The Evangelical Imagination

May 29, 2023
In this revealing study, Prior (On Reading Well), an English professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, surveys the images, metaphors, and stories that have shaped the evangelical movement and given rise to its current identity crisis, “manifest in increasing division, decreasing church membership... ongoing reckoning with racist past.”Prior unpacks the centrality of such themes as domesticity, empire building, and conversion in the movement, and explores how they have been reinforced by evangelical touchstones including Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; Warner Sallman’s 1940 portrait, “Head of Christ,” which depicts Jesus as “white, or at best racially ambiguous”; and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whose protagonist “rescues” a native from cannibalism, treats him essentially as a slave, and converts him to Christianity. Arguing that evangelicalism at its core is “innovative and therefore progressive,” Prior urges Christians to both question evangelicalism’s received cultural assumptions and seek out new “images, metaphors, and stories that fill your own imagination, your community’s social imaginary, and your own cultural experience.” Weaving together perceptive, fine-grained analysis of literature, art, and popular culture—from apocalypse novels to the once ubiquitous WWJD? bracelets—Prior provides plenty of fodder for those wishing to explore what evangelicalism is and reimagine what it might become. It’s an eye-opener.

June 1, 2023

This is a literary and artistic exploration of the social imaginaries that underlie evangelical Christian culture in the United States. Leading evangelical writer and commentator Prior (On Reading Well) uses her skills in English literature to trace some of the major themes that the Victorian era bequeathed to today's evangelicalism, such as the ideas of improvement, sentimentality, and empire. It is a book about evangelicals for evangelicals and the culture of evangelism. While the text takes Victorian literature as its starting point, it is a book addressed to contemporary evangelicals, consistently moving toward commentary on culture wars, mission, aesthetics, gender roles, and politics. The chapters build slowly from oblique critiques of "anti-wokeness" toward more direct disapproval of Trump, conspiracy theories, and the commodification of religion. However, nudges and jabs between commentary on Dickens and Kipling are often surprisingly gentle, especially when compared to the rhetoric supporting and shaping the other side of this subject. Some readers may want current issues to be addressed more aggressively. VERDICT Often insightful and rewarding in its commentary on the Victorian roots of evangelical Christian ideas, this book could confront current issues a bit more strongly.--Zachariah Motts

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.