|
|
The Future of Evangelicalism
| Article
# : |
13088 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
3,132 Words |
| Author
: |
Jeffrey K. Hadden
|
EVANGELICALISM:
The Coming Generation
James Davison Hunter
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
302 pp., $19.95
From the dawning of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, scholars have prophesied the demise of faith and organized religion. But religion has stubbornly refused to fade from the center stage of the human drama in conformity with the script dictated by the sages of secularization theory. Generation after generation of believers have stayed the course, refusing to give up its faith, in conformity with the conventional scholarly wisdom of the Western world.
Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation is James Davison Hunter's second probe into the quandary of conservative Christianity's struggle to remain vital in a world dominated by modernity and the forces of secularization.
His first book, American Evangelicalism, deserved the accolades it received. Although this second effort is ever so much better than the first, it may not be as well received. Many evangelicals won't like the book because Hunter presents empirical data to demonstrate that modernity and secularization have penetrated deeply into the beliefs, the psyches, and the life-styles of evangelicals. Evangelicals have tended to view themselves as separate and apart from the world. Indeed, their cultural distinctiveness is critical to their self-identity.
To these people James Hunter brings bad news. They are not nearly as separate and apart as they think. And as happens all too often, it is the bearer of bad news who is blamed for the news. In their work, their family life, and their politics, evangelicals are found to be less distinctive than many of them perceive themselves to be. And in their theology, Hunter finds cracks in the traditional orthodoxy.
These findings are not going to sit well with many orthodox evangelicals. They are certain to scrutinize the methodology much more thoroughly than they would have, had the findings concluded that belief survives unaltered in the late twentieth century and that in their life-styles evangelicals are a people apart.
We're likely to hear criticisms that the sample is biased, the questions improperly worded, the findings misinterpreted, and the conclusions unwarranted. Such a reaction will help reduce the dissonance encountered by evangelicals who don't like the message and who prefer not to confront the implications of the evidence. But that won't alter the fact that the world of evangelicalism in America is not static.
Evangelicalism in America is changing, Hunter argues, and he has captured the dynamics and particulars of this change more clearly than any observer of the evangelical scene in America today. Alarmingly for evangelicals, moreover, this change is occurring within the very bastion of higher learning evangelicals themselves created to make their own offspring safe from the eroding influences of the secular world.
Hunter's study of the next generation of evangelicals, which he calls the Evangelical
...
Read Full Article
|
|
