Evangelical Culture Research Articles

“A rapper is coming here—and he is black!” Authentication of rap music in the Finnish gospel music scene, 2005–2020

ABSTRACT In this article I analyse how gospel rap music is authenticated as a Christian practice in evangelical culture in Finland. The research data consist of interviews with nine self-identifying Christian rappers as well as media coverage of rap music in the evangelical press between the years 2005 and 2020. I first show how Finnish gospel rap music is embedded in the general late modern religious landscape, which is marked by therapeutic individualism, confessionalism, and striving for personal development. Secondly, I discuss how social diversity is performed in evangelical culture through rap music. Finally, I show how some rappers are engaged in grassroots anti-racist interventions in their musical activities, while the larger evangelical culture often remains reluctant to address the theme of structural racism in Christianity. In the conclusion, I argue that gospel rap music is a diverse and thriving refashioning of Protestant Christianity in an age when the appeal of Christianity in Finland is generally diminishing and Christianity is losing its former position as the dominant religious identity.

The Quality of Priest Services Manifested Through the Activity of Congregation Members in Evangelization

This study investigates the theological, pastoral, leadership and relational aspects of the pastor's ministry, which are reflected in the activeness of congregation members in the church's mission of evangelization. The descriptive literature study method was used to assess these aspects. The research results show that pastors must have a strong theological understanding, social sensitivity, the ability to build strong relationships with the congregation, and the ability to be a transformational leader. This study shows that the motivations of faith, love, and obedience to God's commands influence the activeness of congregation members in evangelistic missions. Through direct involvement in mission activities, pastors function as agents of transformation and serve as role models in building an evangelical culture in the church. This study increases our understanding of the complex relationship between the quality of pastors' ministry and congregation members' participation in church evangelism. Some practical consequences of these findings include establishing new methods to enhance the pastor's role in guiding and motivating congregations and creating an environment that supports participation in the church's evangelistic mission.

Men as Advocates for Women in Leadership

Despite improvements in gender equity within higher education nationally, underrepresentation in women’s leadership persists in Christian higher education. As women in leadership navigate the context of member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), characteristics of evangelical culture (e.g., theological views of gender, traditional gender role expectations) may at times impede these relationships across gender; however, some evidence has suggested that women who attained a presidency within a CCCU institution have identified male advocates to be influential in their leadership journeys. The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of men who had been identified by women presidents of CCCU institutions as having been advocates in their leadership identity development and journeys. This article explored the findings of a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of data from interviews with 14 male participants nominated by women presidents of CCCU institutions across North America. The findings of this study centered on three themes: (a) the pursuit of theological congruence, (b) gender blind, the double bind, and being first, and (c) pragmatism and persuasion. Based on these findings, the interdependence of organizational culture, self-awareness, and the social construction of a leadership identity through reciprocal relationships was discussed. Implications for practice include recommendations for evaluating institutional contexts and personal biases, as well as cultivating reciprocal relationships between women and men.

Evangelical Celebrity and the Second Persona

This article uses the construct of the Second Persona to understand the evangelical Christian rhetorical culture constructed by evangelical celebrities via Instagram. As informal authorities, evangelical celebrities are unique figures. Understanding their media use in constructing an ideal evangelical auditor provides an assessment of evangelical culture and posits an “Evangelical Second Persona” characterized by a familiarity with media, a reiteration of evangelical media consumption, an emphasis on family and class success, and the primacy of decentralized celebrity figures. This analysis shows the utility of persona criticism in understanding the ongoing constitution of evangelical rhetorical culture.

“We can’t go to them, but now they are here”: Ideologies of religion and culture in evangelical ESL classrooms

The history of colonialism, missionary work, and White supremacy is omnipresent in ESL. This study observed ESL instructors at two evangelical Christian ESL programs in South Carolina and investigated locally circulating ideologies of language, race, religion, and gender. The programs, Omega and Pinewood, aimed to share Christianity but used opposing strategies. Omega obfuscated evangelism by conflating Christianity with American culture and focused on assimilating students into English-centric, White evangelical culture. Pinewood accommodated students’ cultural norms, sharing both Christianity and students’ religion. Results of this study are important for understanding how institutional practices correlate with negative outcomes students may experience.

Review: Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture, by Corrina Laughlin

Book Review| February 01 2023 Review: Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture, by Corrina Laughlin Corrina Laughlin. Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 201 pp. Paperback $29.95. Terry Shoemaker Terry Shoemaker TERRY SHOEMAKER is an assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University. He holds advanced degrees in religious studies and has published books and articles on the topics of evangelicals in America, religion and sports, and popular culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (1): 107–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.1.107 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Terry Shoemaker; Review: Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture, by Corrina Laughlin. California History 1 February 2023; 100 (1): 107–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.1.107 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search American evangelicals, a politically active and vocal Protestant subgroup, first rose to political prominence in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration. In the past decade, evangelicals reclaimed a prominence in American news and media outlets due to their overwhelming support for the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Known for adopting new technological tools, evangelicals have successfully utilized digital resources to spread their message, values, and ethics. However, adoption of technology has many consequences, as Corrina Laughlin argues well in Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture. Simply stated, the digital world is “reshaping what it means to be an evangelical” (8). As a framework for her study, Laughlin establishes the concept of the “digital habitus,” a relational space that permits individuals to engage with one another and form echo chambers; however, the algorithmic systems that power the digital habitus are not neutral, and they influence the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review: Redeem All: How Digital Life is Changing Evangelical Culture

Book Review: Redeem All: How Digital Life is Changing Evangelical Culture

"Christian Worldview": A Defining Symbolic Term of the American Evangelical Speech Code

In the speech code of American evangelicalism, the symbolic term “Christian worldview” and its companion term “biblical worldview” are ubiquitous. Speech codes theory (SCT) holds that symbolic terms simply and quickly communicate complex ideas, values, and meanings that are taken for granted in the shared culture of a speech community. Symbolic terms accomplish this work by activating community members’ cognitive schemata or shared mental organization of cultural knowledge. The present study elaborates the historical and contemporary ideas, values, and meanings tacitly conveyed by “Christian worldview,” reports field observations of a one-year “worldview” small group Bible study and interprets this symbolic term as a defining marker of American evangelical culture. SCT holds that a distinctive culture manifests a distinctive speech code of socially constructed meanings that shape its cultural life. The study argues that the symbolic terms “Christian worldview” and “biblical worldview” shape American evangelical culture life according to meanings essential for interpreting that culture and for the discursive constitution of evangelical subjectivity.

A Pragmatic Piety: Experience, Uncertainty, and Action in Charles G. Finney’s Evangelical Revivalism

Abstract This article focuses on the evangelical theology and revival practice of Charles Grandison Finney, popular in his time yet critically under-explored in American philosophy, specifically regarding his role in the emergence of American pragmatism. Spearheaded by American philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, pragmatism argues that the significance of abstract concepts lies in their practical consequences in lived experience, as opposed to their internal logic or conformity to intellectual traditions. Whereas this philosophical method is often seen as predominantly secular in its origins, this article approaches pragmatic thinking and practice from the point of view of the spiritual conversion strategies of Charles Finney and antebellum evangelical culture more broadly. I expand on what Leonard I. Sweet has called Finney’s “pragmatic philosophy of revivalism,” addressing his theology and revival practice to disclose its latent pragmatic tendencies and those within antebellum evangelical culture. I argue that by looking at Finney as an early practitioner of this method, we must reappraise his and evangelicalism’s role in the emergence of philosophical pragmatism, challenge its putative secularity, and – as Charles Taylor has recently demonstrated – reassess what academic disciplines mean when they cite the presumed distinction between the religious and the secular.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Four weeks before the 2016 election, I was watching television with my daughter when Donald J. Trump's notorious Access Hollywood tape surfaced. His remarks were repulsive, I told her, but they would also assure his defeat: evangelical Christians, a critical part of his base, would never vote for a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women. I was wrong, of course. But so were the postelection analyses, which derided Trump's loyal evangelical supporters for placing power above principle. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez demonstrates, Trump's aggressive brand of masculinity has been central to evangelical culture since the 1950s. Lionizing film heroes such as the thrice-married John Wayne and the twice-wed Ronald Reagan, white evangelicals reinterpreted Christianity as a “warrior” faith that embodied physical strength more than moral rectitude. Indeed, pastors such as Mark Driscoll routinely mocked mainstream forms of Christian worship as “pussified” and unmanly. From that perspective, Trump's boasts...

Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa

Reviewed by: Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa Mario T. Garcia Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. By Felipe Hinojosa. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 219. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In fifty years of incredible productivity in Chicano history, surprisingly few studies of religious history were written. One of the exciting new changes in this historiography is the increased study of religion, especially the link between religion and community activism. A new generation of historians is leading the way, and Felipe Hinojosa is a key member of this vanguard. Building on his first major contribution in this effort, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Hinojosa has followed with an even more innovative second book about what he calls “Apostles of Change.” Who are these Apostles? They are lay activists who, influenced by the Chicano and Puerto Rican civil rights struggles, recognized that churches were a major institution within the barrios that needed to be challenged along with political, economic, and educational systems. They ministered to the spiritual needs of their congregations but failed to address poverty, unemployment, inferior schooling, and urban displacement. Some Chicano/Latino activists said basta (enough), and they took the churches on. Hinojosa’s study concerns four cases where activists linked religion to civil rights and community empowerment issues. Based on thorough research, Hinojosa studies the takeover of three churches, and the intervention of a fourth one, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston. In Chicago, a coalition of Chicano and Puerto Rican youth activists, including the militant Young Lords along with Black and White supporters, occupied Presbyterian-operated McCormick Theological Seminary for five days in May 1969. Their main concern was urban renewal. While the takeover did not stop this assault on the area, it did help to initiate a larger struggle that forced both Protestant and Catholic churches to deal with material conditions in the barrios. In Los Angeles, Chicano movement activists organized Católicos Por La Raza, which called on the Catholic Church to do more for its Mexican American parishioners. Shunned by Cardinal James McIntyre, the group forced a confrontation with him during his Christmas Eve Mass in 1969. The intervention led to McIntyre’s resignation and to the Church becoming more responsive to Latino needs. In East Harlem in New York City, the Puerto Rican-led Young Lords occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church in December 1969 for eleven days and transformed it into a people’s church by providing a variety of social services. Although arrested, the Young Lords inspired others to reconsider church priorities. Finally, and of particular importance to Texas history, Hinojosa examines the occupation of Juan Marcos Presbyterian Church in Houston’s northside barrio in the spring of 1970 for twenty days by the Mexican American Youth Organization [End Page 328] (MAYO). Its efforts to transform the church into a social service agent, while limited, likewise pressured church leaders to reexamine their relationship to the Mexican American community. These takeovers and interventions in churches during the civil rights era reveal that religion was not absent in Chicano/Latino freedom movements and that secular activists more often than clergy led the way in linking churches to the social needs of people. Acting as “apostles of change,” these activists transformed the meaning of church. In successfully resurrecting these histories, Hinojosa has written a significant addition to the growing historiography of Chicano/Latino religious history. Well-written and organized, it should be welcomed by historians of the Chicano/Latino experience and by those interested in American religions. Mario T. Garcia University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Evangelicalism before the Fall: The Christian Herald and Signs of our Times

“Evangelicalism Before the Fall” reveals the surprising and largely forgotten world of the premillennialist wing of late Victorian Evangelicalism through a close reading of its leading paper, The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Organized around five thematic soundings (“worldly affairs”; “great questions”; “self and other”; “meeting modernity”; and “Evangelical culture”), the paper shows that premillennialism comported easily with socially elite status, liberal instincts, and irenic habits of mind not commonly associated with those holding similar beliefs in the decades after. Although the primary goal of the article is to recover an overlooked moment in Evangelical history, it secondarily contributes to a historiographical debate in the field of Fundamentalism studies, where revisionists have challenged the “fall” narrative of an earlier cohort of scholars, such as George Marsden and Joel Carpenter, who documented a decline in social standing and influence for the movement relative to the late nineteenth century. The article lends support to the fall narrative, properly understood as a change in social and cultural status.

Battle for the Soul of a City: John Roach Straton, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in New York, 1922–1935

AbstractThe Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a defining moment for New York in the 1920s and one of the most significant theological battles in the city's history, as key doctrines of the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the bodily resurrection of Christ were debated in the mainstream as well as the religious press. The principal figures in the controversy were John Roach Straton and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two prominent clerics whose intellectual and oratorical confrontation showed just how deep this nationwide religious divide had become. Straton and Fosdick used their New York pulpits as public platforms to articulate their opposing theological visions and to justify them as the correct expression of historic Christianity in the present. In doing so, they made the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy very much a New York story, remapping the city's Protestant evangelical culture and reorienting one of the most important episodes in American religious history. The aftermath of the conflict, however, reveals that the lines between “fundamentalist” and “modernist” as distinct categories of religious experience became blurred as each embraced elements of the other. By 1935, both fundamentalists and modernists in New York City had been transformed, just as they had transformed the city.

Territories of beliefs

This article will present the main findings of the doctoral thesis "Territorios de creencia. Cultural practices of young evangelicals in Comodoro Rivadavia" on two central axes. The first one refers to present the analytical proposal regarding the understanding of Pentecostalism as a territory of beliefs with different dimensions that constitute it. These dimensions include its history, its spatial presence, ethical and aesthetic postulates, norms and uses of the body, and also its borders and frontiers -always porous-. In this territory there are multiple positions and ways of inhabiting it, between the normative and instituted ones and the ones that the subjects themselves are creating. The second point of the exhibition refers to the relationship between music and evangelical beliefs, seeking to understand the fluidity, the movement and the multiple ways in which Pentecostal evangelical beliefs are produced, circulated and re-created through cultural practices, recognizing innovations, but also continuities and sedimentations. The focus is placed on the study of the practices and experiences of young Christians who produce, consume, discuss and question cultural goods -especially music-, showing their capacity of agency to produce, negotiate and dynamize the evangelical culture.

A qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis of evangelical Christian sex trafficking narratives

ABSTRACT The purpose of the present qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis (QIMS) is to explore, categorize, and confront one of the powerful narratives present within the counter-trafficking movement—that of evangelical Christian communities in the United States. The authors focused on the analysis of scholarly ethnographies and autoethnographies (N=7) of the evangelical Christian counter-trafficking culture. The QIMS yielded four themes that can be used to explain and categorize the denouement that is often visible in evangelical sex trafficking narratives, including 1) the perfect victim, 2) sexual objectification, 3) rescue for a greater purpose, and 4) co-optation of narratives. Results of this study point to how laypeople, social workers, and professional activists can shape and promote survivor-centered narratives that more fully advance the human rights of sex trafficking survivors.

Why Not Now?

ABSTRACT This article uses the 1890 and 1894 Free Methodist Church debates on women's ordination as a case study on the discursive construction of gender in evangelical culture. At the turn of the twentieth century, women's roles in religious culture were being debated around the United States in various denominations, and the decision to ordain women varied greatly depending on biblical interpretation and denominational theology. The rhetorical performances of two female evangelists and General Conference delegates, Clara Wetherald and Ida Gage, will be discussed and used to illustrate how their opponents used organizational silencing in an attempt to write them out of the organizational record.

Reseña: Ward, Mark. (2017). The Lord's Radio, Gospel Music Broadcasting and the Making of Evangelical Culture, 1920-1960. Jefferson: McFraland and Company, Inc., Publishers

Resena de libro Ward, Mark. (2017). The Lord's Radio, Gospel Music Broadcasting and the Making of Evangelical Culture, 1920-1960. Jefferson: McFraland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Sarah Parsons Moorhead and Revival Poetry

ABSTRACT Wendy Raphael Roberts attends to one of the better-known revival poets, Sarah Parsons Moorhead (1705/6–74), to argue that her inclusion in modern anthologies would enable a more robust attention to one of the largest verse movements in the eighteenth century—revival poetics. Looking at revival poetry sheds light on the extent of women's leadership in early evangelicalism. Moorhead is particularly important for showing how women inhabited a new tradition of evangelical poet-ministers, through which they acted as spiritual directors to the most well-known revivalists of the day. Currently, the evangelical literary culture of the nineteenth-century can appear in anthologies to arise from within the national period alone, and as a result, Romantic poetry and the rise of the nineteenth-century Poetess lose a large portion of their genealogies, which are, at least in part, in eighteenth-century evangelical formations.

Types and Tropes: History and Moral Agency in Evangelical Inspirational Fiction

Abstract: Using as exemplars novels of evangelical inspirational fiction writer Francine Rivers, this article explores how Christian faith is represented as manifest in the emotional lives of characters in inspirational fiction novels. These novels invoke a particularly evangelical way of anchoring Biblical scripture to a modified "typological" understanding of history, that, in turn, anchors characterological claims to moral agency which are grounded in "tropological" or "moral" forms of scriptural interpretation. This narrative organization or "chronotope" models a kind of faith-informed, emotionally centered practice of viewing one's own life and situation that that is widely mobilized in American evangelical culture.

South Korean Evangelical Narratives on North Koreans and Homosexuals

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes how South Korean (SK), evangelical media discuss two outgroup categories: North Korea and homosexuality. Analysis of SK media over two decades—mainly longitudinal analysis of evangelical newspaper Kidok Sinmun (1998-2019)–generates several findings. First, homosexuality is catching up to North Korea as the leading outgroup in SK Christian discourse. Second, both outgroups are subjects of dual, competing narratives: one (threat) frames outgroups, and their supporters, as threats to the liberties and/or values of Christians; another (outreach), as subjects of Christian love and personal relationship. The threat and outreach narratives, in turn, are, respectively, associated with right-wing and non-right politics on the outgroup. We argue that the dual narratives are shaped by American evangelical culture; cross-national communications (e.g., South Korea and USA); and cross-national events (e.g., presidential elections) that influence the perceived threats posed by, or opportunities to outreach to, outgroup members.