Finally got around to reading Jay Tolson's U.S. News cover story "The New Old-Time Religion."
It's a pretty good sweeping overview of the history of the notoriously hard-to-define religious current that is evangelical Christianity in America. Tolson talks to several of the usual suspects, including the three historians who are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand these "evangelicals" who, Gallup tells us, constitute 4 out of 10 Americans. Those three would be George Marsden and Nathan Hatch, of Notre Dame, and Mark Noll of Wheaton College. (Noll's 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, is still the one book I would urge anyone to read to understand this tradition/subculture.)
Some highlights from Tolson's article:
Theologically conservative African-American evangelicals and a minority of white evangelicals combine to make the evangelical perspective a force to be reckoned with inside the Democratic Party.
What Tolson doesn't say is that, according to research by John C. Green at the University of Akron, that "minority" may be as large as 10 million voters. (Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.)
More theologically informed readings of Scripture might also have discouraged the fundamentalists' use of biblical prophecy as what Noll calls "a complete and detailed preview of the end of the world" — often for dubious political purposes. Most evangelicals, for instance, have sensible reasons for their support of Israel, including respect for its democratic institutions. But fundamentalist zealots who base their uncritical support on end-times scenarios are so mechanistic in their use of Scripture that they view even President Bush's effort to negotiate a peace settlement as a betrayal of prophecy.
Mark Noll is no fan of the Left Behind books either.
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