Good News for Common Goods

Abstract

Abstract There has been a lot of bad news about evangelical Christianity and democracy in America in recent years. In Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America, sociologist Wes Markofski draws on twelve months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta, and Boston to investigate how multicultural evangelicals across the United States are addressing racial difference and inequality, poverty and economic inequality, and political, cultural, and religious difference and disagreement in America’s increasingly polarized social and political landscape. Based on extensive original research on multicultural evangelicals active in faith-based community organizing, community development, political advocacy, and public service organizations across the country—including over ninety in-depth interviews with racially diverse evangelical and non-evangelical activists, community leaders, and neighborhood residents—Markofski shows that the varieties of public religion practiced by evangelical Christians are not always, and need not always be, bad news for nonevangelicals, people of color, and those committed to advancing ethical democracy in the United States. He finds that reflexive evangelicals can and do work with diverse race, class, religious, moral, and cultural others to achieve common good solutions to public problems, and that they can do so without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities (or demanding that others do so). Just as ethical democracy calls for a more reflexive evangelicalism, so too does it call for a more reflexive secularism and progressivism.