Modern Evangelicalism Research Articles

Book Review: Timothy E. W. Gloege. Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism

Book Review: Timothy E. W. Gloege. <i>Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism</i>

Review: American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton

Review: American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton

Making Sense of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism

Making Sense of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism Seth Dowland (bio) Steven P. Miller. The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. vii + 221 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95. Matthew Avery Sutton. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. xiv + 459 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. Molly Worthen. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. viii + 352 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. In The Age of Evangelicalism, Steven Miller provides a fascinating genealogy of a generation of “thoughtful evangelical” scholars who launched their careers in the 1970s, most notably, George Marsden and Mark Noll. These historians spoke from within the evangelical tradition, and they attempted a tricky double task. On the one hand, they wanted to force non-evangelical historians to grapple with the importance of this faith tradition and to abandon the biting disdain for evangelicalism that had characterized mid-century U.S. historians. On the other hand, Marsden and Noll, writing in the shadow of the 1980s Christian Right, tried to convince their fellow evangelicals to eschew the ahistorical polemics of right-wing preachers and politicians and to embrace a more robust intellectual encounter with the past. The next generation of evangelical scholarship, represented in new books by Matthew Avery Sutton, Molly Worthen, and Steven Miller, testifies to Marsden and Noll’s success in their first goal: getting non-evangelical historians to treat the tradition seriously. Marsden and Noll’s failure in the second goal—convincing the majority of evangelicals to embrace academic history over politics or pop culture—provides these three scholars with a robust project. Given the public’s identification of evangelicals with right-wing politics and anti-intellectualism, Miller, Sutton, and Worthen face a formidable task in [End Page 152] redefining twentieth-century American evangelicalism as neither monolithically conservative nor anti-intellectual. Sutton’s American Apocalypse offers the most historically wide-ranging and ambitious attempt to revise the history of evangelicalism. He echoes a growing chorus of historians who view evangelicals’ cultural and political engagement as a constant over the course of the twentieth century, not as something that cropped up with Jimmy Carter in 1976. Sutton, though, makes a remarkable claim about the centrality of apocalypticism to evangelicals’ engagement with politics and culture. In his words, “fundamentalists’ and evangelicals’ confidence that time was running out defined who they were, how they acted, and how they related to those around them” (p. xiv). Sutton traces the origins of radical evangelical apocalypticism in the late nineteenth century well, so that when he arrives at the pivotal point of his story, World War I, we can see the events through the apocalyptic prism that colored early twentieth-century evangelicals’ vision. The beginning of the war roughly coincided with a shift in the dominant form of evangelical apocalypticism. Whereas earlier apocalyptic groups had been postmillennial—believing that the millennium prophesied in the Bible had commenced and Jesus would return at its end—there were increasing numbers of early twentieth-century evangelicals who turned to premillennialism. Premillennialists believed that a correct reading of biblical prophecy showed that we were living in the last days before the millennium, which would only commence when certain signs of the end appeared. The late stages of World War I seemed to herald the imminence of Armageddon, the great battle between the forces of the Antichrist and the followers of Jesus. The Bolshevik Revolution confirmed premillennialists’ identification of Russia as Magog, a “great power of the North” destined to play a role in the world’s final battle. Woodrow Wilson’s consolidation of federal power, along with his attempts to recruit the Vatican to the Allied cause, signaled the unification of worldly powers that would be completed by the Antichrist. Most portentously, the specter of a Jewish homeland in Palestine excited evangelicals about the coming of the end times. Sutton sees WWI as a hinge point because premillennialists’ understandings of and responses to world events triggered a breakup with liberals in major American denominations. Like other scholars, he dates the emergence of...

Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism

Journal Article Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism Get access By Timothy E. W. Gloege. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xviii, 307 pp. $34.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 4, March 2016, Pages 1223–1224, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav833 Published: 01 March 2016

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton (review)

Reviewed by: American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton Bobby Griffith Jr. (bio) American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. By Matthew Avery Sutton. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 459. $35.00 cloth) Matthew Sutton delivers an impressive work of historiographical importance for those who wish to understand the impact of fundamentalism and dispensational premillennialism in American life and culture. Dispensational premillennialism, which originated in the 1830s, emphasizes the second coming of Jesus Christ and its connection to current events as interpreted from certain biblical texts, particularly in the Apocalypse of John. This hermeneutic promoted the belief of the Rapture, stressed the importance of Israel, and called the faithful to look to the presence of signs that pointed to Christ’s [End Page 128] return. He argues that modern evangelicalism owes its origins to the popularity of dispensational premillennialism that rose from the millenarian movements following the Second Great Awakening. For Sutton, the belief in the imminent apocalypse provided evangelicalism the framework for understanding the world and fueled its politics and social movements. Sutton connects modern evangelicalism to the millenarian movements that flowed from post–Second Great Awakening Protestantism. Although beginning as a fringe view, premillennialists captured the minds of scores of the faithful through aggressive dissemination of an apocalyptic message. End-times messengers found the good graces of corporate money and this partnership spread the message of premillennialism. Powerful interests supplied capital for evangelicals to nurture the fundamentalist movement in its creation of the “old time religion.” Sutton shows that white fundamentalists and evangelicals largely excluded African American believers who shared theological views. He also depicts different understandings of the end times based upon racialized understandings of prophesy. Although divided by race, premillenialism grew to dominate evangelical thought and guide its understanding of politics and culture. Where George Marsden and other scholars of fundamentalism emphasize the movement’s discontinuity with evangelicalism, Sutton stresses connection. He terms them “radical evangelicals” and shows how the deep belief in premillennialism created similar views on culture, politics, and how to interpret the times. Sutton provides examples of continuity in his depiction of evangelical leaders like Harold Ockenga and Billy Graham. By placing fundamentalists ideologically closer to evangelicals, he is able to reconcile both movements and demonstrate the unity in theological convictions and commitments to conservatism. Sutton shows this continuity not only through a fervent commitment to a premillennial outlook but also how evangelicals relied on existing networks from the fundamentalist movement. Wealthy [End Page 129] benefactors, like J. Howard Pew, provided financial support to both fundamentalist and evangelical causes. Evangelical political connections mirrored their fundamentalist counterparts. Fundamentalists and evangelicals have little that separate them in American Apocalypse. This helps explain the successful transformation of fundamentalism to evangelicalism, yet it does minimize the ire fundamentalists like Carl McIntire, Bob Jones, and John Rice shared toward evangelicalism. As evangelicalism became the dominant form of Protestantism following the 1960s, premillennialism injected itself into the dour world of the 1970s. Sutton explains the explosion of evangelical movies and literature that focused on the impending rapture, tribulation, and second coming of Christ. Books like Late Great Planet Earth sold in the millions and, later, spawned the evangelical end-times fiction genre as typified by the Left Behind series. Evangelical leaders connected unrest in the Middle East to impending doom. Wars and rumors of wars provided evangelicals a framework with which to argue for foreign policies that favored Israel, and they lobbied for federal officials to look to biblical prophecy in order to govern U.S. affairs. By the 1980s, a reporter asked the president questions about the apocalypse. Sutton shows that premillennialism drove evangelicals to turn their understanding of doomsday into political action, particularly for conservative causes. As a consequence, even politicians had to answer for their alliances. American Apocalypse demonstrates the far-reaching power of premillennialism and its effect on U.S. culture. What began as a movement of revivalists and “signs of the times” readers, stretched into a global force of tens of millions who believed the second coming of Christ loomed in their generation. Over time, this belief moved beyond the sawdust trail and...

Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism

Review of: Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, by Timothy E. W. Gloege.

Kuyper and Dooyeweerd: Sphere Sovereignty and Modal Aspects

The article is an outline of some of the key thoughts of two Dutch Calvinist philosophers who have had a major impact on sections of modern evangelicalism. These key thoughts are sphere sovereignty, closely associated with Kuyper but adopted enthusiastically by Dooyeweerd as well, and modal aspects, which is particularly associated with Dooyeweerd. The impact of these key thoughts on how we should view social structures is given, focusing particularly on the state, the church, the family and marriage, and the university. There is one key reservation about this line of thinking, held because so prevalent among in the Neo-Calvinist circles so inspired by Kuyper and Dooyeweerd, that of pillarisation. It is argued briefly here, effectively as a postscript, that this represents a line of thinking that does not belong to sphere sovereignty or to modal aspects.

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton

Guaranteed Pure. The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, written by Timothy E.W. Gloege

Guaranteed Pure. The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, written by Timothy E.W. Gloege

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism

Guaranteed pure: the Moody Bible Institute, business, and the making of modern evangelicalism

Guaranteed pure: the Moody Bible Institute, business, and the making of modern evangelicalism

Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism

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American apocalypse: a history of modern Evangelicalism

The first comprehensive history of modern evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it.Matthew Avery Sutton draws on extensive archival research to document the ways an initially obscure network of charismatic preachers and their followers reshaped religion, at home and abroad, for over a century. Perceiving the United States as besieged by Satanic forces communism and secularism, family breakdown and government encroachment Billy Sunday, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, and others took to the pulpit and airwaves to explain how Biblical end-times prophecy made sense of a world ravaged by global wars, genocide, and the threat of nuclear extinction. Believing Armageddon was nigh, these preachers used what little time was left to warn of the coming Antichrist, save souls, and prepare the nation for God s final judgment.By the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and conservative Republicans appropriated evangelical ideas to create a morally infused political agenda that challenged the pragmatic tradition of governance through compromise and consensus. Following 9/11, the politics of apocalypse continued to resonate with an anxious populace seeking a roadmap through a world spinning out of control. Premillennialist evangelicals have erected mega-churches, shaped the culture wars, made and destroyed presidential hopefuls, and brought meaning to millions of believers. Narrating the story of modern evangelicalism from the perspective of the faithful, Sutton demonstrates how apocalyptic thinking continues to exert enormous influence over the mainstream today.

Discipleship as Living with God, or Wayfinding and Scripture

This paper explores the role of divine speaking in Christian ethics, critically engaging with the tendency in modern evangelicalism to seek to derive moral principles from Scripture or a biblically-derived ontology, often via deployment of map-making metaphors. The paper sets out the rather different centrality of the divine claim found in biblical accounts of good or righteous human action. Drawing on the criticisms of the anthropologist Tim Ingold of what he calls the “map-making fallacy,” the paper concludes by suggesting the methodological importance of understanding the orientation of the Christian life to be a fundamentally grounded in interpersonal responsivity.

American evangelicals and the 1960s

In late 1970s, New Christian Right emerged as a formidable political force, boldly announcing itself as a unified movement representing views of a moral majority. But that movement did not spring fully formed from its predecessors. American Evangelicals and 1960s refutes thesis that evangelical politics were a purely inflammatory backlash against cultural and political upheaval of decade. Bringing together fresh research and innovative interpretations, this book demonstrates that evangelicals actually participated in broader American developments during the long 1960s, that evangelical constituency was more diverse than often noted, and that notion of right-wing evangelical politics as a backlash was a later creation serving interests of both Republican-conservative alliances and their critics. Evangelicalism's involvement with - rather than its reaction against - main social movements, public policy initiatives, and cultural transformations of 1960s proved significant in its 1970s political ascendance. Twelve essays that range thematically from oil industry to prison ministry and from American counterculture to Second Vatican Council depict modern evangelicalism both as a religious movement with its own internal dynamics and as one fully integrated into general American history.

Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief &amp; the Borders of the Self

Misty G. Anderson. Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 296 + xii pages. $65.Misty Anderson's study of how Methodism was represented in eighteenth century, Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self, opens up her subject into broad historical narratives about gender, sexuality, relationship between Christianity and secular, and, indeed, very nature of identity itself, all without losing its grounding in dense, evidential detail drawn from a dazzling array of diverse sources. In book, close readings work dialectically with important theoretical and political concepts instead of being driven and constrained by them. While focused on answering a very specific question-not what Methodism was but how Methodism was imagined in eighteenth century-Anderson's analysis of print texts from novel to hymn, of visual representations, and of embodied performances presents new ways of thinking about just religion but also gender, sexuality, and such bedrock modern concepts as the self. This is a book with its telos in any one theoretical camp or subdivision of cultural studies, though it has its roots in many. Imagining Methodism starts with an openeyed, honest interest in figuring out what Methodism and Methodists meant to eighteenth-century British publics and individuals. In process of that investigation, Anderson contributes invaluable, field-changing insight to queer, feminist, materialist, and performance-oriented work on early modern Britain and its place in history of the modern.Of course, as introduction amply documents, Anderson's focus on Methodism is hardly random but rather places her book in midst of historical debates over social relationships between various types of Christianity and alleged secularism emergent with European Enlightenment. There is a real need for good, historical, materialist work in this area. As Anderson points out, work of Marxist cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson and Max Weber tends to subsume religion into capitalist ideology as the Protestant ethic while Marxist literary critics like Ian Watt edge it out of their readings altogether to focus on an emergent, secularly motivated middle class and its realist aesthetic. Much otherwise excellent work in literary and historical cultural studies has been limited by this implicit alignment between secularism and progressive politics. Anderson joins cultural critics who are skeptical about dominance of skepticism by taking seriously proposition that Methodism, largest new religious movement in period and at heart of modern evangelicalism, might be intrinsic to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and its active negotiation of religion in 'a secular age,' which redefines rather than destroys modern belief (6). This is to say that Anderson embraces religion over secularism as key to understanding formation of modern identities. As she puts her argument, it is not that secular and religious capture complete horizon of possibility in project of modernity, but that their opposition achieves a cultural dominance that defines era (11).The concept of self is central to Anderson's cultural analysis, a turn back to an older term and away from well-theorized, post-structuralist preference for subjectivity. Of course, Anderson has strong methodological backup in Dror Wahrman's The Making of Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England on historical formation of modern gender identities, but her choice is primarily historical; she takes her definition of term back to John Locke's conscious, thinking thing, individual consciousness. The Lockean self links this consciousness with sensation, opening itself up to feeling as well as thought. …

Stale Expressions: the Management-Shaped Church

Managerialism in the Church is rooted in the very character of Reformation theology. The letter's understanding of salvation as imputation and its reduction of the importance for salvation of belonging to the Church encourages the idea that there is a religious 'product' which can be managed and marketed. Modern evangelicalism consummates this tendency and uniquely allows a combining of the capitalist product with the capitalist actor. 'Fresh Expressions' in the Church of England fuses this trend with a liberal ideology of choice and the assumption that parish life must inevitably decline. The new modes of Church which it sponsors deny the very idea of the need to encounter different others in a specific locality which is crucial to the Pauline notion of the Body of Christ. It is hence a misconstrual of Christianity as such.

THE NEW AMERICAN HISTORIES

For at least a decade, many American historians have bemoaned the downfall of synthesis in the writing of the history of the United States. A wide variety of subfields has replaced a single national narrative. This fragmentation has been caused in part by methodological changes in the historical profession worldwide, but also because of the collapse of American exceptionalism. However, there are still some distinctly American themes that are interwoven throughout these subfields. These themes include the rise of transnational and regional history as replacements for an exceptional national history, and above all the influence of the American present on the study of the American past. This article summarizes the apparent fragmentation of the history of the United States before discussing some of the distinctively American themes that remain. The article then focuses in detail on five subfields in modern American history – the new western history, the new history of the segregated South, the cultural turn in Cold War history, and the histories of modern conservatism and modern evangelicalism – to show how these distinctively American themes recur in seemingly disconnected debates.

That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century. By D. G. Hart. (Chicago: Dee, 2002. x, 246 pp. Cloth, $24.95, ISBN 1-56663-460-1. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 1-56663-459-8.)

Modern evangelicalism is a curious blend of age-old belief and cutting-edge technology—a movement that advocates primitive biblical truth through the Internet, contemporary Christian music, and slickly designed, bestselling novels. In this insightful book, D. G. Hart explores how these tendencies developed as evangelicals became both outsiders and insiders in America, advocating an “old-time religion” in distinctively modern ways. Ironies abound in the story. Although evangelicals make up the membership of some of the nation's largest churches, they often perceive themselves as a persecuted minority in a progressively secular America. Hart traces evangelicals' sense of marginalized status to the early twentieth century. While evangelicals once flourished within mainline Protestant denominations, this evangelical dominance collapsed in the 1920s, when Protestantism divided in controversies between modernists and fundamentalists. While modernists prevailed in mainline denominations, advocating the need to modernize biblical interpretation and Christian doctrine, conservative evangelicals became religious and cultural outcasts, withdrawing into fundamentalist subcultures to protect biblical inerrancy and traditional doctrine. Beginning in the 1960s, evangelicals pressed back into mainstream society, increasing their political opposition to America's growing secularization and struggling to restore the nation's Christian heritage. But if the America of the latter twentieth century was different, so was evangelicalism. The traditional faith had developed progressive strategies.

“We Have Heard the Joyful Sound”: Charles E. Fuller's Radio Broadcast and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism

The message that Grace Fuller had awaited for years arrived at her cabin in the San Bernardino mountains. Here, she sought relief from the Southern California heat that aggravated her tuberculosis, for which there was no easy treatment in 1916. Her husband, Charles, had gone to church alone in Los Angeles to hear Paul Rader, the boxer-turned-evangelist. There, Charles converted to fundamental Christianity. Unable to contain his excitement, he informed her of his call to missions, probably Africa. Certain the heat would do her in, Grace's gratitude for Charles's religious experience was tempered by the idea of being a missionary. She thought to herseif, “I'll go with him anywhere in the world, but oh, my goodness, I hope it isn't to a hotclimate!”