Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

After news this week of Mark Driscoll's homophobic facebook status, the emergent church again pops into the news cycle. For those of you not in the an emergent hotbed like Knoxville, the term might be unfamiliar. RiAH mentioned the emergent church while pointing to the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins back in May, so today's guest post tackles the label "emerging church." Our guest poster, Charlie McCrary, interviewed Bell for his thesis on Bell's evangelical anti-intellectualism. Charlie received his BA in religion from the University of North Dakota in May and begins the MA program in American Religious History at my alma mater Florida State University in the fall. His post reflects on Rob Bell, emergence, and the ambiguity of this very label. Charlie makes an excellent case for why scholars should be paying attention to the emergent church and their appeal as method to understand shifts in American evangelicalism.

Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

Charlie McCrary

The release of Rob Bell’s latest book, Love Wins, and the accompanying evangelical controversy thrust Bell into the broader American consciousness. CNN ran multiple stories about him, and Good Morning America hurried to book him. However, most media outlets, made suddenly aware of Bell, struggled to contextualize him. Most Christian media chose either to condemn or celebrate the book, and thus the “secular” media reported primarily on the theological brouhaha. Measured attempts to understand and analyze Bell and his context were almost completely absent.

Most categorizations of Bell associate him with the “emerging church” (or, sometimes used synonymously, the “postmodern church.”) This term is potentially useful, but it lacks a consistently helpful definition. This is due in part to the fact that many who use the term do so in order to stigmatize certain theological positions and not to analyze evenhandedly. In addition, many figures to whom the label is often applied tend to resist the label. The emerging church movement—or, “conversation,” as many would have it—is necessarily amorphous, as most within it recoil at “dogmatic” epistemological certainties and tend toward apophatic (de)constructions of theology. Also, a main feature of the movement is “cultural relevance,” and thus emerging folks tend to reinvent themselves fluidly.

Granted, it can be difficult to come up with some useful analysis for a group so diverse it includes Bell, Peter Rollins, Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, and Scot McKnight. That being said, I think there are two foundational points we should be able to use as our bases for inquiry about the emerging church. First, the word “emerging” itself implies a sort of protest, naturally prompting the question, “emerging from what?” The emerging movement should be seen as a self-conscious reform movement. Most emerging leaders’ books take the form of a response, a correction or expansion of the ideas with which his/her target audience is familiar. This leads to the second point: the emerging church is an evangelical movement. While the term “evangelicalism” is not easily defined and carries a variety of connotations, enough literature and use has been devoted to it that we at least have a sense of what it means. Emerging churches, by and large, function in typically evangelical ways, from the styles of worship music and preaching to the pastors’ book deals with Zondervan. The structure of an emerging church service or the layout of the sanctuary is usually much closer to an average Southern Baptist gathering than a liturgy- and doxology-infused Presbyterian service or a Catholic mass.

Furthermore, the form of Christianity from which emerging folks seek to emerge is usually some version of conservative evangelicalism. Emerging leaders have taken issue with prudish views of sex, a lack of care for the poor, the arrogance of systematic theology, the non-tenability of biblical literalism and young-earth creationism, and more. Given the above description, one might be tempted to characterize the emerging church as simply liberal Protestantism (and some critics have done this.) However, this characterization elevates the theological above all else and ignores the style, the aesthetic, the language, and all the other elements of the evangelical habitus, most of which remain alive and well in emerging churches. In this somewhat paradoxical way, the movement exists as a sort of protest against certain aspects of evangelicalism yet staged by individuals and communities who seek to do so within a steadfastly evangelical context. This is why emergence tends to be popular among college students and in cities with significant young-adult populations; students from evangelical backgrounds go to college and inevitably read Derrida or take a course on biblical literature/history or biology and experience cognitive dissonance. Rather than the two older options, covering one’s ears and claiming that “the world” is out to destroy one’s faith or abandoning religious belief (or at least evangelicalism) altogether, the emerging church represents for many a middle path, so to speak.

So why should scholars care about the emerging church? There are many reasons, but I think the significance of the movement can be summed up with temporal tropes: when we think of the emerging church, we are thinking of a group (or groups) of evangelicals who seek to emerge from the past and shape a new reality for themselves in the present. In turn, this will shape the future of American evangelicalism.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to conduct a mini-interview with Rob Bell via email. In his response to one of the questions he wrote, “People are desperate for narrative — a big story, something large enough to live for. That’s the question right now for millions — is there a story? One we can trust? I say yes. The other stories have failed, which, of course, creates all sorts of new opportunities.” The task for scholars is to identify and analyze what those “other stories” are, why they have failed Bell and his audience, and what “new opportunities” will be seized and what they mean for the future of American evangelicalism.

You Say Evangelical, I Say Evangélico

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Today's guest post is from Stephen Dove, a graduate student in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Guatemala where he is writing his dissertation about the ways Guatemalan Protestants in the early-twentieth century shaped the theologies and practices they received from missionaries. Dove aptly reminds us about the problems with some of the designations we use as scholars of American religion.

Stephen Dove

Summer is here, and for those of us who live in developing countries that means that missionary season has arrived as well. For the next few months, a steady stream of eager, well-intentioned groups in matching T-shirts will offer a visual reminder that U.S. religion—especially evangelical Protestantism—does not stop at the border. Seeing these groups interact with the non-U.S. churches they have helped create also serves as a reminder that our definitions of what are effectively international religious movements can become a little small when viewed exclusively through a U.S. lens.

Take “evangelical,” a label that applies both to most summer missionaries and also to most local churches here in Guatemala. In the U.S., the battle over that term has become increasingly narrow in recent decades as social and political conservatives have essentially elbowed all other Protestants into categories like mainline or liberal. A few outliers like Jim Wallis continue to fight for inclusion under the banner of evangelical, but for the most part, the word has moved closer and closer to being a synonym for conservatism in general. In Latin America, the past century has seen the exact opposite trend occur among evangélicos. This term has become the preferred self-referent for virtually all non-Catholic Christians from Pentecostals to strict dispensationalists to social progressives. This is a diverse bunch, which has led some scholars to caution (correctly) that evangélico does not have the same meaning as evangelical does in the U.S. However, the two groups do share some important foundational beliefs such as an emphasis on the authority of the Bible, a belief that personal conversion is essential, and an imperative to share their faith.

Because of these similarities (and no doubt also because of a love of bigger membership numbers), both U.S. evangelicals and Latin American evangélicos like to consider themselves part of the same team. This weekend, however, I was reminded again just how odd that pairing can sometimes be.

At its Sunday service (attended by at a least one U.S. evangelical mission group), a local church passed out a flyer for a Father’s Day gathering titled “Papás Revolucionarios,” complete with an illustration straight out of Communist propaganda: a woodcut of a stylized worker waving a red, revolutionary flag. This church, which matches theologically with U.S. evangelicals in most ways, was completely comfortable drawing on leftist political imagery to promote its event, and its leaders knew exactly what they were doing. This was not just a convenient clip art graphic or an ironic Jesus-as-Che-Guevara T-shirt worn by an edgy youth pastor. I doubt this particular church has many Communist sympathies, but they could nonetheless imagine the radical social revolutions of their own country’s past as a model for their spirituality. Somehow, I don’t see the same metaphor flying in the average U.S. evangelical congregation. Even left-leaning U.S. evangelicals like Wallis have distanced themselves from such imagery in the current political climate.

At the same time, I have no doubt that this church could turn around next week and draw on imagery from a law-and-order, right-wing political group to make a different point. The reality in Latin America is not that evangélicos are the opposite of their counterparts to the north or even that they can somehow hold people with opposing beliefs together. The truth is that many individuals who identify themselves as evangélico can shift back and forth depending on their context. Their tent is not just bigger; it’s also portable.

Understanding this form of evangelicalism is not just important to the U.S. because of the historical missionary connection. This other evangelicalism is also moving back across the border, not only through immigration but also through reverse missions. Latin American immigration is usually associated with Catholicism when it comes to religion, but in many Central American countries like Guatemala, as much as one-third of the population is evangélico, and the Pew Forum estimated a few years ago that 15 percent of U.S. Latinos are evangélico. The political arena is one place Latino evangélicos have shown their political malleability compared to traditional U.S. evangelicals, with a majority voting for George W. Bush in 2004 but Barack Obama in 2008. In both elections, however, a sizable minority voted the opposite way, again illustrating that this group does not fit easily into political and social categories. This is an important issue in North American religion now, but it is only going to become more so as the evangélico population grows in the U.S. and as Latin American churches build more and stronger relationships with their counterparts in the U.S., forcing both groups to evaluate where their identities merge and where they diverge.

Not into History

Randall Stephens

We've been having a lively discussion on this blog, thanks to Paul's post, and there have been other discussion raging in the blogosphere about David Barton and the uses and abuses of history. The selective use of anecdotes, prooftexts, and the decontextualized way of doing history are closely connected. And, thanks to David Barton and his recent headline grabbing, we have a case in point.

Suppose an amateur Bible scholar said "I know everything there is to know about the Old Testament books of Genesis and I and II Chronicles." Then imagine you asked him/her about what he/she knew about Bronze and Iron Age religion and society, or the development of monotheism in the ancient Near East, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the original languages, or the extensive secondary literature written by thousands upon thousands of scholars who know way more about the subject. Then suppose he/she replies "no" on every count. Now, how is it again that this person really knows something important about Genesis and I and II Chronicles? This is a Theron Ware situation if there ever was one. Ignorance of context sometimes gives people remarkable confidence!

Barton does not recognized the idea that the past is like a foreign country. Instead Barton tends to flatten out time and space and make it almost seem as if the Founders are our contemporaries, motivated by the same concerns that motivate us now. Yet people in the past--whether we're talking about leaders of Bronze Age tribes or bewigged 18th century nabobs who tinkered on their mansions, read Montaigne in their spare time, or enjoyed arm-chair speculation about nature and providence--are not the same as us. This seems like a kindergarten point, but it's apparently lost on David Barton. (See his famous and repeated misuse of the word "seminary," in which he makes no effort to explain how that word meant something markedly different in the 18th century.)

At the Way of Improvement Leads Home John Fea makes an excellent, related point about context and Barton's ignoring an avalanche of inconvenient information:

I challenge you to go to Wallbuilders website and find much of anything about the fact that the many of the most important founding fathers rejected orthodox Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the resurrection of Jesus. Good luck finding any sustained discussion about Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's successful attempt to separate church and state in colonial Virginia or the fact that their efforts were supported by evangelical Baptists with a theology similar to Barton's. These facts of history do not help Barton promote his ideological agenda, so why bother with them?

Right on.

Nearly any trained historian worth his or her salt who takes a close look at Barton and his hyper-politicized work will see glaring gaps in what he writes and talks about. He dresses his founders in 21st-century garb. He's not interested in knowing much about the history of colonial America or the US in the early republic. Why? Because he's using history to craft a very specific, anti-statist, Christian nationalist, evangelical-victimization argument in the present. (Remember the many unconfirmed quotations Barton used in the 1990s? He did so because, first and foremost, he was trying to make a political point.)

In history circles this is what we call "bad history."

The Scandal of the Evangelical Behind

Randall Stephens

I've been having the students in my Religion and American Culture class summarize news stories related to the course. One brought in a feature on an interesting study--presented at the American Heart Associations Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism/Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention 2011 Scientific Sessions in Atlanta. It reveals that young people who go to church regularly are more likely to tip the scales as adults than their non-religious counterparts.

Jeannine Stein of the Los Angeles Times reports:

An inactive lifestyle, watching TV and eating too many fatty foods are all to blame for many Americans being overweight and obese. We may have to add religion to that list. A study finds that young adults who regularly attend religious activities may be more prone to obesity by middle age than their nonreligious peers. . . . "It's possible that getting together once a week and associating good works and happiness with eating unhealthy foods could lead to the development of habits that are associated with greater body weight and obesity," said lead author Matthew Feinstein of Northwestern Medicine, in a news release. "We don't know why frequent religious participation is associated with development of obesity, but the upshot is these findings highlight a group that could benefit from targeted efforts at obesity prevention."

My one question . . . Why?

Evangelicalism, Continental Philosophy, and the Deconstructed Church

by Gerardo Marti

While completing my manuscript on race and music in multiracial churches (more on that at a later time), I've had opportunity to focus on some intriguing contemporary developments among Evangelicals which has drawn the attention of a few people across disciplinary lines. As an outgrowth of this research, and thanks to a wonderful invitation from philosopher Jack Caputo, I spent much of last week at Syracuse University participating in The Future of the Continental Philosophy of Religion conference.

The conference in Syracuse was quite an event, a gathering of around 300 philosophers from the US and UK who specialize in distinctive readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze and the like along with more recent thinkers like Zizek and Meillassoux (you can check out the conference program). I was pleased to hear Catherine Malabou, Thomas Altizer, and Merold Westphol interacting in sessions. With Harvey Cox, Clayton Crockett, and Philip Goodchild in the mix, it was really quite an occasion.

I was invited to present in a session on Peter Rollins, what I called "the phenomenon of Peter Rollins," as a means to explore one development in the Continental Philosophy of Religion. When I was invited to present, my response to Jack Caputo was something like,"You realize I'm a sociologist and not a philosopher, right?" They were quite willing to introduce a multi-disciplinary dialogue that described not only with the ideas of Peter Rollins but what he may represent as actions and movements in our broader religious context. With thirty minutes to share, I tried to unpack my best understanding of how Peter Rollins lies along a long path of renegotiating conservative Christianity that has been brewing for almost two decades.

Most of us know that the spectacular success of Evangelicalism in the 1970s through the 1990s created a self-sustaining Evangelical world—and that these successes created a backlash. Evangelical leaders came to seek ways to overcome the churched/non-churched divide. But the journey hasn’t been smooth.

As Evangelicals became attentive to creating a closed “Christian culture,” many disaffected evangelicals left their churches, becoming critics rather than compliant members. Listening to criticism from outside, atheistic thinkers resourced their critique. There emerged a number of Christian readers of secular philosophy who were pleased to take up an aggressive questioning of the certainty, “truth,” and the resulting morality and politics that came with it. Much of the underlying tone of such criticism draws on a hermeneutics of suspicion with its post-Marx, post-Nietzsche, and post-Freud sensibilities. Notions and paradigms promoted by these new "Christian" writers and thinkers is buttressed and often inspired directly by Continental Philosophy.

Attention to "postmodern thinkers" complimented a broader surge of interest in “postmodern philosophy” among Evangelical seminarians and church leaders. Christian publishers are still catching up to this hunger, producing more books building on recent philosophical work (e.g., Philosophy and Theology series from Continuum / T&T Clark and Church and Postmodern Culture series from Baker Publishing Group). In practice, a growing number of evangelical church leaders are moving from simple “Bible Study” to openly engaging Continental Philosophy through their books and concepts in small gatherings. On my twitter feed yesterday, I mentioned Gianni Vattimo's work, and that initiated a stream of follow-up discussions with fellow tweeps who pay attention to theology and religion.

This engagement with such deeply intellectual work represents a significant shift. Mark Noll in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind articulated the historical basis for anti-intellectualism among Ameircan Evangelicals. Now we are seeing more educated Evangelicals who are finding their religious frameworks “lag” behind the theoretical or epistemological/ontological sophistication of their schooling. They have fundamental critiques of what they see as “modern” ways of reading the bible (hermeneutics), organizing the church (ecclesiology), and assessing morality and devotion (spiritual formation) and are forming new types of Christian gatherings to express their developing values.

Continental philosophy "works" because it involves thinkers whose work invokes a sustained social critique. Continental philosophy is concerned with structures, underlying structures of society (often drawn from Marxist orientations) and underlying structures of the psyche (often drawn from Freudian orientations). A pursuit of uncovering the working of underlying, non-conscious, structures, cultivates observations that eventually can move to practical efforts in what to talk to people about (preaching), what humans are to become (evangelism and discipleship), how community is to be lived together (ecclesiology and “loving one’s neighbor”), and how to act in the world (duty to God and others). These writings provide resources for being prophetic to the church and to the world.

These intra-Evangelical critics have been helped by the “religious turn” in Continental Philosophy and the greater availability of religious thinkers in this vein as primary and secondary works were made more available at the same time as the disaffection and pursuit of alternative frameworks happened among evangelicals. This includes writings from and about Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Rene Girard, Jon-Luc Marion, Emmanual Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Nancy -- Slavoj Žižek,, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Gianni Vattimo). Jack Caputos’s appropriation of Derrida, Levinas’s rejection of Heidegger, Marion’s religious reinterpretation of phenemenologists, and more emerge amidst this re-thinking, aggressively incorporating insights from philosophers who engage in distinctive readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger.

In the conference, I dared to raise Peter Rollins to a more significant level by placing him in a broader socio-historical context. Trained in post-structural philosophy, with a PhD from Queens University in Northern Ireland, Rollins intellectually stimulating style of speaking, writing, and consulting fits efforts to flesh out Christianity in new ways that are sensitive to societal shifts and emerging sensibilities. In other words, the happenings around his person are a manifestation of changes across mainstream Christianity. So while Peter Rollins is an interesting person in and of himself, I moved away from assuming that compelling ideas from a single, charismatic leader initiates social change. Instead, Peter Rollins unique “ministry” (which I place in quotes) is an interesting and timely development of American Christianity that finds resonance in the cumulative contradictions of modern Evangelicalism.

Overall, I suspect that Continental Philosophy is underpinning a profound reworking of theological questions including what is the church (ecclesiology), what it means to be human (anthropology), and how life is to be lived (ethics) -- at least for a significant segment of American Christians. Peter Rollins’s appropriation of Continental Philosophy fuels provocative practices in the form of preaching and new types of groups among those who resonate with his message. And it’s the practice of new religious gatherings (like "Pub Churches") that especially attracts the interest of this sociologist. If anyone can contribute any insight or corrections on this, I'm happy to interact on it.

Review of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt

Randall Stephens

Books & Culture posts part of my review of Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. Subscribe to Books & Culture--read loads of great on-line material and receive the print version.

"The Sunbelt Coalition: Evangelicals and Politics in a New Light"

In 1968, Christian Life magazine featured a story on "The Reagans and Their Pastor." The Hollywood-star-turned-governor explained: "While prayer always has been a part of my life, I have spent more time in prayer these past months than in any previous period I can recall." He had much to pray about in that rocky election year. But when not praying, Reagan now and then slipped into jeremiad mode. Mild-mannered and affable in the eyes of many, Reagan raged at that "mess in Berkeley." The cold warrior morphed easily into the culture warrior. Civilization seemed to be collapsing. Juvenile delinquents and their liberal élite enablers wanted to wreck the Golden State. In response, Reagan promised constituents that he would stand firm against hedonism, crime, and all manner of sin. And though the situation was grave, he was not above cracking a well-timed joke. The typical campus radical or hairy young libertine, Reagan famously quipped, "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheeta."

Southern California's conservative Christians, many who came out West from the southern plains, naturally took to the Gipper. He spoke their language. Darren Dochuk reflects on Reagan's popularity among those faithful in his wonderfully written and expertly researched From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism.

In the early 1970s, evangelicals halfheartedly supported Richard Nixon, who, along with being shifty, was once too cozy with silk-stocking Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller. Later in the decade, evangelicals from Atlanta to San Diego began to cast a suspicious eye on Jimmy Carter. In their view, the Baptist president from Plains, Georgia, was a liberal appeaser, soft on communism, and softer still on moral degeneracy (code for homosexuality, abortion, and feminism). Reagan, by contrast, would not vacillate on family values, thought supporters. Neither was he a seedy political chameleon. . . .

A sampling of other material in Books & Culture's Jan/Feb issue that might be of interest to readers of this blog:

Timothy Larsen
Faith Under Fire: Americans in World War I.

George Marsden
Invisible Faith: The Life and work of Henry Luce.

James L. Guth and Lyman A. Kellstedt
Why We Get Along: Religion and public life in the U.S.

John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
A Christ We Can Follow: The new kenotic theology

Robert Bruce Mullin
The First Great Schism: AD 400 to AD 600.

David A. Skeel
Emigrant Nation: Italy, giving and receiving.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
The Second Sex, the Second Time Around: A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking book.

John H. McWhorter
The Sondheim Reckoning: A composer speaks his mind.

Donna Freitas
Boy Books
An endangered species?

Otto Selles
Funny Girl: A memoir by comedian Sarah Silverman.

Stranger in a Strange Land: John Wilson
The Milosz Year: Longing for "the restoration of all things."

Alan Jacobs
Recommended Reading

God's Own Party: Interview with Daniel K. Williams, Part 1

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Baldblogger presents part 1 of an interview with Dan Williams, author of the recently published God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Find previous posts on Dan's book here and here. John Fea, over at The Way of Improvement Leads home, offers his take here. There's also a great audio interview at Barry Lynn's site Culture Shocks. Dan is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia.

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Baldblogger (BB): God’s Own Party maintains that in order to understand evangelical political ascendancy vis-à-vis the 1980 presidential election, one must begin by examining the culture wars of the 1920s. Briefly connect the dots for us. Why is it important to consider this historical trajectory in order to understand evangelical Christianity and modern Republican politics? Does this perhaps help to explain your choice of subtitle—The Making of the Christian Right—as opposed to The Making of the Religious Right?

Dan Williams (DW): The contemporary Christian Right subscribes to a particular view of the relationship between Christianity and the public sphere that can be traced back to the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century. Fundamentalists of the 1920s believed that secular influences threatened the nation’s Christian identity, and that if Christians did not enter the political arena to defend the nation’s Christian values, the nation would face divine judgment and possible destruction. The conservative evangelicals who formed the modern Christian Right in the late twentieth century held this same view of America’s unique religious identity and the necessity of preserving the nation’s Christian values by fighting secular influences through politics. The culture wars of the late twentieth century were thus very similar to the culture wars of the 1920s.

Even some of the particular issues at stake in those culture wars were similar. Fundamentalists of the 1920s were concerned about sexual licentiousness, changes in gender roles, the state of the family, and the secularization of public education. Evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s were concerned about these same issues. That’s not surprising, because late-twentieth-century American conservative evangelicalism was a direct theological descendent of early-twentieth-century fundamentalism. In fact, many of the conservative evangelical leaders of the late twentieth century had parents who had called themselves “fundamentalists” and had identified with the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s. Some had even worn that label themselves before exchanging it for the less pejorative term “evangelical.”

My book traces the story of evangelical political activism from the early twentieth century to the present, because the Christian Right is deeply rooted in the evangelical politics of the previous three generations. I think that some studies of the Christian Right have underestimated the connections between late-twentieth-century evangelical politics and those of an earlier era, but I think that one contribution that a historian can make to this discussion is to trace that political lineage.

Media reports of evangelical political activism in the 1980s commonly used the term “Religious Right” to refer to the movement, as though it were generically or ecumenically religious rather than distinctively Christian. During the 1990s, the phrase “Christian Right” became more common, perhaps because of the use of the term “Christian” in the most prominent Religious Right organization of the decade, the Christian Coalition. Today both terms are commonly used.

In my view, the term “Christian Right” is a more accurate descriptor, because the movement’s theology and worldview have always been distinctively Christian. Nearly all of the movement’s leaders have been evangelical Christians. Although a few Orthodox Jews and a number of conservative Catholics support some of the Christian Right’s goals, the movement’s leadership has always come from a rather narrow range of evangelical Christian denominations. And the movement’s history can be understood only in the context of the history of twentieth-century conservative Christianity, especially evangelical Protestantism.

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Read the rest of part 1 of my interview here.

Saving the World? The Changing Terrain of American Protestant Missions, 1910 to the Present

March 24-25, 2011

Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC

The Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College (IL), with a grant from the Lilly Endowment, is sponsoring a two-day conference at Duke Divinity School to explore the evolving nature of American Protestant missions since the famed Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910. Through lectures and panel discussion a number of distinguished scholars will examine the American mission enterprise over the last century while discussing the extent to which America continues to play a role in the shaping of global Christianity.

Participants include: Thomas Kidd (Baylor University), Mark Noll (University of Notre Dame), Robert Priest (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), Dana Robert (Boston University), Marsha Snulligan-Haney (Interdenominational Theological Center), Brian Stanley (University of Edinburgh), and Grant Wacker (Duke Divinity School)

For more information and to register, please visit isae.wheaton.edu/projects/final-conference.

On the Study of Evangelicalism in the Chronicle

Timothy Beal, "Among the Evangelicals: Inside a fractured movement," Chronicle Review, December 12, 2010
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. . . academic studies of American evangelicalism and related movements have been fairly few and far between compared with those of other religious subjects—such as early American religious history and religion and politics—and their authors have written primarily for audiences of their disciplinary peers. More recently, however, there appears to be a growing intellectual interest in the subject among nonevangelical readers and outside academe. Some of the most popular trade books on the subject are first-person accounts of non-Christians who have immersed themselves in particular evangelical or fundamentalist communities. Most notable are Jeff Sharlet's remarkable exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (HarperCollins, 2008), and Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University (Grand Central, 2009), that is, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Sharlet is a religion scholar and journalist, and Roose is a former Brown University undergraduate and now a writer. >>>

Jesus is My Friend

Randall Stephens

Hat tip to my co-author Karl Giberson for pointing me to this great video. If this is not already on-line at Christian Nightmares, it should be. The song and video is proof that reggae is not for everyone.

From Prize-Winning Dissertation to...

Today I received a copy of Darren Dochuk's long-awaited From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton).

The book's amazon.com release date is December 13, just in time to find its places under the Christmas trees of RiAH blog readers.

Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize as a dissertation, Darren's book is an erudite and persuasive account of how southern evangelical migrants transformed California's culture and politics.

"Rather than an invention of Falwell and Robertson's Religious Right," he argues, "evangelicalism's politicization was a product of an earlier time made possible by an earlier generation, a generation that came of age on the West Coast during Roosevelt's time, not Reagan's." Until recent years, historians have paid relatively little attention to what one might call the pre-history of the Religious Right. That, however, is no longer the case, as books ranging from Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors, Dan Williams's God's Own Party to Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart all provide careful analysis of how evangelicals gradually came to embrace conservative politics and free-market capitalism. Darren's book is a thorough culmination of this trend.

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt explores the religious and political interchange between the South and Southern California from the 1930s through 1980. "Jeffersonian Democratic" migrants quickly opposed California's version of the New Deal Coalition, constructed their own subculture of schools and organizations, and eventually helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency.

Several aspects of Darren's book thoroughly impress me. First, he very sensitively -- without a trace of scholarly condescension -- includes the voices of "plain folk," many of whom he interviewed for the book. Second, Darren mines untapped and rich veins of archival sources. Few historians have visited both the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Pat Boone Headquarters. He also gained access to the private records of many southern California churches. Finally, the book benefits greatly from Darren's clear and eloquent prose. Both specialists and students will find From Bible Belt to Sunbelt engaging and thought-provoking.

Buy it, read it, assign it.

Transatlantic Tea Party Time?

Hilde Løvdal

Central figures in the right wing Christian media in Norway have expressed a deep admiration for conservative American Christians. Now, they want to put on the Tea Party mantel.

“We won America, now we must win in Norway.” So said a writer in Norge IDAG, a right wing Christian newspaper, in the aftermath of the American election earlier this month. Editor Finn Jarle Sæle has time and again stated his admiration for Sarah Palin, and the editorial from the November 8, 2010 on the election clearly expressed his admiration for Tea Partiers:

. . . They won America.

Now we must do the same in Norway. We must, like them, say that Jesus is the foundation of our laws. That’s what Norway’s first national legislation stated at Moster in 1024 and repeated in the Constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814.

The time has come to bring Norway back to the precious principles of our Constitution. Our nation needs a change based on the rule of law, which our fathers gave us. This is how they think in America. They quote George Washington. He said nobody can rule a nation with justice without God and the Bible. They quote the man who abolished slavery, the great Christian president Abraham Lincoln, who said the Bible is the foundation for the law of the land.

The Tea Party says no to socialism and no to secularization. They have said a strong yes to liberty. They elected a libertarian, Rand Paul, to the Senate. Because they know that ultimate freedom, or libertarianism, comes with finding Jesus Christ.

We know that only good, old Jesusland has freedom and prosperity. And we think that those who take away the philosophy of Christ and remove Jesus from our schools, kindergartens, and Constitution, take away our freedom and our prosperity. They surrender us to a controlling state unequipped to give us either freedom or benefits. As a last resort, the state tries to save itself with more and more taxes and more and more control.

So let’s stand up in the spirit of Henrik Wergeland. Norge IDAG wishes to inspire extra-parlamentarian opposition, small and big tea parties. Soon, we too will win elections. We cannot follow the traditional methods that, for a long time, have led to losses for Christians. We win because we no longer just sit on the sofa. We win when we understand our possibilities as Christians. We are the largest people’s movement besides those that have formed around organized sports.

Our first task is to turn each pessimist into an optimist. We will claim God’s blessings over Norway. As before, Deut. 27 and 28 shall be fulfilled. When we follow God’s laws, we are the richest nation in the world. Then, we will start winning Nobel Prizes just as Israelis do. He puts us higher than any other nation, the Bible says, when we keep the covenant from Moster and Eidsvoll, which built Norway. It has helped our country so far, despite the infiltration of socialism and secularization . . .

This is just an excerpt, but you get the picture.

At a time when the more moderate Christian Democratic Party (est. 1933) struggles with massive loss of popular support and strives to find its way back to political power, right wing groups are networking heavily and taking cues from conservative American Protestantism.

Kristenfolket (The Christian People, or just The Christians), a coalition inspired by the Moral Majority, tries to encourage Norwegian Christians to vote for conservative political parties based on a nice bouquet of issues such as support for Israel, defense of traditional marriage, and Islamophobia. In 2009, Kristenfolket and other conservative Christians gathered at Moster, where the first national law based on Christianity was signed, to reclaim Norway for Christ and pray for God’s blessings over Norway. (If God really listened to their prayers, he must be a left wing social democrat.)

Whether they have actual political power or not is hard to estimate. But judging from their economy, they’re on the rise. While the Norwegian State Church, to which about 80% Norwegians belong, struggles to raise enough funds to create a reality show about the life of an ordinary minister, Visjon Norge, a charismatic right wing TV station has a record high offerings and a loyal base of viewers who donate money to the station.

As American style historical fundamentalism seems to seep into Norwegian fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and charismatic wings of Norwegian Christianity, I cling to the fact that Norway is a nation of coffee drinkers. I hope that keeps most of us sober.

Big Church

Randall Stephens

Big, bigger, biggest. Americans dig superlatives. I didn't know that as a kid when the Stephens clan attended the enormous College Church of the Nazarene in Olathe, Kansas. It was and still is one of the defining features of my home town. It looks a little like a massive brick wigwam, or an enormous brick-covered circus tent, or bricked mother ship, with docking stations, resting on the prairie. (When the main sanctuary was built around 1980 I don't think "megachurch" had yet entered the neologism lexicon.)

As a youngster, maybe I assumed that most other people, too, attended churches with 2,000-plus members. Our church had stadium seating and a passion play that brought acres of Jerusalem--hills, shrubbery, buildings, a tomb, the Last Supper tablescape--into our sanctuary. I did visit some Missouri Wesleyan and Nazarene churches out in the sticks that didn't have orchestras, so I suppose I did soon realize that not everyone was blessed with a sprawling church complex.

You could get lost in the basement halls of our church. (I still remember all the smells of that basement when we had to scurry down there in the late 1970s during a tornado. Odors of Play Doh mingling with mold, perfume, and Old Spice.)

I wonder what future generations of historians will have to say about the megachurch. (Surely, sociologists and suburban anthropologists have plenty to say about it now. So did Andrew Sullivan in his Conscience of a Conservative.) What does the megachurch tell us about religion in America in the last 20 years or so? What does the disdain that most critics have for them tell us? If we took a snapshot of American evangelicalism in the 1880s or the 1950s and compared that with the megachurch context of today, what contrasts would come into focus? (Matt Sutton found some roots of the phenomenon in Sister Aimee and Angelus Temple.)

An excerpt of an AJC piece on the ever-present megachurch:

Shelia M. Poole, "Megachurches: Supersizing Faith," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 6, 2010.

Rock climbing walls, kids' spaces that resemble small Disneylands, bookstores, state-of-the-art sound systems. It's church -- supersized. In metro Atlanta and elsewhere, the number of megachurches, which have long been defined as having a weekly attendance of 2,000 or more, are still drawing huge numbers of worshippers and receiving millions of dollars in the collection plate. "Megachurches have really succeeded because they service all needs of the community, the spiritual and the social," said Lerone A. Martin, an assistant professor of American religious history at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. . . .

These religious behemoths have received greater attention of late after a flurry of well-publicized litigation against one of the most mega of megachurches, the 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia. New Birth is named as a defendant in five lawsuits, four of which allege that its prominent pastor, Bishop Eddie L. Long, coerced four young men into having sex.>>>

Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, IX: Jedgar on Sunday School

Randall Stephens

Everybody ought to go to Sunday School,
Sunday School, Sunday School.
The mothers and the fathers,
and the boys and the girls,
everybody ought to go to Sunday School.*

Below is an excerpt from J. Edgar Hoover's article on the merits of Sunday School. (Subversives, he wrote, wanted to abolish it.) The piece, in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, appeared in Christian Life Magazine (May 1970). As I was flipping through the pages and stumbled on this, I did a double take. Yes, indeed, this was the J. Edgar Hoover stumping for a cherished institution of Protestant education. I take it that he wrote for other Christian magazines, too. Haven't seen him in CT, but perhaps he graced their pages as well.

J. Edgar Hoover, "The Sunday School Can Lead Us Back," Christian Life (May 1970)

Today the Sunday School is on the defensive. There are those who minimize its positive role. There are others who, whatever their motives, seek to abolish it outright. Should they succeed, they will destroy for much of our youth as well as many older citizens, opportunities to study, discuss and consider, on a regular basis and with others, the real source of this Nation's spiritual strength. . . .

Our Nation has survived the sixties. Save perhaps for that of a century ago when the Union was rent by civil war, no decade in the history of the United States has been more fraught with uncertainty, more torn by violence, or subjected more frequently to high peaks of intense emotion. . . .

The guidance derived from study of the Bible has been immense from our beginnings as a Nation. The French observer, de Tocqueville, tells us that the sovereign authority in the United States in the 1830's was religious. He explains that religion exercised little influence ". . . upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state." De Tocqueville found that there was no country in the world where the Christian religion retained a greater influence over the souls of men than in this one. And he found the average American to be, in his words, ". . . a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers." . . .

It is because believe the future of freedom in our Nation--and. therefore, the fate of the entire world-is dependent upon improving the spiritual life of our country--the quality of life, if you will--that I wholeheartedly support the Sunday School as an institution. I believe it has within it the capacity to become an even more dynamic and evangelistic force than it now is. I believe it must reach out in some manner to encompass and enlighten that great body of pathetic young people who, in the main because they are ignorant of Him, do not believe in God and cannot believe in themselves. I refer particularly to the immature and demanding children of affluence. the "Now!" oriented young people, who--because of parental neglect in the area of discipline--have as their sale guides to action only their own wants and desires.

God’s Own Party, cont.

by Steven P. Miller

In Dan Williams’ God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, we now have a go-to narrative analysis of the roots, rise, and resilience of the Christian Right. While Williams builds on earlier scholarship—especially William Martin’s memorable and anecdote-rich With God on Our Side—his book is an exceedingly original contribution based on deep (and I mean deep) research leavened by the wisdom of almost a decade’s worth of reflection. Williams writes with grace and clarity.

Williams describes a “ninety-year quest” (9), which started with the culture wars of the 1920s and intensified with the surprisingly (and overly) confident evangelical activism of the late 1940s and 1950s. (The early National Association of Evangelicals comes across as a proto-Moral Majority—something that those of us with our heads stuck in that Seventies decade should keep in mind.) After authoritatively covering the somewhat more familiar territory of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Williams, to his great credit, follows through with a deft ordering of the recent past. The power, glory, and spectacle of the George W. Bush years yielded to the uncertain trumpet of 2008 (which, in turn, was complicated by the blaring trumpet that is Sarah Palin).

Below are a few preliminary—and somewhat random—thoughts on how God’s Own Party informs what might be called the new evangelical history. (Later, I hope to do the same for Darren Dochuk’s no less eagerly awaited From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, which will appear in December.)

First, I affirm the use of “Christian Right” (as opposed to Religious Right) to describe an evangelical Protestant movement that, largely for strategic reasons, has included a broader range of actors. That said, a lot remains to be learned about the relationship between the Christian Right and the Catholic right. On this and other topics, Williams offers intriguing leads for future researchers (Attn. graduate students).

Williams gives “fundamentalist” vs. “evangelical” quite a bit of analytical heft, noting (echoing John’s study of Campus Crusade for Christ) that those identities were well defined only by the late 1950s before showing (my interpretation here) how they became less relevant by the 1980s, as the Reagan coalition took shape. Irenic Billy Graham and surly Bob Jones, Jr., had more than a few overlapping friends and positions, but Williams is very clear about their differences, especially concerning civil rights issues. He argues that “fundamentalists became ‘conservatives’ in opposition to the Kennedy administration” (59)—that is, well before New Right activists sidled up to Jerry Falwell, et al.

It’s hard to know just what to make of “Nixon’s evangelical strategy” (89), as Williams aptly calls it. His Nixon was an ambitious, but superficial manipulator of evangelical politics who went so far as to try to install his man (Veterans Administration official Fred Rhodes) as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. H. R. Haldeman and the once-born version of Charles Colson were equal parts ruthless and bumbling. Yet, as Williams notes, the salad days of the “silent majority” came after the fall, when Christian Right activists embraced its populist tone (“moral majority”). That’s “Nixonland” for you, I guess.

I sense an emerging scholarly consensus that abortion was a driving force behind the growth of the Christian Right from a very early date, even if W. A. Criswell tacitly endorsed Roe v. Wade and even if Jerry Falwell initially said little about the matter. Most such expressions of moderation occurred before the phrase “abortion on demand” became established, first as a concept, then as a statistic. To be sure, one might interpret that “concept” as a “rhetorical device.” But I think Williams is wise to avoid a cynical interpretation of evangelical pro-life politics. (For Francis Schaeffer, to cite one example, Reaganism was a proxy for opposition to abortion—not the other way around.)

Williams’ work is a story of (to quote an earlier version of the title) “Republican faith,” and it becomes clear in this book that, as early as the Eisenhower years, the GOP was the logical vessel through which to pursue conservative evangelical politics. This reality, as I read Williams, points to the overall pragmatism and patience of the Christian Right, not to its naivete or lust for power (as is sometimes suggested). If the Christian Right endures, as Williams believes it will, it will do so in large part because it made itself into a major wing of a major party.

The End is Always An Arm's Length Away

Kelly Baker

Spending my weekends in the End of Times section at the local bookstore is becoming a habit for me. Pouring over not only Tim LaHaye's popular Left Behind series but also any other work of fiction (Christian or otherwise) listed under apocalypse, rapture, post-apocalyptic or the end. The apocalypse haunts my book shelves, my waking hours and my dreams these days. If I am not reading about the end, I am watching cinematic ends including zombies, angels and the hot monster-stalking brothers of Supernatural. My Netflix queue is a bit scary and my movie watching partner any day now is going to declare apocalyptic burn out. The end is always an arm's length away at my house.

This apocalypse obsession is currently focused on LaHaye. My relationship with LaHaye is completely one-sided. He has no idea that I even exist but he would probably be content to know that I now own several of his books both fictional and theological. I would like to say that LaHaye has been a peripheral figure in my mind since my high school days and the popularity of his Left Behind series among the young (and not-so-young) evangelical set. In 1998, I even started reading the eponymous first book, "a novel about earth's last days" and didn't get further than piles of clothing lying haphazardly on an airplane. In 2010, I finally finished the 468 page book I started twelve years ago as well as LaHaye's new venture in fiction with Craig Parshall, The End (2010) series. Moreover, I now am the somewhat proud owner of several Left Behind:The Kids books, two Left Behind films and multiple theological works "unveiling" Revelation and explaining how we are actually at the end of days. Why might you ask would I spend my limited time and energy on evangelical pulp fiction? (If you ask this, then you possibly don't know me well.)

This can partially be blamed on my students and my Apocalypse in American culture class, but that is a bit disingenuous on my part. Granted, I did assign interviews with Tim and Beverly LaHaye, excerpts from The Edge of the Apocalypse and excellent analysis from Amy Johnson Frykholm's Rapture Culture. Yet, the real reason is that I have become a bit obsessed, in a scholarly way, with LaHaye's end of times theology from Rapture to the Glorious Appearing, which includes tribulations, destruction, more destruction and a vast majority of humanity being wiped out in inventive yet terrible ways. His Revelation Unveiled sits on my desk with a cover bent from use because of his charts that depict timeline and explore the essentials differences between pre-millennialists, a-millennialists and post-millennialists.

Part of my effort is to understand the theology that LaHaye has spent much of his life popularizing. The other is to attempt to understand the appeal of the sixteen book series that sold 65 million copies and even made it to the top of the New York Times bestselling list. Left Behind, the book, turns fifteen this year, and LaHaye is still writing and preaching his approach to the end of times. The plot of the first book includes the rapture of true Christian believers, international intrigue, intrepid reporters, converted Christian skeptics and the appearance of the anti-Christ in the form of the Romanian Nicolae Carpathia. The Left Behind books follow the melodramatic saga of the Tribulation Force to the Glorious appearing of Jesus and eventually to the millennial kingdom. The series also includes three prequel books that follow Rayford Steele (the pilot), Buck Williams (the journalist) and Carpathia before the Rapture.

Fifteen years later, LaHaye and Parshall's The Edge of the Apocalypse provides a different and sometimes more disturbing narrative. Joshua Jordan, a former military man and now weapons designer, saves New York City from nuclear destruction using his Return-To-Sender defensive shield developed by his private company. In the early pages, Jordan's wife, daughter and son face nuclear annihilation, but Jordan saves the day. However, Jordan is not hailed as a hero but rather he is called in front of a Senate Committee for hostile questioning and maligned by the liberal media. LaHaye's favorite threats are still present: globalization, one world currency and the dangerous nature of peace. But, Jordan, a skeptic married to beautiful church-going wife, is not concerned with the end of the world but rther the end of the American nation. The patriotic hero fears that the government will steal his top-secret weapon and leave America unprotected from enemies that pretend to be allies. The edge of the apocalypse, then, is not for the global world but the particular American population, who cannot trust their government to protect them. The cynical Jordan, however, is one step ahead of the reader, and he organizes a small group of powerful capitalists, including one woman, called the Roundtable. The small cabal hopes to illuminate the government's diabolical plans and protect the nation at all costs.

What proved most striking to me was the intimate relationship between the American nation and the end of the larger world. LaHaye and Parshall's America was the redeemer nation, the model, and when America failed, so too would the rest of the globe. LaHaye and Parshall uplift a small band of Christian patriots to take back the nation if the government no longer protects its citizens. The book ends with Jordan contemplating how to work against our national government and deciding his group could lead the way to revolution. Perhaps, the reader is supposed to think, people like Jordan could save our nation from itself. This vision of the nation and the world bears some similarity to Left Behind but the larger tale appears more ambivalent about the end of a nation and its people.

Yet, the call for small groups to defend the nation and antagonize government proved a little too similar to the white supremacists that I study as well. They can't trust government either, the end is near and they guarantee that they are ready for it. The Edge of the Apocalypse conveys a similar meaning. At least with Left Behind, the violence did not erupt until after the Rapture. With Edge, the end of the book, and the possible end of the nation, no longer has the guarantee, and its end feels nearer and closer. The Edge haunts my dreams and waking hours, and maybe my obsession with LaHaye is to place that book in perspective. Or maybe, it is my attempt to see how America's fate became intertwined with the apocalypse more largely.

This Land is My Land, You Got That?

Randall Stephens

Peter Marshall has long kept an active commentary page on his petermarshallministries.com site. He's mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more! (He seems to have been mad as hell for a for some time now, so this is not a news flash.)

Marhsall is the author of The Light and the Glory, now revised, a Christian bookstore bestseller and a staple of homeschooling curriculum. (John Fea has written a cogent essay and several posts on Marshall and his career.) Marshall, along with another popular Christian historian David Barton, served as a history curriculum adviser for the Texas State Board of Education. Of that development, Fea wrote: "Someone on the Texas Board of Education must really like Marshall. This is the only way to explain how a Presbyterian pastor from New England with no formal training in history became an expert reviewer for the Social Studies standards for one of the largest states in the Union."

So, I paste here part of Marshall's recent post on Islam. (Could Marshall and Diana L. Eck have a beer summit to talk over the nature of American religion?)

Peter Marshall, "Islam's War with the West: The Need for Reality -- Part Two," 7/22/2010.

This week's commentary begins, then, with this question: When it comes to the reality of Islam in America, can a good or devout Muslim be a good American?

No. The answer, my friends, is a flat "no!" The only Muslim that could possibly be a good American is a Muslim that is non-practicing, or one that is in the process of repudiating Islam. Why? Because Islam is completely incompatible with either Christianity or patriotic Americanism. read on>>>

The Oslo Soul Children and the Cowboy Twins

Today's guest post comes to us from our Senior Norwegian correspondent

Hilde Løvdal,

who posted here last year on "The Adventures of a Norwegian in Colorado Springs." Today she sends her exploration of the influence of contemporary Christian music in her homeland.

People often ask me why I am so fascinated by American evangelicalism. To me, it’s perfectly logical. I grew up in a culture saturated with American evangelical culture. So, to me, it’s a matter of studying a culture that is strangely familiar while totally different at the same time. American Christian music, in particular, has influenced the ways Norwegian Christians try to balance being faithful to their beliefs and being up to date culturally.

My hometown Kragerø is a small town in the Norwegian Bible Belt (yes, there is one!) and was for a long time the home of Skjærgårds Music and Mission Festival, the Norwegian equivalent to the Cornerstone Festival. (“Skjærgårds” refers to the landscape you see in the promo trailer.)

The festival was held for the 30th time last week and had about 6000 visitors. In total, about a 250,000 people have been to the festival - and that’s a lot of people for a nation of 4.8 million people where maybe 5-10% of them attend church on a regular basis.

The festival has had a mix of local and international acts, but American artists have more often than not been the main attractions. As such, Skjærgårds has been a vital force in introducing American Christian rock and gospel music to a Norwegian audience. Larry Norman, Petra, Jars of Clay, Margareth Becker, Newsboys, Rebecca StJames, Jesse Dixon, Koinonia, Al Green, and Five Blind Boys are no strangers to veteran festival attendees.

From the first Skjærgårds festival. Photo: Vårt Land/Skjærgårds arkiv

Skjærgårds grew out of a group of young Norwegian Christians inspired by American Christian rock and contemporary gospel music, which again was introduced to the Norwegian audience in the wake of the Jesus movement in the 1970s (yes, it was here too!). Andrea Crouch, in particular, was a major inspiration to Christian musicians throughout Norway. Thanks to Crouch et al, gospel choirs may have been the most important arena that churches have had to reach Norwegian teenagers and young adults. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I estimate that thousands of Norwegians know Crouch’s Soon and Very Soon by heart.

Since 1988, Oslo Gospel Choir has been the most important ambassador of Norwegian contemporary gospel music. OGC has not just had success within the Christian market, but also managed to reach across to the secular market. Oslo Gospel Choir was the bestselling act in Norway in the 1990s - in any category. Other successful gospel choirs include Norwegian Gospel Voices Voice of Joy and Safari. Lately, Oslo Soul Children has been a driving force in the urban gospel. Since it started in 2005, the OSC concept has spread to more than 70 choirs across Norway (there’s even one in Japan!) and there’s now also Oslo Soul Teens. (PS - those of you interested in trans-Atlantic gospel music can see OSC live on tour in the States this fall.)

Contemporary gospel music has not fared well in all Christian circles. Skjærgårds caused quite a stir when it started in 1981. The pioneers behind Skjærgårds grew up in a culture where strict moral codes distinguished believers from non-believers. It was a bold move to bring drums on stage in a culture where drums were considered the devil’s instrument and dancing was a major social taboo (“It’s not the dancing itself we’re against, but whatever it might lead to”). Yet, those skeptical towards the new rhythms and new ways of doing Christian music have also relied heavily on American gospel music, albeit in the Southern gospel tradition.

Southern gospel has been hugely popular in low church groups in and outside the state church. Pentecostals and fundamentalists may have disagreed over the theological matters, but they’ve shared a love for the harmonies and message they find in Southern gospel music. Churches and religious meetings are abounding with groups such as Fjordingane and Rett kurs. The folks over at Southern Gospel Scandinavia estimate that Southern gospel has been part of the Norwegian evangelical culture for at least 90 years. Lately, the Gaither’s Homecoming concept has attracted thousands of primarily baby boomers to their concerts, and there’s even a Norwegian/Swedish version of it – Minns du sången.

I could go on and on about the profound impact American religious culture has had on Norway’s Bible Belt culture. I could for instance write about Cowboytvillingene (the Cowboy Twins), a legendary 1990s duo that spread the Good News through Southern gospel music and their own TV-show. Or about how my grandmother and Johnny Cash’s mother had very similar hymnals. Or about the connections between Christian hipster musicians in Norway and the States. Or about how Christian hipsters mourned the loss of Larry Norman and organized tribute concerts in his honor. Or about how pastors look to Bill Hybels and Rick Warren for inspiration. Or how most of the books in Christian bookstores are Norwegian translations of American evangelical literature. No wonder, then, that reading books by the likes of Andrew Beaujon, Colleen McDannell, Eileen Luhr, and Heather Hendershot is a glimpse into a culture that is strikingly familiar to my own background.