American Evangelicals and the 1960sAxel R.Schäfer, Editor. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

Abstract

American Evangelicals and the 1960s Axel R. Schafer, Editor. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.American Evangelicals seeks to complexify and problematize the reductionist trend in interpreting the rise of the evangelicalism in the United States as a reaction to the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s or what the authors refer to as the backlash theory. In a similar vein as Philip Jenkins's Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (2006) and Mark Noll's insightful body of work on American Evangelicalism, this text fluidly investigates elements in and around the long (pre-1960s and into the 1970s) that, taken together, provide alternative understandings of this extremely complex socio-historical phenomenon.American Evangelicals is divided into three different parts with three to four essays per section. The Introduction, it should be noted, was written by the late Paul S. Boyer and represents the distillation of a lifetime of scholarship. The first section, Talkin 'Bout a Revolution? Evangelicals in 1960s Society and Culture examines the relationships Evangelicals had with oil, the language of the 1960s, and race and gender issues. Part Two, Raging Against Leviathan? Evangelicals and the Liberal State explores the interplay between Evangelicalism and the prison system, the Constitution/Supreme Court, public funding of religious agencies, and Vietnam. The final section, Taking it to the Streets? New Perspectives on Evangelical Mobilization looks at Evangelical reactions to Vatican II, engagement with European missions, and the Evangelical Left's move from personal to social responsibility. Representative and nuanced in its scope, the text is alternatively surprising and thought-provoking.One of the more outstanding contributions to the volume is Darren Dochuk's Prairie Fire: The New Evangelicalism and the Politics of Oil, Money, and Moral Geography. In his chapter, he presents the 1960s as the crucial decade during which the organizational ties between evangelicals and corporate America were cemented and the religious language that legitimized and spiritualized corporate (petro-)capitalism emerged (8). His retrospective analysis provides a basis for understanding the link between economic developments in the 1960s and the rise of Reaganomics and the Texas/Bush nexus. Moreover, he illustrates how big oil courted Billy Graham, perhaps the defining evangelical figure of the last four decades. …