Evangelicalism as a Social Movement

Abstract

Investigations of American evangelicalism can be divided into two broad groups: those that focus on the personal, experiential, and emotional techniques and effects of evangelicalism as a set of practices of selfhood; and those that focus on the mobilizing and coalition‐building techniques and effects of evangelicalism. The nexus of these two dimensions of evangelicalism lies in identity, personal and collective, and evangelicalism is a potent social movement in so far as it offers effective techniques on both the selfhood and the organizational sides of the identity question. On both of these dimensions evangelicalism has become an ever‐more obvious empirical challenge to the private religion/public politics distinctions that have tended to guide liberal societies attempts to regulate and understand religion. American evangelicalism emphasizes the emotional and the personal in a way that challenges institutional categories of religion like denomination, ritual, and doctrine, and it has become so intertwined with conservative political mobilization that some scholars are hesitant to understand some of these popular strands of evangelical engagement in the conceptual terms of “religion”. It is this combination, emotionally intimate and politically combative, that gives American evangelicalism its identity‐building and movement‐mobilizing force.