I turned in my manuscript to Our God Is an Awesome Brand on the twilight of Eastertide earlier this month. When I sent in the manuscript to my editor at Brazos Press, I didn’t include a conclusion outside of the concluding chapter of the book. Since turning in the manuscript, I’ve spent some considerable time thinking about what an epilogue to the book would have looked like.
I’ve tried to demonstrate restraint in providing too many spoilers about the book, over the last couple years that I have been drafting it, in an effort to allow mystery and surprise to drive continued interest in the project. Frankly, I also have restrained from joining in a few recent public conversations about evangelical history because I also didn’t really want to reveal my hand to early and undercut the significance of this project as a contribution to the writing of evangelical history. However, I think now is a good and fitting time to unveil some of this material, even if intentionally obscured enough to not give away too much about it.
An Epilogue to Our God Is an Awesome Brand
You’re not supposed to save important arguments for after you’ve told the whole story. Usually, you foreground the story in those arguments, just in case you lost people along the way. I chose not to do this because I wanted my arguments to emerge inductively out of my research and storytelling. Moreover, I didn’t wish to make claims that historical evidence did not support. Thus, an epilogue proves to be a helpful addition to this book.
On the other hand, an epilogue is also a fitting place to say mea culpa (my bad). I anticipate that Our God Is an Awesome Brand will not meet everyone’s expectations. I know that I did not write the book some readers wanted. Perhaps they will think I pulled my punches or that I punched too hard. Perhaps my coverage did not meet expectations. Perhaps I didn’t talk about the heroes or the villains of some readers’ evangelical stories.
Candidly, writing the exhaustive and definitive historical treatment on evangelicals is as probable as reconciling an optical illusion in a piece of M. E. Escher art. Nonetheless, briefly I will attempt to justify and explain what I intended to accomplish in this book and why I underwent the journey to craft this history.
Many scholars have contributed delicious items for us to taste, to have a more robust flavor profile of who evangelicals are. The skillful and creative scholarship of R. Lawrence Moore, Bethany Moreton, Tim Gloege, Kathryn Lofton, Matt Sutton, Kristin Du Mez, Darren Dochuk, Nicole Kirk, Daniel Vaca, Molly Worthen, Isaac Sharp, Kate Bowler, William Schultz, and Sarah Hammond sat in the background and inspired this project. This book would not have become what it is without having first learned from these scholars. Some of these scholars focused on fundamentalists rather than evangelicals. Others looked at later evangelicals. I hope what I have accomplished is that I have pulled together some of the underlying tasty morsels that these scholars have produced and then set the table for an ongoing feast.
I provided a series of origin stories that demonstrated the function of the liminal second world wartime era in the making of the evangelical brand. Doing so ought to have demonstrated continuity from the fundamentalists to the evangelicals, especially in regards to the militant and political undertones of evangelical culture and how that shaped the brand and its expression. I highlighted the transition from premillennial fundamentalists to reformed evangelicals functioning as caretakers of the brand. I also highlighted the painstaking process of crafting a brand history that reflected the ideal values of a certain sort of evangelicals—white, male, reformed, respectable, middle-class protestants.
The stories I told highlighted this establishment leadership and the ones who exerted an oversized influence over the brand. I especially emphasized their role as spokespersons, institutional organizers and leaders, publicists, and makers of the brand and writers of its history. One might say that this was a self-consciously evangelical whig history for the sake of interrogating the project of evangelical whig history and how it evolved.
Because I foregrounded one particular segment of the brand, I underdelivered on offering the full scope of the evangelical brand. Some of this was intentional. Part of brand segmentation is that there is never an exhaustive list of segments, companies, goods, and services. There are always newcomers who enter into markets. There are new technologies that redefine markets. There are also new markets created to draw in new makers and products. The openness of the market orientation prevents the possibility of providing an exhaustive and definitive statement about the evangelical brand.
Furthermore, at no point did I attempt to define evangelicals or claim that evangelicals can be reduced wholly and exclusively to a market-oriented definition. Evangelicals defy definition. As a social movement and -ism among all the other -isms of the nineteenth century, evangelicals have proven to be nimble. They pivot and evolve from one generation to the next. They have a heritage of being cautious to not allow themselves to be “canceled” or to be on the wrong side of history; nearly to a fault they have been non-committal in respect to certain culture issues, until they have been able to read the winds and forecast the current of culture. Once cultural and political virtues or winners are identified, evangelicals tend to enter the fray late and loud, as if they always had been there. When evangelicals have been on the wrong side of an issue, they later diminish this failing or revise this past to understate their role in it. Bearing these impulses in mind, at any given time in evangelical history and in any given geography where evangelicals have been present, at best we can describe them, as they really lived, in that time and place.
Throughout their history we might be able to identify the following evangelical segments: 1) Reformed, 2) Methodist, 3) Holiness, 4) Premillennial/Fundamentalist, 6) Pentecostal/Charismatic, 7) Mainstream, 8) Anabaptist, 9) Cathlo/Anglo-liturgic, 10) Christian Nationalist. Again, this is in no way an exhaustive list. Nor did I successfully provide a full profile of these segments. Some of these segments were not discussed in this book. Perhaps one day I will do so. These segments fall along continuums that may be described as politically left or right, and they may be pacifist or militarist. Some of these segments span these spectrums and have constituents at various points along that spectrum. Some segments focus on more of an organic and vineyard mindset as opposed to a trellis or factory mindset, of institutional and organizational philosophy and structure. Certain segments may be more inclined to statist rather than anti-statist mindsets.
Evangelical origin stories have been inspired by key figures who felt called to disrupt and challenge the establishment or status quo. Thus, throughout evangelical history, developments in the brand have involved anti-clerical clericalism. Disruptors challenged the establishment clerics and created new pathways for new sorts or styles of clerical leadership. Because disruptors have to create new institutions and structures, they often have a self-conscious obscurantist and anti-intellectual identity, until they may go about the hard work of creating new intellectual institutions that dogmatize and indoctrinate their followers into a new order of being. So, there is also a kind of anti-intellectual intellectualism that exists from generation to generation of evangelicals, which might be demarcated by the birth of new evangelical educational institutions or movements to purge and purify traditional institutions that have become liberal or experienced a perceived spiritual or theological declension. Ultimately, every new development in the evangelical tradition has involved a sort of disestablishment establishmentarianism. The anticlerical disruptors have critiqued establishments and deconstructed them. They are those whose cries have been: “Tear the whole thing down and burn it to the ground.” In their minds a phoenix of genuine evangelical belief will re-emerge from the ashes. From those ashes a new, purer, and better establishment may emerge. These figures go on to creating new structures, organizations, publications, and centers of education to accomplish this mission.
In the evangelical past, some of the key figures who have disrupted the established order have included men like Philipp Jacob Spener, Count von Zinzendorf, George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Charles Grandison Finney. Again, the former list reflects the default establishment makeup of leadership. Later will come women like Phoebe Palmer and people of color like William J. Seymour, who will oversee major transitions in what it means to be evangelical.
Figures who have helped make and evolve evangelical identity organized meetings and conferences, crafted distinguishing statements of beliefs and practices, birthed societies and organizations, started publishing mills, educational environments, became cutting edge adopters and users of new technologies, or innovators of products and goods for evangelicals. Aimee Semple-McPherson adopted radio ministry as a cutting-edge way to build an audience. C. I. Scofield developed the bible study system credited to his name. Billy Graham filled stadiums as venues for conversion. Ken Taylor developed the New Living Translation. Beth Moore filled stadium for women to study the bible. SBC pastors started a prayer movement at school flagpoles. Rachel Held Evans leveraged social media and blogging to reach new audiences and get them to think differently about evangelical culture and theology. Charlie Kirk activated young people to be politically motivated, and their MAGA activity became inseparably intertwined and synonymous with evangelical identity. John Mark Comer rebooted interest in ancient practices of spiritual disciplines. I have told some of these stories in this book, but many of them I intentionally left out because others have told these stories or will tell them better than I. The parts of the evangelical brand story that have yet to be told I leave either for another installment to be written by me or for others far better equipped than me to tell those stories.
For those who have not been convinced that other tellings of the evangelical past shed as much if not more light upon the story than what a mere theological account of evangelicals can do, I leave you with a final insight. Fruits reveal roots. If the roots are theological rot, then the cultural fruits will be bad and should be burned up. While this is a profound biblical insight (Mt. 7.16–20), I sourced it more immediately from the pervasive attitude that overtook the American mindset at the dawn of the twentieth century. This American mood eventually propelled the evangelical brand and its makers forward up to the present.
At the turn of the twentieth century, William James, an American intellectual successor to Jonathan Edwards, articulated this insight in the first of his Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh. We might say that when James accepted the task to safeguard the inner life of the American mind, he borrowed largely from Jonathan Edwards to make a compelling argument, a pragmatic argument, that we would be known by our fruits; in other words, our experiences reveal our identities. James argued:
In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The roots of a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.
“In forming a judgment of ourselves now,” Edwards writes, “we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day.… There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence.… The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.”[1]
James was no evangelical by the standards of the day. In fact, the arguments he made here took his peers entirely by surprise. William James emerged as one of the early spiritual but not really religious, at least in the way we understand religion, figures of his day. He became a bit of a secular mystic. It is difficult to overstate the significance of his contributions to the fields of psychology and philosophy. This notion, that you will know them by their fruits, is possibly his earliest public articulation and commitment to what becomes known as philosophical pragmatism.
Those of us who are part of the inheritance of the American mind intuitively knows this as: if it works and is profitable, it must be true, right, and good. While aspects of this philosophical presupposition prove to be true, perhaps evangelicals uncritically have adopted this mindset to their detriment. You see, when other values intrude into the evangelical system, values that are part of economic and political systems that are not derivatively Christian, then the system itself becomes polluted with impurities. While on the surface the whole pragmatic system appears to thrive, it actually has been defiled and prevented from meeting its intended end.
I have done what I can to tell the story of twentieth-century origins of evangelicals and the worldview that they built. From its origins, there have been non-Christian values that have been integrated into evangelical identity and taken for granted as being distinctly evangelical characteristics. While they may have been distinctly American values, they nevertheless failed to meet the criteria of being genuinely Christian values. Evangelicals have not been able to eradicate these intrusions. Because these values have been fixtures to evangelical identity from its origin, they sometimes are not recognized as idols that have been smuggled into the evangelical temple. I hope I have, in some measure, identified these intrusions and indicated that they, indeed, are not unprecedented. I also hope I have helped you recognize some of the ways in which the evangelical establishment attempted to conceal unseemly aspects of evangelical identity in order to curate its brand image. May this revisionist intervention in evangelical history prove to be of some worth to assist genuine Christians to best move forward and construct a vision of Christianity that reflects the scope of the redemptive story and adopt the image of its main character, Jesus Christ.
[1] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 20. See Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, WJE, 2:441.
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