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Peter Berger has argued that modernity marginalizes religion to the private sphere, thus creating a secularization of culture. Later he reneged, suggesting that religion can survive without a “sacred canopy.” Christian Smith has used the term “sacred umbrella,” and in this study the metaphor “sacred tent” is used to suggest that subcultures use religion to solidify and mobilize identity. This chapter gives a definition of religion, arguing that groups form religious subcultures around symbolic and social boundaries that involve forces and powers that go beyond the self and group, which create powerful moral worldviews‐defining identity, creating tension with outsiders, and, on occasion, violence.

Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between moral reality and history. Early humans invented gods, myths, and ideologies to depict moral order. Premodern communities are described as having sacred canopies, which protected everyone equally from the threat of meaninglessness. Modernity changed this structure. It created a plurality of realities—one of which (nihilism) is the possibility that everything is meaningless. Modern writers and thinkers feared that this development would leave the world disenchanted. While modernity made meaninglessness a viable reality, it also created the possibility that individuals can choose their own moral order. In addition, a modern therapeutic culture provides a new type of sacred meaning.

In an effort to win southern white voters, the GOP embraced the old southern religion turning the church faithful into the party loyal. They did so because in many parts of the South, the church remains the central institution defining, organizing, and politicizing its surrounding community. A “sacred canopy” drapes over the region, where there is a common cosmology that is intractable from southern white identity, including its reverence for white supremacy and patriarchy. In general, as a block, white southerners were more evangelical, Protestant, fundamentalist, and moralist than the rest of the country. The not-so-new southern religiosity satisfies an appetite for certainty, conformity, and even social status. As a means to solidify southern white support, the Long Southern Strategy framed southern white Christianity as under attack and cast the GOP as its protector, the price of which is increased cultural defensiveness, anxiety, fear, and distrust.

Although the prominence of women in the McMaster IVCF challenged my presuppositions about several elements of evangelicalism, the role of Satan in this group's discourse simply bewildered me. Whenever this topic arose during conversations with IVCF students, I became somewhat disoriented. For the first several interviews, I was incredulous and found myself rephrasing the open-ended questions I had posed, seeking more and more details in the answers that were offered to me. I had encountered references to Satan, demons, and angels in most of the scholarly and popular texts I had read before I started fieldwork. However, there is a significant and sometimes categorical difference between what one reads about in the comfort of one's home and what one experiences in the field. In other words, although I was intellectually prepared to encounter Satan, demons, and angels in evangelical discourse, on a deeper level, I was unable to accept that contemporary North American university students would believe in the existence of such entities in quite the way that IVCF students actually do. Eventually, I was able to understand more clearly and without puzzlement what IVCF members mean when they speak of the spiritual realm. In fact, by the end of my fieldwork, I found myself interpreting several unsettling experiences in my own life according to the IVCF's relatively 'enchanted worldview. Initially, I began investigating this issue by asking students questions about the role of Satan in their lives at McMaster. However, my respondents rarely referred solely to Satan, but rather to a much more elaborate array of nonhuman entities working for and against Satan. In referring to these entities, I use the phrase 'spiritual realm in addition to God, Satan, demons, and angels, partly for the sake of brevity but in addition because I seek to connote by this phrase an entire cxtrahuman dimension that includes all these figures. Because students talk about the demonic elements of the spiritual realm much more frequently than the angelic elements, this chapter focuses on the former. The evangelical discourse on the spiritual realm is rooted in both ancient Christianity and recent popular fiction.