Browsing by Author "Wacker, Grant"

How did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.

This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.

This dissertation charts the history of evangelical Christian influence in American criminal justice and prisons in the second half of the twentieth century. A work of cultural history that draws upon archival sources, newspapers and magazines, governmental records, and interviews, it explores the connection of the dramatic rise in imprisonment and the surge in evangelicalism’s popularity during this period. Evangelicals outpaced nearly all other religious and social constituencies in their interest in crime and punishment. They led the way on all sides of political battles regarding criminal justice and incarceration: some pushed for “law and order,” while others launched reform efforts. They built ministries to delinquents and inmates, revolutionizing prisons’ religious culture. In sum, this dissertation’s central argument is that crime and prison concern are central to evangelical entry into American public life, and that one cannot understand the creation, maintenance, or reform of modern American criminal justice without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact. This dissertation makes two additional arguments about the precise relationship of evangelicalism to mass incarceration. First, evangelicals not only lobbied for policies and voted for politicians that helped build America’s carceral state, they also helped make these changes appealing to other citizens. Unlike much of the previous work on twentieth-century evangelicalism (particularly their influence in politics), this dissertation frames the movement not in terms of backlash or culture warring, but consensus. Postwar evangelicals framed their own religious movement as reputable, racially moderate, and politically savvy, and they helped to do the same for the cause of punishment, bolstering law enforcement’s “neutral” quality, colorblind aspirations, and respectable status. Second, this dissertation argues for the political import of evangelical soul saving, often overlooked by scholars who characterize the movement’s conversionism as individualistic or neglectful of issues of social change. I show how, though unapologetically spiritual in focus, evangelical concern with crime and punishment opened the eyes of some conservative Protestants to the needs of juvenile delinquents and prison inmates, leading them to solidarity with offenders and new forms of reform work.

This dissertation introduces readers to the major figures and features of the twentieth-century American prosperity gospel. It argues that these diverse expressions of Christian faith-fuelled abundance can be understood as a movement, for they stem from a cohesive set of shared understandings. First, the movement centered on Faith. It conceived of faith as an "activator," a power given to believers that bound and loosed spiritual forces and turned the spoken word into reality. Second and third respectively, the movement depicted faith as palpably demonstrated in wealth and health. It could be measured in both in the wallet--one's personal wealth--and in the body--one's personal health--making material reality the measure of the success of immaterial faith. Last, the movement expected faith to be marked by victory. Believers trusted that culture held no political, social, or economic impediment to faith, and no circumstance could stop believers from living in total victory here on earth. Though its origins lay in the late nineteenth century, the prosperity gospel took root in the Pentecostal revivals of the post-World War II years. It reached maturity by the late 1970s as a robust pan-denominational movement, garnering a national platform and a robust network of churches, ministries, publications, and media outlets. Using the tools of ethnography and cultural history, this dissertation argues that faith, wealth, health, and victory served as the hallmarks of this American phenomenon.

This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian identity. The history that is told in this work is that of a century-long struggle by American Indian Pentecostals for autonomy, leadership, and recognition within the Assemblies of God. I argue that the AG's efforts to establish indigenous churches in its home missions work to American Indians bore two important and largely unanticipated consequences. The first was that it prompted American Indian Pentecostals to forge a new identity: fully Indian and fully Pentecostal. The second was that it forced white Pentecostals to own up to their belief in the indigenous principle: that God's Spirit fell equally on peoples, without regard to ethnicity or social standing. I focus mainly on giving voice to the Pentecostal Indian actors in this history, in order to fill in the gaps on a group of modern Pentecostal believers that were almost never written about in the histories of the movement.

I have rooted this work in the history of American religious history, as well as Native American history and the history of American Pentecostalism. The majority of the sources come from the Assemblies of God's archives, chiefly, ministerial files, Pentecostal periodicals, letters, tracts, meeting minutes, and self-published autobiographies.

Scholars, journalists, and religious leaders in the twentieth century widely hailed The Christian Century as the most influential Protestant magazine in America. This dissertation investigates the meaning of such praise. In what ways, and upon whom, did the Century exercise influence? Answering this question directs attention not only to the Century's editorial content but also to the cultural role of magazines and the makeup of the Century's audience, an elite group of white American Protestants who had no collective name for the first half of the twentieth century but came to be called the Protestant mainline.

I focus on the editorial tenure of Charles Clayton Morrison, who bought an obscure Disciples of Christ periodical at a sheriff's sale in 1908 and transformed it, over the next 39 years, into the flagship magazine of liberal Protestantism. Attending to the Century's history as well as its rhetoric, I find that the magazine had a deep effect on its readers but a limited effect on American Protestantism as a whole. Most American Protestants never read the Century or accepted its theologically and politically liberal messages. The mainline, while certainly powerful, was never mainstream.

Studying the Century reveals how the mainline evolved in terms of membership levels, core emphases, and posture vis-à-vis other religious traditions. Likewise, the Century clarifies the role of the mainline as the dominant Protestant tradition in America. If dominance is understood to mean control of positions of power, a plausible case can be made for the dominance of both the mainline writ large and of the subset of this group who read The Christian Century. If dominance has anything to do with numerical preponderance, however, or with the ability to build consensus around key ideals, the supremacy of the mainline should be reexamined.

Lofty estimates of the Century's influence presuppose a transmission model of communication in which the primary role of a periodical is to convey information that alters readers' thinking. The Century did convey information to its readers, but the greatest service the magazine performed was to confirm readers' identity as central figures in the growth of what its editors deemed a vital, progressive, but by no means universally accepted form of Christianity. The Century spoke to its 35,000 readers more than it spoke for them, and those readers frequently felt like members of a beleaguered minority rather than a triumphal majority.

Throughout its upward climb, the Century's rhetoric ran ahead of its accomplishments. Without ever amassing a wide readership, it declared itself the rightful representative of American Protestantism. The Century's rhetoric of unified, progressive, and culturally dominant Protestantism proved compelling, but it obscured many complexities. Examining the Century's struggles to define itself and remain financially viable in its formative years brings to light the difficulties inherent in any attempt to lead America's fractious Protestants.

This dissertation begins with questions about the epistemic methods that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American Protestants used to create confidence in new religious ideas, and particularly the role of scientific rhetoric in this confidence making. It concentrates on early Protestant fundamentalists and the emergence of dispensationalism modernism. Distinct from dispensational premillennialism--a set of theological ideas about prophecy belief and the end times--dispensational modernism was a constellation of epistemic ideas and methods used to interpret texts and time.

Historians have traditionally portrayed fundamentalists and dispensationalists as anti-modern, reactionary foes of modern scientific reasoning. Yet early dispensational thinkers created new, modernist methods for readings texts (particularly the Bible) and structuring time (through elaborate interpretations of prophecy). These ideas emerged amidst popular beliefs about the power of quantification, classification, and scientific analysis to construct firm religious knowledge. While liberal higher critics adopted practices of interpreting texts in light of the times--particularly historicism--dispensationalists took a contrary approach and interpreted the times in light of the text of the Bible. Seeing time as divinely ordered and classified with distinct divisions, dispensationalists argued that the meaning of time came from without, through supernatural ruptures in the temporal order.

Dispensationalism thrived in the interdenominational networks of mainstream and conservative Protestant clergy who sought to retain intellectual authority for biblical interpretation. As knowledge production became increasingly specialized and professionalized--the domain of elites--dispensational methods provided clergy means to navigate the tension between the need for specialized expertise and popular appeal. These ideas took canonical form in the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909 and still the best-selling reference Bible in American history. The reference notes in Scofield's Bible--condensed expert interpretations and taxonomic divisions--promised methodological proficiency and theological confidence to anyone who studied it.

Christian engagement with beauty contests shifted dramatically between the initial Miss America pageant in 1921 and its 90th anniversary in 2011. This dissertation explores how and why many Christians found the organization an institution worthy of partnership with the church. It examines three aspects of Christian involvement in the contest: the long history of beauty pageants, the persistent emphasis on individual physical attractiveness, and the idea of witness in southern evangelical culture. It argues that after 1965, at least two factors enabled the unlikely marriage of Christians and the Miss America Organization: the perceived threat of second-wave feminism and evangelicalism's increasing desire to engage culture. In addition, Christian contestants gained rewards, both tangible and intangible, from their pageant participation. Most significantly for some Christian women, the competition functioned as an arena in which women could serve as Christian evangelists. Pleasure, prizes, performance, and purpose: contestants found all these and more on the stage. The goal here is not to prove that the Miss America pageant is somehow inherently religious, but rather that the Christians who participated in the contest were dealing with multiple expectations from church and culture that dictated, influenced, and explained their experience. This dissertation describes the place Christian women found in the Miss America pageant for their religious self-understanding. By telling the story of Christian women in a gendered and sexualized arena, I hope to emphasize the flexibility of gender roles and religious mores inherent in Christian participation.