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This introductory chapter briefly explores the emergence of the Primitive Baptist movement between the 1820s and 1850s. Primitive Baptists in the antebellum South struggled not only with missionary adversaries but with a set of beliefs that placed them at odds both with their fellow evangelicals and with their own fraught consciences. These beliefs distanced them from the optimistic strains of evangelical Protestantism. The chapter also explains how the study of the Primitive Baptist movement reflects a concurrent emotional turn in scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In the case of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism, the Protestant construction of the emotional profile of other groups functioned as a primary means by which to distinguish themselves from such groups. Emotionality, just as importantly as skin color, national origin, language, or social class, served as a marker of difference for the Protestant middle class.

The roots of climate care run deep into American evangelicalism's past, fostering its emergence and molding its contours. As one phenomenon within the patchwork of contemporary evangelicalism, climate care is affected by the community's broader dynamics and trends. It also affects them. This chapter discusses how evangelical interest in climate change, developed out of more than three decades of evangelical engagement with broader environmental issues. While evangelicals have often been cast as anti-environmental, mainstream evangelical leaders and scholars long displayed receptivity to the concerns of environmentalism—though to different degrees and at different points in time. This history has two main axes: first, the process of building a theology of creation care and, second, the process of putting that ecotheology into practice.

The first chapter focuses on the first decade of the Homecoming franchise. The first Homecomings occur against the backdrop of late 1980s/early 1990s American politics, economics, evangelicalism, and mass entertainment. It is through these early videos that the Gaithers must establish the trust of an audience often alienated by televangelism and other subgenres of contemporary Christian music.

This chapter focuses on American evangelicals and the affirmation of their normativity. It begins by discussing a brief historical background of the evangelicals and the impact of Cold War in their missionary work. The chapter then discusses the critique, challenge, and limits of acceptable evangelical dissent during the late 1950s and the 1960s, with a particular focus on Elisabeth Elliot's critiques of missionary attitudes and tactics. It also discusses evangelical reflections on American missionaries in Christianity Today and in Free Methodist publications during the last three decades of the twentieth century.

This concluding chapter charts the aftermath of Rushdoony’s theological legacy. As a result of Rushdoony’s ill health, financial setbacks, and the premature deaths of theologians such as Bahnsen and Chilton, the 1990s and early 2000s marked an era of change for Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation and North’s ICE. Worse, the theology of R.J. Rushdoony has since become a screen upon which critics project competing interpretations of the proper place of religion in American society. By using Reconstructionism to embody “bad” religion, such narratives reify the normative and naïve assumption that “good” American evangelicalism simply seeks to bring the light of Christ’s Gospel to a fallen world. Such saccharine discourses, however, conveniently ignore that both evangelicalism and secularism are culturally constituted systems of exclusion facilitated by powerful institutional, legal, and governmental mechanisms.

This epilogue presents the author's thoughts about the evangelical subculture and the future of evangelicalism in America. He discusses the importance of belief to evangelicals; how their doctrinal precisionism has produced the diverse evangelical subculture in America; and how the media, especially television, have permeated evangelical worship. He also believes that evangelicalism will also persist because of its timeless appeal. It promises intimacy with God, a support community, an unambiguous morality, and answers to the riddles of eternity.

This is book about popular evangelicalism, a kind of travelogue into the evangelical subculture in America—a subculture that encompasses fundamentalists, charismatics, and pentecostals. This prologue explains the author's rationale for writing this book. It presents his account of venturing outside the confines of the evangelical subculture wherein he was reared, and the lessons he learned from the theological liberals he had been taught to despise. As a historian, his primary goal was to produce a book that might appeal both to scholars interested in popular religion in America and to the general public curious about a phenomenon that has received a good deal of attention in the past decade.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the extraordinary appeal of five evangelicals who make strong cases to replace Billy Graham as America's leading preacher and evangelist: Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and Brian McLaren. The present study makes the case for sa supply-side analysis of religious vitality, contending that clergy (and their congregations or followers) hold the key to understanding why certain movements thrive while others decline. It argues that religious suppliers thrive in a competitive spiritual marketplace because they are quick, decisive, and flexible in reacting to changing conditions, savvy at packaging and marketing their ministries, and resourceful at offering spiritual rewards that resonate with the existential sneeds and cultural tastes of the public. Religious suppliers carve out a niche in the spiritual marketplace and distinguish their ministries by offering an array of spiritual goods and services that match the tastes and desires of religious consumers.

American evangelicals facing West from abroad have reshaped important elements of their religious tradition. Migration and demographic realignments intensified the impact on issues as varied as humanitarian work, civil rights, missiological strategies, sexuality, supernatural practices, and immigration. There were, however, limits to this global reflex. Transnational encounters often did not fit American categories. They did not cleanly map onto conservative or progressive sectors, and their influence often was limited to establishment evangelicals. Populists, many of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2016, have resisted the global reflex. This book, while narrating important demographic shifts, shows that evangelical cosmopolitanism is not pervasive at present.

This chapter focuses on two movements that unfolded, American Evangelicalism and Wesleyan Holiness, and how changing understandings of women's appropriate place in public life laid the foundations for the Azusa Street Mission. It considers how nineteenth-century, black Evangelical women contributed to the establishment of the largely egalitarian ethos of early Afro-Pentecostalism by bringing to their involvement in Azusa changing expectations about their roles in public ministry and public life, biblically based arguments for women's religious leadership, a developing pneumatology, and eschatological expectancy. It also considers how black women's views about public activism and theology influenced the dynamic sociological and historical factors that produced Azusa Street.

This chapter explores how Brian McLaren attracts many followers by challenging evangelicalism. McLaren is a pastor, best-selling author, ministry consultant, and influential leader in a rapidly growing evangelical movement called the emerging church. McLaren engages in progressive dialogues on the global economy, the growing economic divide between the rich and the poor, and the mounting danger of violence from both terrorists and antiterrorists. His writings attract many who criticize and critique evangelicals' partiality with American nationalism and neoconservative politics. By offering a relational and organic model of spiritual community that emphasizes friendship, fosters dialogue, and makes no claim to having a monopoly on truth, McLaren constructs an archetype for a new kind of evangelicalism that addresses the alienation, isolation, and rampant individualism of our society.

Gender norms were another source of tension. First- and second-generation Mar Thoma Americans had divergent ideas about the obligations and behavior of Christian men and women in church, and the gender norms and behavior of professionally educated immigrants also differed from those of less well-educated members. Changes in gender roles and class position as a result of the migration and settlement often roused gender insecurities that were manifested within the arena of the church. Chapter 4 focuses on how three groups within the Mar Thoma church: immigrant nurses, who were often the primary income earners in their families, and their husbands; professionally educated immigrant men, who were generally the primary income earners, and their wives; and well-employed second-generation women and men influenced by American evangelicalism, performed gender and normative Christian identities in very different ways in church, leading to some tension between the groups.

This epilogue offers some concluding thoughts about the five subjects discussed in the preceding chapters: Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and Brian McLaren. All five are evangelical innovators who adjust and retool American evangelicalism in appealing ways that attract large segments of the religious market. Each offers a style of Christianity that is dynamic and relevant, changes many lives and meets many needs; an environment that takes varying forms and yet remains simple and satisfying; a message that rests in God's sovereignty while providing intriguing possibilities for human agency; instruction that is pragmatic yet idealistic, self-actualizing and self-therapeutic; a ministry that responds to market forces and yet remains true to core beliefs; and a scope that transcends race, ethnicity, and class. In a nutshell, these innovators offer a brand of evangelical Christianity that is brilliantly designed for contemporary Americans.

This chapter presents the author's account of his visit to the Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas. Founded in 1924 to combat the theological modernism then popular with American Protestants, the Dallas Theological Seminary has held down, in its view, the fortress of evangelical and fundamentalist orthodoxy against the sundry assaults of twentieth-century theological liberalism. The author describes his visit to the seminary as a kind of inspection tour of these doctrinal ramparts—an examination of the theological infrastructure of American evangelicalism. People here believe that the intellectual case for evangelical theology rests on the twin pillars of biblical inerrancy (the conviction that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit rendered the Scriptures errorless in the original autographs) and a nineteenth-century doctrine known as dispensational premillennialism.

American Protestantism determined to a large extent the nature of the mission errand to China, especially in the Chinese Protestant elite’s understanding of social Christianity. American Protestantism, however, suffered from certain weaknesses in its own understanding of the relationship between Christianity and society, and this weakness was most evident in the message of the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel aimed to reshape the modern industrial economy, so that it was more humane to workers and more beneficial to society. That message, though, was compromised in its transmission to China by its association with imperialism. Beyond this message of the Social Gospel, American missions were also the early benefactors of the main institutions—colleges and universities, the YMCA and the YWCA—through which the Protestant elite influenced the larger society.

This chapter shows how Rick Warren became the pastor of a 25,000-member church in Orange County, California, and one of the most influential Protestant leaders in the world. Warren's simple sermons, often structured around catchy acronyms, address life issues that affect many Americans. He packages evangelicalism in an unconventional, racially generic, and politically inoffensive way and is the force behind a rapidly growing purpose-driven church movement that blurs denominational distinctions and challenges traditional ways of approaching ministry. By mixing religion with the best marketing and business principles of today, along with other elements of contemporary secular culture, Warren makes evangelical ministry attractive to baby boomers and successive generations of Americans.