How Distinctive Are Evangelicals, Really?
(ANALYSIS) There’s this book that came out way back in 1998 that has a title that has to rank up there in my favorite ones of all time, “American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving.” It’s by Christian Smith and Michael Emerson.
They did a tremendous amount of work to generate the methodological scaffolding of the book, including doing in-depth interviews with dozens of evangelical Christians, along with some solid survey analysis.
The thesis of the book is that evangelicalism has benefitted from how it’s positioned itself in the broader culture of the United States. They call it “subcultural identity theory,” and it’s worth explaining.
Smith and Emerson contend that the real success of the evangelical movement in this country is how it’s managed to learn from the mistakes of both fundamentalism and mainline Protestant Christianity.
The widely held narrative around fundamentalists is that they felt very ostracized due to the perception of conservative Christianity in the wake of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
The dominant stance of this movement became “Let’s cloister ourselves over here in this corner of society. We will work on our own personal piety and devotion and the rest of the world can (quite literally) go to Hell.”
The mainline failed because it tried to be too much like the world. Sure, those churches still spoke about things like repentance and sin sometimes. But really, they became more and more like country clubs with every passing year.
And if it’s just the country club with a bit of religion, isn’t it just easier to skip the Jesus part and just head right to the golf course? For those who want to read more about this, I would strongly recommend this wonderful piece by N.J. Demerath III from 1995.
So evangelicals struck a middle path. They did not make the mistake of turning inward completely, nor did they capitulate to the larger culture either. Instead, they still managed to interact with the world just enough while maintaining their cultural distinctiveness on things like sexuality, abortion, divorce, etc.
This led to two really important sociological outcomes:
1. Evangelicals engaged with the world on a regular basis, which still afforded them the ability to try and bring new converts into the fold. I mean, can you really call yourself evangelicals if you don’t actually evangelize? So, they still kept some lines of communication open with the larger culture.
2. This engagement with the world also helped strengthen intergroup ties. By bumping up against the culture on a regular basis, it reminded evangelicals why they were so different from the world around them. They would see people around them drinking, smoking and “sinning” in various ways and made them realize how they had to stand firm against all the temptations that could easily sway them away from the fold.
In other words, they constantly felt a sense of embattlement against the larger culture, and that was the engine that led to their subculture thriving.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.