STEPHEN P. MILLER.The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 221. $19.95 (U.S.).
For historians of American religion, it has become common practice—even a professional necessity—to begin any study of American evangelicalism with the admission that it is almost impossible to succinctly and objectively define this segment of Christianity. Interpreters have devised a number of definitional approaches—theological, denominational, sociological. One of the most persistent is the cultural approach: Scholars have argued that evangelicalism functioned and continues to function as one of many subcultures vying for power within American society. In this book, the historian Stephen P. Miller takes issue with this persistent characterization of born-again Christianity. Since the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, he argues, evangelicals have not been cultural outsiders or marginalized voices but rather have resided “at the very center of recent American history” (7).
Miller characterizes the current period of American history as the “age of evangelicalism,” a nearly 40-year era in which “born-again Christianity provided alternatively a language, a medium, and a foil by which millions of Americans came to terms with political and cultural changes” (5). Evangelical standard-bearers influenced late twentieth century history as politicians, activists, entrepreneurs, culture-makers, pundits, and pariahs; but evangelicals themselves often hotly debate who actually counted as a member of their tribe. At the same time, non-evangelicals sometimes participated in evangelical popular culture, sometimes railed against evangelicals in emotionally pitched “culture wars,” and often framed their own politics in opposition to the public agenda of the evangelical-led Christian Right. “Such was the nature of evangelicalism’s impact on late twentieth-century American culture,” Miller explains. “It was pervasive enough that no one expression of evangelicalism could lay sole claim to it, and it involved more than just avowed born-again Christians” (8).
In this sense, Miller’s book is much more than a recent history of evangelicals in America. Other scholars have provided such surveys. Rather, Miller narrates a history of America itself, illustrating how the nation evolved in parallel with a complex, contested, and constantly transforming evangelicalism.
Miller divides his book into six short, readable, but densely researched chapters that narrate this all-encompassing story of evangelical influence. Much of his narrative focuses on the political sphere. It begins in the 1970s, during a period in which America desperately sought an opportunity to be “born again” after the Watergate scandal and the devastation of the Vietnam War. This decade also witnessed the political ascendancy of America’s first evangelical president, the Georgia-born, Sunday-school-teaching Southern Baptist Democrat Jimmy Carter. His brand of born-again politics emphasized personal integrity and moral cleanliness. Yet this vision of evangelical America rather quickly fell out of favor, replaced by Ronald Reagan’s brand of faith-based nationalism and social conservatism. This approach, along with the meteoric rise of the Christian Right, quickly drove evangelicals into the waiting arms of the Republican Party in the 1980s.
Though not an evangelical himself, Reagan successfully courted the evangelical vote and cultivated a public image as a defender of religious faith. Reagan’s legacy, claimed by the GOP for at least a decade afterward, cemented in the minds of Americans across the political spectrum that Christian Right–style Republicanism was “thepublic expression of born-again Christianity” in the United States (60, emphasis mine). The presidency of George W. Bush represented both the apogee of this evangelical political ascendancy, and its nadir. The scandal that embroiled the Colorado megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, the controversy swirling around Regent University–educated Monica Goodling during her tenure at the Justice Department—these events and others contributed to a backlash against evangelical influence on American public life. During the 2008 election, the Democratic candidate Barack Obama renewed his party’s religious vision; his public overtures to evangelical left leaders such as Jim Wallis helped give new visibility to a more progressive brand of born-again politics.
Miller’s political narrative is convincingly argued, but the most interesting sections of The Age of Evangelicalisminvolve detours into intellectual history and popular culture. Miller successfully demonstrates that evangelicalism influenced both highbrow cultural discourse and popular music, therapeutic bestsellers, and even vacation destinations. For instance, he shows that evangelicalism “was woven into the interpretive metaphors” that defined discussions of faith and public life in the 1980s and 1990s: The “naked public square” and the “culture wars,” he rightly contends, were products of evangelical influence. Moreover, he shows how an “evangelical chic” captured a mainstream market share in these decades: The genre of contemporary Christian music, the Left Behindseries of novels, “purpose driven” self-help guides, Thomas Kinkade paintings, and the family-friendly tourist destination of Branson, Missouri all emerged from within evangelicalism even though their cultural footprint eventually extended beyond those religious roots.
ThroughoutThe Age of Evangelicalism, Miller makes good on his provocative thesis: Evangelicalism was hardly a subculture but rather “a language, a medium, and a foil” that Christians and non-Christians used to make sense of social, political, and cultural changes during the last three decades of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first centuries. In making his argument he deftly draws on the numerous histories of evangelicalism written over the last thirty-plus years, weaving together their individual arguments, while also building on those previous studies through his own extensive work with primary sources from evangelical archives. The result is a persuasive study that gives popular readers and scholars alike a new way to view evangelicalism and its role in the United States since the 1970s.
One does wonder, though, how this study—published in 2015—would conclude if written today. Miller ends his narrative with the election of 2012, arguing that this event represented “the waning salience of evangelical politics as a whole” (162) because it was the first election in nearly 40 years that featured no evangelical candidates nor any overt courting of evangelicals as a singular political bloc. While true on its surface, this conclusion now seems premature. In the wake of the 2016 election, pundits and demographers proclaimed that a staggering 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump—a thrice-married casino mogul who previously appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine and seems to have few qualms about using foul language. Meanwhile, evangelicals continued to influence American forms of entertainment and self-help: One need look no further than the success of evangelical-produced films such as God’s Not Deadand prosperity preachers such as Joel Osteen—and the backlash against them—to see that evangelicalism still functions as a vehicle for and a foil against quintessentially American cultural values. Miller’s narrative feels too neat and tidy in light of these recent developments and ongoing permutations. The evangelical declinethat Miller observed five years ago has not come to pass. Instead, it seems that the “age of evangelicalism” that began in the 1970s has simply entered into a new phase in the early twenty-first century.