US Evangelicals Research Articles

Devotional fitness: aspects of a contemporary religious system

The aim of this paper is to describe some more or less representative groups within the area of devotional fitness in the USA, to compare their ideas­ to those held in Christian congregations in Germany and to extract some of the most important features of these movements. The descriptive section, ‘Examples of fitness in US evangelicalism’, will have a short look at three of these movements and then examine one of them more thoroughly, namely, the concept of ‘Shaped by Faith’. The next part of the descriptive section (‘Aspects of religion and fitness in Germany’) will look into the connections between sports and religion in Christian congregations in Germany. In the third section, some of the historical trajec­tories which have influenced contemporary body ideals in both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ contexts in the United States and Germany are briefly described. In the analytical section, the material is screened for striking similarities and recurring motifs and a preliminary definition of ‘devotional fitness’ is suggested. One particular feature of these currents, the blurring of genres, is dealt with more thoroughly in section ‘The blurring of genres in devotional fitness’. The article ends with some ideas as to how these concepts of devotional fitness could be researched within the analytical frame of cultural semiotics.

Scales of religio-political action: The local and the ‘civil’ in contemporary US evangelicalism

It is often assumed that religio-political action must necessarily take place on the socio-spatial scales of the urban, national, or global. This view stems from a more fundamental assumption that modern religious action occurs at a local, private scale, and its political expression is a challenge to the supra-local scales of the state, the market and civil society. This notion is integral to the macro-sociological concept of desecularisation. Through a detailed empirical analysis of a recent, high-profile instance of religio-political action – the 2008 Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency – this paper argues that certain instances of such action are misunderstood if seen as inter-scale conflicts of desecularisation. Instead of mobilising individuals for broader scale state-political action, some types of religio-political action can mobilise individuals for a locally scaled, non-political religious action.

The Evangelical Roots of US Africa Policy

Within the last 15 years, several factors (including the spectacular growth of their missionary activities in Third World countries) have transformed US evangelicals from staunchest isolationists to enthusiastic internationalists. Successful coalitions with other groups (like ethnic lobbies and humanitarian NGOs) and a receptive Bush administration have helped them gain unprecedented influence in US foreign policy towards the less developed world. Their influence in Washington's Africa policy (especially in relation to Sudan and foreign aid) is probably much deeper, more consistent and more able to survive a change of administration than the evangelical impact on any other area of US external relations.