The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis
Karen Swallow Prior
Hi, 304pp, Brazos, 2023
ISBN 9781587435751
Prior is a reader, writer, and professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this book she draws upon her evangelical background and her academic speciality, to examine evangelical sensibilities. She writes as a critical friend, and as an insider. As she puts it, “In a way, what follows in these pages is simply my testimony. It is a picture of the evangelical imagination as I have found it over the course of years of researching, studying, reading, worshiping, and living and grappling with my own imagination—what fills it and fuels it.”
In many ways it is an iconoclastic book - in it she shows how evangelical culture has been shaped by Victorian values and ethos as much as it has by biblical ones. Drawing on her academic research she examines Victorian literature:
You will notice a pattern emerging from all this Victorian literature. You will see in both the texts and their surrounding historical contexts qualities strangely similar to many of the defining characteristics of modern American evangelical culture. And by seeing in that literature many of the values and beliefs prominent within American evangelicalism today, you might find yourself wondering whether some of the ideas that characterize today’s evangelical culture are Christian as much as they are Victorian.
She provides an excellent critique, and one that deserves close attention. She ably exposes contemporary evangelicalism’s overemphasis on patriotism, self-improvement, achievement, marketing, business techniques, triumphalism, and consumerism. Two quotations will serve to illustrate:
Evangelicalism’s infatuation with secular notions of social progress and self-improvement is marked throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While evangelicals initially opposed nineteenth-century movements that emphasized the possibility that human effort could bring physical healing, mind cures, victory over sin—movements such as New Thought, the Keswick movement, and the Victorious Life—the influence of these popular teachings could not be entirely stemmed: therapeutic culture snaked its way into evangelicalism. Nineteenth-century revivalists such as D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday were among those whose teachings blended evangelicalism with notions of social progress and transformation through personal purity and piety.
And:
This triumphalist spirit of empire was cultivated on an individual level too. “Do great things for God!” was for a generation (or two) of evangelicals not just an encouragement but an expectation that became a mandate. One younger friend who grew up evangelical told me she had the sense that if she didn’t grow up to do something great or radical, then she would have failed as a Christian.
Components of evangelicalism see examines include: Conversion, Testimony, Improvement, Sentimentality, Materiality, Domesticity, Empire, Reformation, and Rapture. For each one she shows how these are integral to evangelicalism and how each one has been shaped by the Victorian ethos. Her analysis is nuanced and profound. The literature she discusses includes work by well-known authors such as Dickens, Swift, Defoe, Bunyan, Alcott, Hardy along with the currently less popular works including Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson. Works of “art” by Thomas Kinkade and Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ are also examined, both as examples of evangelical sentimentality.
In short, The Evangelical Imagination is an engaging, well-written, and thought-provoking read; it may disturb, but it will disturb those that need to be disturbed. Her main concern is that evangelicalism becomes more focused on Jesus and the scriptures rather than exemplify a Victorian ethos.
Contents
Introduction: Victorians, Evangelicals, and the Invitation
1. Made in His Image
Imagination, Imaginaries, and Evangelicalisms
2. Awakening
Mumford, MLK, Hurston, Hughes, and Other Poets
3. Conversion
Language, Dr. Pepper, and Ebenezer Scrooge
4. Testimony
Grace Abounding and "Evangelically Speaking"
5. Improvement
The Puritan Work Ethic, Paradise Lost, and the Price of Progress
6. Sentimentality
Sweet Jesus, Uncle Tom, and Public Urination
7. Materiality
Jesus in the Window, the Virgin Mary on Grilled Cheese, Gingerbread Houses, and the Sacramentality of Church Space
8. Domesticity
Angels and Castles and Prostitutes, Oh My!
9. Empire
"The White Man's Burden," His Man Friday, the Jesus Nobody Knows, and What Johnny Cash Really Knew
10. Reformation
Pardon Me, Reckoning or Rip Van Winkle?
11. Rapture
Or How a Thief Came in the Night but Left My Chick Tracts Behind
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