Like many other Christians I am now wary of the word "Evangelical" as a descriptor. The hijack of this historic word by the Christian Right in the United States has rendered the word problematic. Historically the descriptor Evangelical was a defining term that did not set out to be exclusive. Yes, it is specific, has its own criteria both agreed and contested, but it was always within those critieria a diverse and trans-denominational movement.
The recent events in the United States did not just happen unexplained and unanticipated. They are part of a contiuum of events that began around 70 years ago in post was America, and in a society seeking new purpose, new motivations, and a renewed sense of destiny. This book traces the history of American Evangelicalism, and the author is very aware that the geographic adjective is a major qualifier. The developments in the United States are culturally conditioned and therefore have a different history, genealogy and social context. The result is a form of Evangelicalism deeply rooted in American culture and drawing nutrition from the American worldview, including exceptionalism, hunger for cultural conquest and economic dominance.
It is a long story, and Molly Worthen is a writer who has done her research, read the history, listened to the witnesses, analysed the data, and argued her central thesis with elegance and eloquence. This is a highly readable, widely sympathetic, and unflinchingly honest account of those 70 years, and without being gratuitously unfair or partisan in her conclusions.
What is impressive about this book is the conscientious use of sources and the application of sound analysis and historical imagination in teasing out the various strands that intertwine in the history of a movement so fluid, diverse and contested. There is no caricature, even of those who might seem targets for such crude and dismissive treatment. Billy Graham and Bob Jones, Carl Henry and Charles Fuller, Cornelius Van Til and R J Rushdoony, Francis Shaeffer and Tim Lahaye, Harold Lindsell and Hal Lindsey, Jim Wallis and Al Mohler are amongst the dramatis personae in a story where the rhetoric was often that of combat and battle, threat and crisis, culture war and battle for the Bible, and polarised in sloganised opposing camps as conservative and liberal.
The central thesis, the engine that drives this book, and which Worthen believes is the key to understanding the conflicted passions and persuasions of the protagonists, has been the crisis of authority surrounding the nature and status of the Bible. The most contested term has been inerrancy, and the stakes were set so high because the Bible was seen as a bulwark against communism, liberalised ethics, erosion of family values and latterly issues of abortion, pro-life and homosexuality. Once concede the absolute and final authority of the Bible, and the true faith was exposed to fatal compromise, doctrinal dilution and ethical relativism.
All of this Worthen chronicles with informed commentary. In doing so she explores the developments in education, seminary training, and the move towards winning control of the institutions of learning, publicity, denominational policy and mission and establishing public intellectual, ethical and theological values congruent with the political and missional aims of what has come to be known as the Christian Right. The chapter exploring the developments in the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decades of the 20th Century are particularly instructive. While Worthen does not bring her treatment up to the present time, the trajectories she traces, and the narrative flow of the story she tells, sheds considerable light on the motives and political goals of American Evangelicals and their relationship to the centres of power in Washington.
Along the way Worthen shows familiarity and a sure grasp of the implications of eschatology in the worldview and political visions of evangelical premillenial dispensationalism. She is especially sharp in observing the connections between such eschatology and responses to social issues such as poverty, oppression and systemic injustices such as slavery, racism and gender issues.
The crisis of authority in American Evangelicalism she traces to the long battle to establish the Bible as an authority above and beyond secular reason. She points out the uncomfortable process whereby the methods of achieving this have historically relied on rational categories and the desire to show the Bible as scientifically accurate. All this while at the same time reserving for the Bible a privileged and overriding authority not only in matters of faith, but as an account of sacred history and acts of God which are in theory scientifically explicable. Lurking beneath both the surface tensions and the deep fault lines of conservative evangelicalism is the question of who controls the definition, who defines the content of evangelical belief and who therefore is the gatekeeper as to who is out and who is in.
Worthen does a great service to evangelicals who want to understand what has been going on in the American evangelical cultures of the past 70 years. This book is helpful especially to those who do not buy into the Christian Right worldview but who nevertheless would call themselves evangelicals. Inerrancy is not and has never been the universally accepted or only way of construing the final authority of the Bible. Indeed Worthen's book would have been more valuable still had it included some consideration of the varieties of interpretive approaches used by evangelicals of various hermeneutic hues. But what she has given is an authoritative account, critical but not unsympathetic, nuanced but clearly argued, and leaving her readers better informed as to how on earth in a country proud of the separation of church and state, a self-defining Christian movement has won such influence at the heart of political power.
