Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right

Abstract

All researched topics benefit from the maturation of their field, and the study of American evangelicalism is no exception. Those of us who have been in the business of studying religion in American culture long enough may recall the seeming “discovery” of American evangelicals in the mid-1970s—by the media if not by scholars—and the veritable rush to figure out from whence they came and why. Thankfully, there has been of late a leveling of the adrenaline, and the study of American (and international) evangelicalism has benefitted from more level-headed, historically and sociologically minded studies. Axel Schäfer's work is one such study. After first examining the various theories that have been popular in analyzing the rise of American evangelicalism since the 1970s—modernization, functionalism, competitiveness, cognitive resilience, and secularization—and exploring how each falls short, Schäfer takes the reader back in time, to the breaking away from fundamentalism by evangelicals who sought to be more integrated (and accepted) in post–World War II American society. His primary argument is that, through three different phases (the post–World War II era, the 1960s, and the 1980s, each covered in a separate chapter), American evangelicalism evolved in a virtual Hegelian mode (my words, not his) of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis with its former incarnation but also in relation (but not necessarily reaction) to the broader American culture.