the Foreign Service before he ran for office, he served ten terms as a U.S. Representative from Illinois. In the early 1970s, the conservative Republican churchgoer celebrated the "new evangelical majority in American religion" and chided liberals for losing the fight. "Well, things have changed," Anderson boasted to the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals. Now they are the 'kooks'—and we are the 'beautiful people.'" Ten years later he railed against another foe. Disillusioned by his people's drift to a hard Right, liberalized by debates over Vietnam, Watergate, and abortion, Anderson ran as a moderate Republican, then as an Independent, and stumped against co-religionists he once counted among the beautiful. At a National Religious Broadcasters meeting in 1980 he charged, "The political marriage of the Moral Majority and the New Right is not ordained in heaven." Anderson lost, miserably, but pressed on; by 2008 he identified as liberal Democratic and lent Barack Obama a helping hand.
Evangelicals were therefore a diverse and vigorous lot, animated against themselves and their enemies but unquestionably effective in imposing their wishes on the body politic; yet they were still more than this. Miller's call for a new scholarly appraisal of politics is linked to a re-reading of popular culture, and his cheeky insistence that evangelicals be seen as America's "zeitgeist-keepers" rather than its outliers. With encyclopedic breadth and journalistic instinct for the quirky and profound, Miller guides his reader through the myriad fads that married born-again Christianity to the free-for-alls of advanced capitalism. Created in the media-obsessed 1970s, "evangelical chic" thrived for decades, generating campy "how to" guides for everything from bettering sex to selling makeup, combating Satanism to doing what Jesus would do. Many Americans interpreted this phenomenon as a sign of theocratic takeover. As Miller recounts, the "evangelicalism scare of the Eighties" (repeated in the mid-2000s) spawned its own culture industry, typified in dystopic books like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, movies like Footloose (1984), and the brash TV programming of Phil Donahue. But regardless of whether they registered as trendy or threat, evangelicals commanded the airwaves, and set the standards by which others wanted or sought not to live.
They also set the standards by which others wanted or sought not to reason. Miller's romp through born-again popular culture is accompanied by close inspection of developments that placed evangelical-inflected concepts and evangelical-friendly thinkers in the limelight. Evangelicalism's "impressive amount of sway" in the post-1960s, he submits, was evident in the way it forced intellectuals to ponder the place of faith in the postmodern public square. "Practitioners of born-again faith," "detractors," and "bemused bystanders" all wrestled with the broad significance of the evangelical awakening, bombarding a reading public in the process.
Among the practitioners, of course, was Francis Schaeffer, who turned the aesthetics of secular art into conservative apologia. The list of detractors included Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti, who used his Ivy League post to excoriate "'tax-exempt Savonarolas'" (Christian Rightists) and help liberal advocates stem the parochial and dangerous (as they saw it) thinking of the Schaeffer crowd.
From the pens of Richard John Neuhaus, James Davison Hunter, and Robert Bellah came defining concepts ("naked public square," "culture war," "Sheilaism") that explained current trends in fresh sociologies that defied simplistic theories of secularization. Then there were the "thoughtful evangelicals" who formed the "conscience wing of modern American evangelicalism" during the 1990s. Ensconced in influential academic institutions, a number of them (Mark Noll, George Marsden, et al.) used funding from the Lilly and Pew Foundations to produce first-rate scholarship that "countered evangelical shibboleths" while also forcing American humanists and social scientists to "take account of evangelicalism." Besides producing their own treatises, these scholars also supported collective publishing efforts such as Books & Culture, all in an attempt to awaken and affix evangelicalism to major, mainstream intellectual currents.
All of which suggests Miller's third conversation-shifting provocation. Here the pundit and scholar becomes cultural critic eager to advance a new schema for understanding evangelicalism's relationship to contemporary society. Miller says it's time for evangelicals and students of evangelicalism to accept that neither they nor their subject can be framed as a "narrow subculture." "Many self-described evangelicals," he bemoans, "have not conceded their status as something other than an oppressed or marginalized minority." There are reasons for this, of course, tied to evangelicals' desire to "be in but not of the world," yet Miller deftly shows that the logic of outsider status and spirit of the persecuted doesn't ring true. Enabled by post-1960s "religious diversity," which "made born-again faith … an avowed identity," evangelicals could wear the "born again" label confidently, and convince many of their fellow Americans to assume it too. And "secularism, or something akin to it," didn't diminish evangelicalism's influence, but rather dispersed and increased it. To students of evangelicalism, Miller says enough of "evaluating American evangelicalism on its own, self-limiting terms," and enough of portraying it as "still recovering from its Scopes Trial-era nadir" and in need of "excessive scholarly empathy." The colorful facts cited in his book demand a fresh approach in which "the fruits of evangelical influence" are studied as earnestly as the "root of it," and the "footprint" of evangelicalism is seen as immense and residing "at the very center of recent American history." At the same time, Miller tackles the narrow-mindedness of yet a third readership, comprising those who have long identified evangelicalism as "a zealous fifth column about which to sound the alarm." Like it or not, he charges, it's time to stop seeing evangelicals as strange and, unconstructively, as a foreign "threat to American values." Quite the contrary, he says: between 1972 and 2012, normal "American values" were theirs to define. It was up to others to figure out how to inhabit this born-again world.
And it's up to the rest of us to figure out what to make of the born-again past and shifting future that Miller brilliantly, pleasingly unpacks in his text. The Age of Evangelicalism certainly warrants the rethinking that it asks of us. And perhaps a bit more questioning. Though meant to be functional, Miller's naming of an "Age" is vulnerable to nitpicking. In his recently acclaimed book Age of Fracture, Daniel T. Rodgers writes of the last quarter of the 20th century as an aggregate defined by disaggregation; of an epoch when American imaginations of self and society represented something very different from what had come before. In this milieu, division not unity prevailed, and public intellectuals started thinking less about "society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice." Meanwhile, people bowled alone.[1]
Evangelicals clearly benefitted from this fragmentation, and used it to assert their order of personal proclamation and practice. Yet disaggregation constantly worked against them as well. At every gesture toward consolidated influence they faced centrifugal forces within, which turned evangelical subsets into distinct subcultures, one epoch into many. Even as he effectively attends to some of this scattering within evangelicalism, Miller's story rests principally on the experiences of white middle-class constituents, most at home in Colorado Springs, Charlotte, and Cobb County, whose confidence to speak loudly and shape an era was borne of the Cold War boom and all the cultural, political, and economic assertions it allowed. But what about the non-white born-again Americans of South Central Los Angeles or working-class evangelicals of Cleveland, whose "Age" had not yet come or had stalled by 1980 or 2000? Or the immigrant evangelical from Latin America whose "Age" was dawning, not ending, in 2012?
Miller's reading of Evangelicalism's "Age" also leans on a sense of timing dictated by homegrown politics. All logical and compelling, of course, for Miller's is meant to be (and is!) a definitive history of one of the most impactful political movements in this nation's history. Yet does the 40-year cycle offered here reduce too much of evangelicalism's clout to political will, and synchronize too many of its give-and-takes to Washington time? Recent studies of evangelicalism have tended to focus on politics in part as a way to catch the attention of skeptics who might otherwise write it off as marginal. Yet evangelicalism's staying power (as Miller would agree) also derives from its ability to adjust, readjust, and constantly carve out fresh creases of influence. If plagued by ideological rigidity recently, suggesting a different destiny in U.S. political culture, American evangelicalism has managed to reorient itself to global markets and ministry, harness the energy from the bounce-back of entrepreneurialism and outreach that these enterprises have produced, and tune its desires for influence to cities in Asia, Africa, and South America. Born-againism may not be as prevalent inside the Beltway as it once was, but thanks to processes of exchange that began around 1972 and continued cresting in 2012, it is alive and well beyond U.S. borders. Of this subtler but ultimately more expansive "Age of Evangelicalism" one might still apply Alan Wolfe's early-2000s charge, directed to Americans, that we—as in a global we—"are all evangelicals now."
Still, this parting word reinforces Miller's fundamental takeaway, which he delivers with exceptional authority and vivid detail. Despite insiders' claims of marginalization and detractors' wish for it to disappear, and regardless of what we as interested observers anticipate for its future in Washington, American evangelicalism is neither broken and beleaguered nor exotic and spent. It is very much in and of a world it has so very much helped create.
Darren Dochuk is associate professor of history and associate professor in the humanities in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton).
1. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Belknap Press/Harvard Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 3; 4-5.
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