Dan Gilgoff at God & Country had an incisive post yesterday considering the Evangelical movement as a counter-cultural phenomenon:
“Religions that grow are the ones that are hard-core in some way—they have something that differs sharply from the culture in which they operate,” Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University, told me recently. “That’s the problem with mainline Protestantism: It’s not different enough from mainstream America. Evangelicals have been able to pitch themselves as the alternative to mainstream culture.”
Indeed, evangelicals read self-consciously evangelical magazines, go on church mission trips, and demonstrate remarkable political cohesion; a Pew survey out today finds that 71 percent of white evangelicals think abortion should be illegal, compared to 44 percent of the rest of the country.
In fact, nowhere is the evangelical countercultural impulse more evident than in politics. At the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington, more than one speaker compared the Christian right’s role in politics today to the biblical story of David and Goliath.
Its self-image as a marginalized group and perennial underdog doubtless serves to galvanize the movement—but does it hold water? The line between inside and outside, hegemonic and subaltern, has become quite blurry indeed.
Continue reading at God & Country.