Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American EvangelicalismTodd M.Brenneman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Abstract

Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism Todd M. Brenneman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Though journalistic books, which point out the more alarming pronouncements of the Religious Right or the wackier side of evangelical pop culture, tend to capture public attention, the past few decades have seen the emergence of a body of thoughtful, serious work that maps the historical and sociological nuances of American evangelicalism and its imbrications with broader American society and polity. While the framework for much of this scholarship tends to see evangelicalism through the framework of beliefs, institutions, and practices, much of the best recent work in this area focuses on its tastes and its characteristic ways of making sense of things, especially its ways of articulating how the Christian individual should understand her or him self in relation to family, society, and history (all understood in both their natural and supernatural aspects). Todd Brenne man's Homespun Gospel reinforces the argument that approaching evangelical culture through the lens of its aesthetics and cultural products, its preferred tropes and discourses and the responses they reliably invoke, is an essential supplement to the attempt to understand it through its doctrines, institutions, and public controversies.Brenneman argues that though evangelical political leaders and polemicists attract the most attention, evangelicals themselves actually spend more time with ostensibly apolitical writers and pastors such as Max Lucado, Joel Osteen, and Rick Warren. These inspirational writers rarely argue or debate but instead wrap their readers in the simple truth that God desperately loves them and wants the best for them while framing this idea in nostalgically-tinged images of home, family, and the innocence of children. The persuasive power of inspirational rhetoric, Brenneman argues, comes not through its ability to weigh the relative merits or evidentiary claims or competing perspectives but through its invocation of these emotion-laden nostalgic tropes to bypass the head and get straight to the heart, where truth can be felt and not merely known. Brenneman argues that Lucado, Warren, Osteen, and their ilk promote a kind of therapeutic evangelicalism organized around God's desire to heal and help his faithful in their lives, an approach that is not only scrip tur ally questionable but that tends to preclude (with its overweening emphasis on the individual) the attention to social justice that animated earlier versions of American evangelicalism.Brenne man's discussions of sentimentality in evangelical inspirational writing complements other recent work in the field. Its emphasis on the primacy of an aesthetic model of evangelical decision making meshes well with, for example, Lynn Neal's excellent parsing of the aesthetics (and subjective functions) of evangelical reading in her Romancing God (2006). His observations about the pervasiveness of tropic models that undergird this kind of discourse aligns with George Lakoff's classic arguments in Moral Politics (1997), and it reinforces arguments explored in the two best literary critical works on evangelical fiction, works that explore the way that evangelical popular hermeneutics are informed by particular histories of pedagogy and discursive practice: Amy Frykholm's Rapture Culture (2007) and Greg Jackson's even richer historical work, The Word and its Witness (2008). …