Browsing by Subject "Evangelicalism"

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.

A history of white supremacist ideology has long shaped white evangelical churches and their theology. This has never been more apparent since the election of Donald Trump and the response to the protests after the murder of George Floyd. Amid the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, white evangelical preachers sought to address race, racism, and racial justice. This thesis aims to articulate theological resources and homiletical strategies for white evangelical churches as they address racial injustice from the pulpit. Specifically, two predominately white evangelical churches in San Diego, which have a stated belief in and pursuit of racial justice, are studied, and the six sermons after the death of George Floyd are analyzed. The study and analysis of Park Hill Church and All People’s Church are placed in conversation with present antiracist scholarship. Examination of antiracist discussions will illuminate the homiletics of these two churches and lead to practical theological insights and biblical hermeneutics that pursue an antiracist imagination. This thesis concludes by suggesting three biblical passages, Amos 2, Matthew 15, and Acts 15, as biblical companions for imagining antiracist homiletics.

The current era of American Christianity marks the transition from a Western, white-dominated U.S. Evangelicalism to an ethnically diverse demographic for evangelicalism. Despite this increasing diversity, U.S. Evangelicalism has demonstrated a stubborn inability to address the entrenched assumption of white supremacy. The 1970s witnessed the rise in prominence of Evangelicalism in the United States. At the same time, the era witnessed a burgeoning movement of African-American evangelicals, who often experienced marginalization from the larger movement. What factors prevented the integration between two seemingly theologically compatible movements? How do these factors impact the challenge of integration and reconciliation in the changing demographic reality of early twenty-first Evangelicalism?

The question is examined through the unpacking of the diseased theological imagination rooted in U.S. Evangelicalism. The theological categories of Creation, Anthropology, Christology, Soteriology, and Ecclesiology are discussed to determine specific deficiencies that lead to assumptions of white supremacy. The larger history of U.S. Evangelicalism and the larger story of the African-American church are explored to provide a context for the unique expression of African-American evangelicalism in the last third of the twentieth century. Through the use of primary sources — personal interviews, archival documents, writings by principals, and private collection documents — the specific history of African-American evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s is described. The stories of the National Black Evangelical Association, Tom Skinner, John Perkins, and Circle Church provide historical snapshots that illuminate the relationship between the larger U.S. Evangelical movement and African-American evangelicals.

Various attempts at integration and shared leadership were made in the 1970s as African-American evangelicals engaged with white Evangelical institutions. However, the failure of these attempts point to the challenges to diversity for U.S. Evangelicalism and the failure of the Evangelical theological imagination. The diseased theological imagination of U.S. Evangelical Christianity prevented engagement with the needed challenge of African American evangelicalism, resulting in dysfunctional racial dynamics evident in twenty-first century Evangelical Christianity. The historical problem of situating African American evangelicals reveals the theological problem of white supremacy in U.S. Evangelicalism.

“The Touch of the Word: Evangelical Cultures of Print in Antebellum America” analyzes the reception of evangelical print media among everyday Americans in the antebellum period. I focus on the practices of readers who received publications produced by the American Tract Society, the publishing giant that circulated over five billion pages of books, tracts, and newspapers between 1825 and 1860 in hopes of converting the nation to Christianity. While scholars typically approach printed media as containers for words, I argue that the antebellum reading public encountered proliferating religious print as a visual, tactile, and affective experience in ways not usually associated with Protestantism, let alone evangelicalism. The product of intensive archival research in over a dozen repositories, “The Touch of the Word” tells a new story about popular religion by recovering three predominant ways in which Americans sensorially encountered the material power of religious print media: as burdens, as objects of desire and consumption, and as sites for appropriation and play.