Evangelical Culture Research Articles

Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844–1870 by Laura Mair

Reviewed by: Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844–1870 by Laura Mair Monica Flegel Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844–1870. By Laura Mair. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. xv + 256 pp. Cloth $282.00, e-book $120.00. Like many Victorian scholars, I am very familiar with the ragged school movement. Or perhaps more accurately, I have a strong sense of what it was and what it entailed, but I arrived at that knowledge via the writing of figures like Charles Dickens, Mary Carpenter, and Thomas Guthrie. My knowledge on ragged schools could therefore be likened to the treatment the movement has received thus far; as Laura Mair describes, "The ragged schools have received insufficient attention from historians; although much has been written, little has been said" (8). Fortunately, her own contribution to this field thoroughly addresses this lack. In an engaging history that is grounded in the journals and letters of Martin Ware, a volunteer ragged school teacher at Compton Place, Mair provides a well-rounded portrait of the ragged school movement through a microhistory of this one institution, its teachers, and its students. Her main aim is to provide a fuller sense of those involved, both teachers and students, so as to build upon past scholarship which, in its focus primarily on the institutional documents of the movement, has necessarily provided "limited access to the lived experiences of both scholars and teachers" (210). The image of the ragged school that emerges through her careful research is one of a complex institution that built upon, and displaced, existing informal schooling structures and that offered cross-class interactions marked by both conflict and affiliation. Mair's text is organized with the aim of providing a broad but detailed overview of the movement and an intimate understanding of the relationships between individuals in Compton Place. Her first chapter situates the emergence of the ragged school movement within dominant narratives and theories of childhood in the mid-nineteenth century, and within evangelical culture. She gives a brief overview of existing educational structures, such as dame schools and Sunday schools, demonstrating how ragged schools differed from, and were sometimes in tension with, these other models. She also explains the [End Page 447] organizational structure of the movement as a whole, arguing for a recognition that while each ragged school was inherently local, there were important ties between regions that gave the movement coherence. Her second and third chapters address the children and teachers of the ragged schools, respectively, delving into how each group was characterized in institutional literature, but also how they have been depicted in histories of the movement. In both chapters, Mair is careful to provide as many individual voices as can be accessed, so as to challenge assumptions about students and teachers alike. Her final two chapters focus specifically on Martin Ware, providing close readings, first of his own journals from his time as a volunteer teacher and then of his correspondence with former pupils. Her analysis succeeds in providing a vivid and complex portrait of Ware as a man of principles and prejudices who cared deeply for his students. The correspondence provides a fascinating window into the development of the teacher/student relationship within the classroom and into the pupils adulthood. Each chapter is fascinating on its own. Combined, the chapters provide an understanding of the ragged school as an important precursor to modern education systems. While my own understanding of ragged schools was of the religious indoctrination of lower- and working-class children by primarily middle-class philanthropists, Mair highlights how an "anti-sectarian" culture within the movement actually "set ragged schools apart and enabled them, for the most part, to avoid the interdenominational challenges that both Church and Sunday schools faced" (45). She goes on to describe the limitations of that anti-sectarianism in her discussion of conflicts between ragged schools and local priests and Catholic parishes. While ragged schools were clearly sites of cross-class association—between teachers, parents, and pupils, but also between teachers themselves—they were also on the front lines of class and sectarian conflict...

Vanity Fair and the celestial city. Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical literary culture in England, 1720–1800. By Isabel Rivers. Pp. xviii + 457. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. £95. 978 0 19 826996 0

Vanity Fair and the celestial city. Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical literary culture in England, 1720–1800. By Isabel Rivers. Pp. xviii + 457. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. £95. 978 0 19 826996 0

White Evangelicals as a “People”: The Church Growth Movement from India to the United States

ABSTRACTThis article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.

“Millions of Jews Died in That War… It Was a Bad Time”: The Holocaust in Adventures in Odyssey’s Escape to the Hiding Place

In 2012, the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family published Escape to the Hiding Place, the ninth book in Adventures in Odyssey’s Imagination Station book series. This short children’s book is a creative reimagining of Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place (1971). Corrie was a Christian who lived in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Corrie and her family helped hide Jews and non-Jews from arrest and deportation at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Corrie’s story has played a significant role in the evangelical Christian encounter with the Holocaust. Like every Imagination Station story, Escape to the Hiding Place features two cousins, Patrick and Beth, from the fictional town of Odyssey. They travel back in time to help Jews escape the Nazis, all so they can learn a lesson about their ability to aid others in need. A harrowing adventure ensues. This paper does not criticize the valuable rescue work undertaken by Christians during the Holocaust, nor does it criticize the contemporary evangelical desire to draw meaning from Christian rescue work. Rather, the fictional narrative under consideration skews toward an overly simplistic representation of the Christian response to the murder of Jews during World War Two, contains a flat reading of Dutch society during the war, and fails to address antisemitism or racism. This paper situates Escape to the Hiding Place within a wider evangelical popular culture that has struggled with the history of the Holocaust apart from redemptive Christian biographies.

Spiritual Formation and Soul Care in the Department of Christian Formation and Ministry at Wheaton College

This article examines a model of formation within higher education that is committed to educationally based spiritual formation, desiring to see students formed as people who love God and neighbor, devoting their lives to redemptive labor in the world. Deeply influenced by the evolving relationship between the department, the institution, and the broader evangelical culture, the Christian Formation and Ministry department of Wheaton College seeks to equip students with the theological and theoretical foundation, the personal maturity of character and faith, and the practical ministry skills necessary to lead and participate in the formational and caring mission of the church in the world. Wheaton College’s unique approach to teaching spiritual formation and soul care in both their undergraduate and graduate programs is examined through a historical context of the department, a liberal arts and learning-centered approach to education that includes biblical foundations, philosophical framework, pedagogy, and teaching curriculum and assessment.

O caminho estreito e o caminho largo de Hieronymus Wierix do ano 1619: uma leitura panofskiana de uma gravura da reforma católica

O artigo apresenta e interpreta a gravura De smalle en de brede Weg (o caminho estreito e o caminho largo) de Hieronymus Wierix, criada no ano de 1619 na cidade de Antuérpia, já sob domínio espanhol. O objetivo é analisar uma expressão da cultura visual religiosa católica que influenciou as Américas e o Brasil colônia e que inspirou a cultura visual evangélica brasileira, no caso, mediante a xilogravura de Charlotte Reihlen no século 19. Como método aplicam-se os três passos de interpretação de arte religiosa renascentista propostos por Ernst Panofsky, a descrição pré-iconográfica, a análise iconográfica e a interpretação iconológica. Espera-se enriquecer a compreensão da cultura visual religiosa na América Latina e no Brasil, inclusive em sua transconfessionalidade, investigando seu rico fundo imaginário.

Contesting the Protestant Consensus

This article challenges the premise that a Protestant consensus emerged in Upper Canada by the mid-nineteenth century by examining the persistence of politically influential, dissenting evangelical voluntarists who advocated the secularization of the clergy reserves. State- Chruch efforts were strongly contested by evangelicals who had come to believe that the purity of their faith was marked by its independence from the state as well as its revivalism. Using the Toronto-based Christian Guardian, this article traces a clash between the British Wesleyans and the generally voluntarist Upper Canadian Methodists as they sought to claim the legacy of Methodism in the colony. Overall, this article seeks to highlight the persistence of an early dissenting evangelical culture, not as an exception to the rule of consensus, but as a significant influence in colonial public policy and a vital force in Upper Canadian Protestantism that calls into question the consensus model.

Wearing your heart on your sleeve: the surveillance of women’s souls in evangelical Christian modesty culture

ABSTRACT A few years ago, a rash of online debates over whether Christian women should wear yoga pants spread across white evangelical blogs and social media. These were followed by conversations about the meaning of “modesty” more broadly, including who has the ability or authority to “read” women’s piety, or their very souls, through their dress. Drawing on media interface theories and close analyses of these debates, this article examines how some evangelical women resist the surveillant male gaze in their religious communities by implying that their modesty resides not in signs that are legible to others but in their own embodied experiences of pleasure and care. The article argues further that the case of white evangelical modesty culture offers an example of Foucault’s concept of the “soul” and the micro-physics of power that produce it, something that has been overlooked by the literature’s focus on the role of the state and corporations in surveillance. Moreover, absent a more capacious understanding of the sociality of surveillance, current approaches to biometric surveillance have also neglected important limits to surveillance that are suggested by evangelical women’s tactical resistance to the gendered politics of surveillance in their communities.

Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism eds. by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter

Reviewed by: Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism eds. by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter Mark J. Dixon Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism. Edited by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter. Grand Rapids: Eerd-mans, 2017. 297 pp. "Some Lutherans in America don't like the word 'evangelical' because it has been monopolized by biblical fundamentalists." [The New Church Debate: Issues Facing American Lutheranism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983, 2] Carl Braaten's imprecise use of terms did not invalidate his assessment of Lutheran attitudes, which still rings true today. In fact, Lutherans in America have been skeptical of evangelicalism (and closely related movements) long before it came to be associated almost exclusively with the modern Religious Right. This skepticism implies that evangelicalism is easily defined, and unworthy of serious or respectful engagement. This collection puts these assumptions to the lie. Here readers encounter evangelicalism as "the single most powerful explanatory device adopted by academic historians to account for the distinctive features of American society, culture, and identity," and see the folly in pigeonholing a tradition without a universally accepted "consistent historical referent" (xvi). Carter and Porter open their introduction by summarizing the evangelical influence on modern American life—from the Bakkers to the Osteens, The Total Woman to The Purpose Driven Life, Nixon to [End Page 118] Trump. Despite evangelicalism's obvious contemporary significance, its history was neglected until the "historiographical revolution" of the 1980s, which emanated largely from Wheaton College's Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (founded 1982). This surge in scholarship located the modern faith associated with Billy Graham within a tradition "extend[ing] all the way back to colonial revivals led by the likes of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Sarah Osborn." It also led to a growing recognition that "no other faith had so powerfully shaped the nation's course" (xv). Despite (or because of) this increased critical attention, a satisfactory historical definition for evangelicalism has proved elusive. Carter and Porter intentionally refrain from offering a comprehensive definition, and instead frame this collection of essays as "a variety of historical approaches to a term that … points to a set of family resemblances that spring from a shared genealogy" (xvi). Decisive moments in the history of several branches of this family tree are laid out in twelve essays spanning from the Great Awakening to the 1974 Lausanne Congress. Every essay is worth your time. I regret that I can only mention a few. Some, like Harry Stout's on the Great Awakening or George Marsden's on fundamentalism, conveniently repackage field-shaping theses from these authors' own monographs to fit the "turning points" device. Catherine Brekus' essay is notable for treating a classic theme (the relationship between evangelicalism and the Enlightenment) in a new way, in this case by approaching the issue through figures like Sarah Osborn and Newport Gardner instead of, for example, Jonathan Edwards. Edith Blumhofer's essay on the origins of Pentecostalism in Chicago is so highly detailed that it almost functions as a very brief introduction to the subject. This reader particularly appreciated Luke Harlow's chapter, "The Civil War and the Making of Conservative American Evangelicalism," and its convincing argument that the slavery debate and its effective resolution in the Thirteenth Amendment created the narrower, more conservative evangelicalism that would go into the twentieth century prepared to devote tremendous energy to a range of issues that would come to define fundamentalism. [End Page 119] I craved at least one more chapter after Daren Dochuk's on Lausanne, or at least an explanation for the absence of an essay dedicated to the modern evangelical culture with which Carter and Porter chose to open their introduction. Of course a scholarly critique of evangelical Christianity in the context of the 2016 presidential election is most to be desired, but that history almost certainly unfolded too close to publication. In any event it is difficult to know what this turning point means yet. Where will evangelicalism go from here? I also would have liked more from Carter and Porter on their intriguing "genealogical" definition of evangelicalism. What are the family resemblances between figures like George Whitefield...

Review: Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture by Felipe Hinojosa

Review: Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture by Felipe Hinojosa

When the Lord builds the house: An autoethnographic account of working in an evangelical for-profit organizational culture

Religion is often perceived as a private topic, thus belonging outside the traditional conceptualization of a work environment. However, religion is a pervasive organizing framework and an understanding of its role in the workplace is needed from a communicative perspective. In the following autoethnography, I describe my experience working for a Christian for-profit homebuilder – starting with new employee orientation and moving through my final day at Local Homes. I focus on instances where tension emerges between expectations and reality as I learn about and interact within the overtly evangelical Christian organizational culture. The tension is illustrated through four vignettes that correspond to the traditional phases of socialization. Through writing this autoethnographic account, I attempt to move beyond my personal experience and situate my story within larger disciplinary and societal conversations about the socialization process in a religious organization. With this goal in mind, I conclude with methodological and theoretical implications.

Learning the Value of Rights: Abortion Politics and the Liberalization of Evangelical Free Speech Advocacy

AbstractFor the past century, the expansion of free speech rights has been the domain of liberals. Recently, however, conservatives have become advocates for expanded free speech rights. For Evangelicals Protestants, this advocacy would have been highly controversial only a generation ago, offending the base's ordered liberty sentiments. I suggest that abortion politics is a primary contributor to the evangelical free speech advocacy shift. Using a variety of data, I detail the evangelical shift toward expanded free speech by exploring the topics of radical protest, campaign finance, and obscenity. While rank-and-file evangelicals are less supportive of free speech than the general-public, elites have routinely used abortion politics to frame the shift toward individual free speech rights. Elites have diverged from their constituents to support a higher-priority issue (abortion), and the constituents have been supportive. Abortion politics has come to dominate evangelical advocacy decisions and has cultivated an evangelical rights culture.

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

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). …

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture by Felipe Hinojosa

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture by Felipe Hinojosa

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

Secularism, Synthesis, and Antebellum Evangelical Self-Understanding

In Secularism In Antebellum America, John Modern extensively and directly engages with what he calls Mark Noll's “magisterial treatment of evangelicalism” in America's God. In light of this, I have been surprised at what a challenge it has been to bring these books into conversation with one another on the subject of evangelicals and evangelicalism. The central reason for the difficulty, I think, is that Modern's treatment of antebellum evangelical print culture—his chapter entitled “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan”—is not actually about evangelicals. It is about secularism. And that, in a nutshell, is Modern's point. Throughout his book, he works hard to bring what he sees as the background into the foreground, rendering the emergent atmosphere of secularism as the protagonist in his story of evangelical media practices.

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture

Humanities

Humanities

Reconfiguring Protestantism and Minorities: A Review Essay

Review essay discussing: Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle, by Angela Tarango; Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action, by Gastόn Espinosa; and Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture, by Felipe Hinojosa.