Rhetoric Race and Religion
I’ve recently cracked open Matthew Hedstrom’s recently published The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom’s book is providing me with an opportunity to reconfigure my thinking and teaching on the respective trajectories of twentieth-century (and beyond) Protestant liberalism and evangelicalism.In recent decades pundits and some scholars have made much of the post-WWII evangelical resurgence, coupled with a precipitous post-1965 mainline decline. For evangelicals, the post-WWII religious boom kept going for the rest of the century, whereas in terms of membership, the mainline segment of that boom rather quickly went bust. As long as the Republicans were winning presidential elections with the robust support of evangelical voters, it seemed that evangelicals had swept the field of Protestant religion in the United States. In my own scholarship, I’ve at least partly supported this paradigm. When I examined Campus Crusade for Christ in the context of other Protestant campus ministries, it seemed fairly obvious that evangelicals had outperformed their mainline counterparts. I’ve also taught the story of post-WWII American religion roughly along such lines.
After 2008, I thought obituaries of the Religious Right were very, very premature. Come on, Republican Party. If you want to win an election, you may as well try to ride that horse one more time. I know Romney performed better than McCain among evangelicals, but I still think it’s much easier for the Republican Party to win a presidential election with a candidate with fervent evangelical support (this requires the rather delicate trick of not scaring the daylights out of everyone else in the country). But in the long run, I tend to agree with Albert Mohler that evangelicals had better get ready for a sojourn in the political wilderness. I remember (but could not find to link) a splendid editorial by the Christian Century’s David Heim (some uncertainty about the author) from quite a few years ago (presumably before the 2008 election) wryly encouraging evangelicals to enjoy their moment in the political and cultural limelight because it would prove fleeting. In a short time, they’d be with their erstwhile liberal Protestant bedfellows in the scrapheap of political history. Very prescient. [Blogging has its disadvantages, but it does allow the most tenuously sourced allusions].
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In