Customer Reviews

Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this book Christian Smith shatters many of the stereotypes that the media and academics hold about American Evangelicals. In it he draws on a series of interviews that he and his colleagues conducted over a three-year period as part of a much larger research project of American evangelicals. It compliments his 1998 book on evangelicals that is far more quantitative in nature.

Specifically, Smith explores how evangelicals think about pluralism, politics, education and gender roles. He concludes his book with a chapter looking at the results of recent surveys on evangelicals. What Smith finds is that evangelicals embrace a wide variety of views that are higly complex and not reducible to a single stereotype. As an example, while evangelicals embrace language that hold husbands up as the leaders of their families, in practice they are just as egalitarian as everyone else.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the evangelical subculture. Smith offers a far more nuanced and complex view of evangelicals than many commentators and academics have led us to believe.

Every time I have a reason to dip into this man's "scholarship" I am amazed at the simple superficiality of it. One must grant him a certain cleverness in knowing how to strike chords that will get people to think his point-of-view is useful as a balancer. But as to real analysis of anything, he starts with demonstrable falsehood. Though he praises the editors, it is clear that they were none too busy or concerned. You can sum all of this up with a statement from his Conclusion:

"Despite lingering Enlightenment ideologies about strong objectivity and universal rationality, our lives remain fundamentally governed by imaginative narratives of the historical traditions that encompass them.." p. 194

To unpack the presumption and misinformation contained in those comments would take a whole article. But one should point out that Christian Smith somehow imagines that the entire legal system of the United States, grounded as it is in aspirations of "strong objectivity" are somehow to be re-visioned by visionary academics like him, as being nudged-out out by "imaginative narratives." It is absurd to think that such a -- comparatively -- fair country as this should have its staying power identified with Christian Smith's childish "imaginative narratives". Rather, even on a continuum of scholarly views of the relationship between the Founders of this country and Enlightenment notions of "universal rationality", no one responsible would account for it by way of a "lingering" "imaginative narrative". By contrast we are dealing with the Founding aspirations of this country in its very core ethos. If one conceives of that as merely "lingering" then that shows some basic presumption of hostility to the very ethos of a free society as embodied in that Founding aspiration.

That all this should be delimited in a book about what Evangelicals want, sheds oblique light on current conundrums of people like Perry and Bachman. This book is poor scholarship, but no doubt would be a good primer for those characters.