The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior (Brazos Press, 2023).
The unexamined life, according to Socrates, is not worth living. Karen Swallow Prior might say something similar about the unexamined faith.
Karen (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is a good friend and occasional collaborator of mine) undertakes such an examination in her latest book, The Evangelical Imagination. As someone who frequently teaches and writes about Victorian literature, Karen is uniquely qualified to conduct such an examination of evangelical Christianity, since, as she observes, “Evangelicals … created most of the ethos that defined the Victorian age and … this ethos defines much of evangelicalism today.”
In other words, much of evangelicalism is rooted not in Christianity, but in culture—the culture of a particular era, which, while it had its virtues, had its flaws as well.
Karen painstakingly demonstrates this by taking us through the history of certain concepts integral to evangelical faith: awakening, conversion, testimony, improvement, and so on. She shows how ideas we take for granted, and the language we use to talk about them, usually have a context and a deeper meaning that most of us know nothing about.
For example, in her chapter “Domesticity,” she explains Victorian ideals about gender roles and how they developed, and then adds, “Rigid ideas about masculinity and femininity were never limited to evangelicals—they were in the air. Evangelicals simply breathed the same air that everyone else did. We still do. So much so that what evangelicals uncritically assume is ‘biblical’ turns out to be simply Victorian.”
And then there’s her powerful chapter on “Empire.” The Victorian era was the age of the British Empire, and during that time evangelical thinking got so tangled up with imperial thinking that, again, we often still think and talk about Christian faith—built on a humble, self-sacrificing Savior—in terms of conquering and dominating.
Karen cites one example that’s very personal for her: Liberty University, where she taught for many years before university president Jerry Falwell resigned in the wake of a sex scandal. Leaving Liberty helped her gain some perspective on the skewed values there, not just in Falwell’s own life, but at the institutional level. “The Falwell Empire,” as Karen calls it, showed her “up close the harm done when people are counted as less important than the institution.”
Despite her own painful experiences, or perhaps even because of them, Karen writes not harshly or bitterly, but with hard-earned wisdom, deep historical and literary insight, and a desire to restore what’s been lost or damaged. Her book is must reading for people of faith who want a greater understanding of what they believe, why they believe it, and whether it aligns with what belief should really look like.
Book Links:
The Evangelical Imagination on Amazon
The Evangelical Imagination on Bookshop
(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualified purchases.)
(Cover image copyright Brazos Press. Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.)
Goodreads Links:
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
Notes:
And now for a special announcement: Last week I signed with Cascade Books to write The Screen and the Mirror, a book about great films and what they show us about ourselves. This book is for Cascade’s new Pop Culture and the Sacred series, edited by David and Marybeth Baggett. I’ll keep you posted on when to look for it, and I hope to do some fun book launch events here when the time comes!
Dear, Strange Things will take an Easter break and be back on April 14. Wishing you a happy Easter!
I don't mince words when I say this is one of the most important books I've read in the last 5 years. Koyzis' Political Visions and Haidt's The Righteous Mind find easy company with Swallow's work. They are necessary for peeling back the layers of rhetoric and repeated propaganda that has been endemic to the surface layer arguments made by religious political elites. Swallow delves deeper than "worldview" and offers something altogether different.
I own a copy of this and am SO looking forward to reading it. Your review just solidified that anticipation!
Also... way to bury the BIG news about your forthcoming book! How incredibly exciting! Congratulations. ❤️