This sugary excerpt from Bernice Martin’s review of books on what she calls the “new American Evangelism” worries me because I think that nothing good can come from the increasingly evangelization of American society and of its politics:
The terms of engagement in America’s “culture wars” have been subtly changing since the 1990s with the economic, intellectual, social and political coming of age of many Evangelicals in the Bible Belt. This has been brought about by the rise of the oil and real-estate industries, and the occupational and geographical mobility of a considerable part of the younger generation of Evangelicals. They have flocked not only to Evangelical private colleges but also to the Ivy League universities (partly through radical access initiatives after the 1960s) and on to New York, Silicon Valley and even Hollywood as lawyers, bankers, IT professionals, academics and filmmakers.
They constitute a new cosmopolitan Evangelical stratum, as concerned with ecology, AIDS (and not with policies exclusively dependent on abstention) and with human rights worldwide as with traditional questions of personal morality. They are also less solidly Republican. They bring their Christian principles into the boardroom and the caucus in exactly the same way their secular and liberal peers advance their own interests and values. And they are as embarrassed by some of the opinions of the Evangelical masses, and the polarizing media celebrities who mobilize them, as are secular liberals. There is a new Evangelical intelligentsia and it is a power to be reckoned with: Books and Culture, the Evangelical answer to the New York Review of Books, is its public face.
[…]You would not guess that most Evangelicalism lies on the soft end of the spectrum with a stress on “heartwork”, personal moral conversion and sincerity, as in Methodism and many of the megachurches, which is where George W. Bush and the Billy Graham ministries fit. It is rigorous moralism, strict biblical inerrancy, messianic nationalism and apocalyptic fervour that are mainly represented by Bates: he sums it up as “hardline reactionary Protestantism”.
Nor would you guess that even those with official beliefs in the Apocalypse don’t usually let it affect their day-to-day lives – they pay their mortgage and insurance even if they read violent fantasises about the cosmic war after the Rapture, or pore over prophecies of the End Times a-coming.
