Theoretical Barriers to the Understanding of Evangelical Christianity

Author(s): R. Stephen Warner

Source: Sociological Analysis, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 1-9
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3710492
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 Sociological Analysis, 1979, 40, 1:1-9

Theoretical Barriers to the

Understanding of Evangelical
Christianity*
R. Stephen Warner
University of Illinois, Chicago Circle

Based on the prenise that evangelicalisn is annimportant contemporary phenomenon th

been 4slihlted by sociologists, this paper analyzes three cognitive biase.s that preven
understanding. The three biases, or "theoretical barriers," are the identificatio
eva ngelicallisn zwith social clases, political, and historical correlates. The paper argnie.s nagain
as~simption that evangelicalism is in essence the religion of the disinherited, the conservati
the atallistic, especially if ze are to understand the resurgence of evangelicalisin in mnainlin
mindle-class churches.

This paper is based on two premises: first, that "Evangelical Christianity" is an

important contemporary religious phenomenon; second, that sociologists have
not so far contributed much to the understanding of this phenomenon. These
premises will be stated below in somewhat more detail, but they will not, in this
paper, be truly demonstrated or defended. Instead, the thesis of the paper will
be to suggest some reasons for our failure to properly understand evangelical
Christianity. These reasons are stated to be three "theoretical barriers" or
cognitive biases that have the effect of discounting the phenomenon. They are
class bias, liberal bias, and evolutionary bias, and although they are stated to be
three in number they are interrelated. The argument will proceed by citing an
eclectic selection of what are nonetheless claimed to be representative works in
the sociology of religion, on the one hand, and by occasional references to data
collected by the author in an on-going field study of an evangelical revival in a
small-town Presbyterian church, on the other. With this theoretical statement, I
hope to "clear the ground" for my own and others' attempts to do empirical
justice to the phenomenon.

Definitions

The term "evangelical," itself, is often misunderstood. Although it is widely

used, especially with the ascendancy of an evangelical to the Presidency, it is
seldom defined. Members of the author's class in sociology of religion and all but
one or two of the lay members interviewed by him in a study of the evangelical
revival in a Presbyterian church do not correctly define the contemporary
meaning of the term. Two misidentifications are frequent. The first is to confuse
'Evangelical" with "Evangelistic." (The tendencies denoted by these terms,
though related, are not identical.) The second is to use "Evangelical" in its now

*Paper read at the 1978 Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, San
Francisco. In its preparation, I drew upon advice and suggestions from Joy Charlton, Anne Heider,
Christine Heyrman, and David Street. I am very grateful to each of them, but I cannot ask any of them
to share responsibility for the views expressed here. Still less can I burden, though I must thank,
Norman Cantor, Lewis Coser, Arthur Frank, Barclay Johnson, and Hans Mol, who read this paper in
draft but whose valuable comments I was unable to accommodate before publication.

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2 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

archaic sense as a synonym for "Protestant." (The Reformation churches were

Evangelical in their time; most now, however, have become theologically "lib-
eral.") However, a recent cover story in Time magazine (December 26, 1977) did
supply one of the few quasi-definitions found in the popular press recently:
"Most Evangelicals . . . are basically conventional Protestants who hold staunchly
to the authority of the Bible in all matters and adhere to orthodox Christian
doctrine. They believe in making a conscious personal commitment to Christ, a
spiritual encounter, gradual or instantaneous, known as the born-again experi-
ence" (53). This definition is similar to one found in the (Random House)
dictionary: "Evangelical ... belonging to or designating the Christian churches
that emphasize the teachings and authority of the Scriptures, esp. of the New
Testament, in opposition to the institutional authority of the church itself, and
that stress as paramount the tenet that salvation is achieved by personal conver-
sion to faith in the atonement of Christ" (493). Recognizing that the Biblical and
personal aspects of this definition (as of the phenomenon) represent bases of
faith potentially and often actually in tension with each other, we will nonethe-
less be speaking of evangelicalism as Biblically-based Christianity that emphasizes
a personal relationship of the believer to Jesus Christ. Often enough, the evangeli-
cal believes not only in the literal truth of the Bible stories but in the potentiality
of such miracles today.
For the sake of clarity, the contrary "liberal" tendencies of the "mainline"
Protestant denominations should be briefly defined. Where evangelicalism re-
gards the Bible as literally true and Jesus Christ as a "personal savior," "liberalism"
here shall mean that tendency to regard the Bible as metaphorically true and Jesus
Christ as an ethical prophet. To avoid confusion, it should be noted that the
organization that came to be called the National Council of Churches of Christ in
the United States of America (in 1950), which organization is the representative
par excellence of the "liberal" tendency, is an offshoot of the American Evangeli
Alliance, founded in 1867. Like "liberalism" in the political sphere,
4"evangelicalism" in the religious sphere has undergone an almost complete
reversal of meaning in the past century (Moberg, 1973). Those I am here calling
evangelicals and liberals alike have difficulty in designating their own religious
tendencies, and "liberals" will as likely have no term or some other term (such as
"humanist" or "ethical") to refer to themselves. "Liberal" is a theologian's and
outsider's term. The contrast, though, is marked, and it is experienced by the
layman. The liberal is put off by the evangelical's exclusivity, naivete, and "Jesus
talk." The evangelical is repelled by the use of the designation "Christian" to
refer to doctrines and rites that implicitly or explicitly deny the divinity of Jesus,
and he is likely to view the liberal Churches as "dead."

Premises

1. Evangelical Christianity is an important contemporary phenomenon. "Ac-

cording to a recent Gallup survey . . . half of all Protestants-and a third of all
Americans-say that they have been born again. That figure comes to nearly 50
million adult Americans who claim to have experienced a turning point in their
lives by making a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Even
more surprising is Gallup's report that 46 percent of Protestants-and 31

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 UNDERSTANDING OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY 3

percent of Catholics-believe that the Bible is 'to be taken literally, word for
word,' a doctrine held only by the most conservative Christians" (Newsweek,
1976:68). Evangelicalism is, in fact, a social movement, whose adherents are to
be found (a) in new (and perhaps evanescent) religious groups-from devotional
affinity groups to charismatic fellowships; (b) in the traditionally evangelical
denominations-including Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans;
and (c) as a burgeoning "underground" in the traditionally "liberal" denomina-
tions, including the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. (The Catholic charis-
matic movement is a related revitalization movement.) To some extent, today's
evangelicalism is part of the fad of self-consciousness of the 1970s (Wolfe, 1976),
but it is more than that. As Troeltsch stressed, literalist and enthusiastic sec-
tarianism (of which evangelicalism is the latest example) has always been an
immanent tendency within Christianity.
2. Evangelicalism has heretofore not received the sociological attention that its
intrinsic importance calls for. It is overlooked, or discounted, stereotyped and
patronized. Notions that evangelicalism is a working class, Southern, emotional,
and other-worldly phenomenon skirt its significance for the mainline churches.
Sociologists who speak of mainline, liberal lay believers with respect and fellow-
feeling treat evangelicalism as if they were witnesses to a bizarre spectacle. It is as
if evangelicals were denizens of the zoo. The flavor of this ridicule is seen, for
example, in Stark and Glock's dismissal of a neoorthodox answer to the decline
in liberal faith. Speaking of the apparent victory of skepticism in the early 1 960s,
they wrote: "The current reformation in religious thought appears irrevocable,
and it seems as likely that we can recover our innocence in these matters as that
we can again believe the world flat or that lightning is a palpable manifestation of
God's wrath" (1968:216). No doubt because of its perceptual distance from the
sociologists' worldview, evangelicalism is dismissed out of hand as irrelevant or
quaint at best.

Barriers

Assuming the correctness of the two foregoing premises, the next question (to
which this paper is addressed) is "why"? Evaluative bias is one obvious answer:
sociologists, being political liberals, cultural secularists, and theological ration-
alists, are repelled by the perceived conservatism, supernaturalism and
emotionalism of the evangelicals. But, unless we are to suppose that sociologists
consciously allow their evaluative biases to distort their "findings" and recom-
mendations, we have to inquire into the perceptions-the more-or-less uncon-
scious cognitive biases-that prevent clearer vision and that "feed into" the
evaluative biases.
In my reading of the literature, I have come across three interrelated precon-
ceptions regarding evangelicalism that in demonstrable ways prevent those who
hold them from seeing evangelicalism clearly. These preconceptions are: (1) that
evangelicalism is a lower-class phenomenon; (2) that evangelicalism is politically
conservative; (3) that evangelicalism is retrogressive historically. Each of these
preconceptions is based on a perfectly respectable empirical correlation: the
correlations between denomination and social class; the correlation between
religious orthodoxy and political conservatism; and the observation that "disen-

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4 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

chantment" or secularization advanced over a century-long period, especially

from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. However, these empiri-
cal generalizations have been hypostatized to the status of theoretical constructs
so that the correlations have come to take on the appearance of identities. And if
evangelicalism is perceived as by definition the religion of the disinherited, a
religion that leads them away from relevant solutions to modern problems, then
the middle class sociologist who wishes to study the relevant mainstream of
contemporary religiosity may safely ignore it; hence the logic of the unconscious
dismissal of the evangelical. I claim that this logic does in fact operate.
Social class bias. In the chapter of Economy and Society devoted to the sociology of
religion (originally published in English translation as The Sociology of Religion),
Weber presented a seminal series of generalizations relating religiosity and social
stratum. Drawing upon these correlations or "elective affinities" (cf. Warner
1972:106-113) and upon similar ideas of Troeltsch, Richard Niebuhr presented
the classic explanation of Christian fragmentation in the United States, The Social
Sources of Denominationalism (1929). Niebuhr found that the tendency we are here
calling evangelicalism - the emphases on personal salvation, conversion, re-
vivalism, and miracles-was socially located among the "disinherited," among
those on the Western frontier, and among Negroes. Niebuhr saw this phenome-
non as self-liquidating, as the inevitable effect of piety was to bring about
economic success and as the settlement of the land reduced urban-rural and
regional differentiation (1929:18, 30-33, 41-43, 54-56, 57, et passim), and he
expected the truly disinherited in a secularized age increasingly to turn their
hopes toward secular solutions, including Marxism (72-76). The denominations
that had been founded to meet the needs of the disinherited-especially Bap-
tism, Methodism and Quakerism-he saw as increasingly evolving in the direc-
tion of middle class intellectualization. (The denominations, however, continued
on their fragmented courses because of organizational imperatives, and he
deplored that fragmentation). Meanwhile Niebuhr's argument that the religios-
ity of a redeemer and a savior met the needs of the disinherited while the belief
in a creator and a judge met the needs of the bourgeoisie (1929:84) has been one
of the guiding threads of thinking about the correlation of religion and social
class. While it may still be true that the correlation holds generally (the lower the
status the more evangelical the religion, and conversely), the fact that middle-
class evangelicals are to be found in middle-class churches is obscured by
rendering the correlation an identity. We find in Michael Ducey's (1977)
excellent account of liberal worship, for example, the following statement about
the churches in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago that he studied:

The fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches-the churches of the disinherited-did

not display [the] same malaise [as the middle-class churches]. In Lincoln Park, the
number of these churches increased during the sixties, and on a wide front the
spokesmen of these churches could be heard saying to their middle-class sister
churches: "I told you so. Your liberal secular involvement has brought you to grief."
This agony and discomfort of the mainline churches vis-a-vis the continued self-
assuredness of the insistently "other-worldly" fundamentalists beg for commentary.
But we must leave that commentary aside until we have satisfactorily described and
probed the meaning of the malaise of the churches "of the middle." The fundamnen-

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 UNDERSTANDING OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY 5

talists we shall always have with us, but the discomfort of the
more sensitive indicator of the central issues of social and cul

Note that in this statement Ducey juxtaposes non-parallel categories, fundamen-

talism (theology) and middle-class (social structure), thus identifying fundamen-
talism as a lower (or working) class phenomenon. One result of this identification
is that Ducey fails to consider fundamentalism (and its close kin evangelicalism)
as part either of the middle-class malaise or of its solution. Nowhere in his
argument is there recognized the possibility of a pentecostal-fundamentalist-
evangelical-or-charismatic tendency within the mainline, "middle-class church-
es, with the result that Ducey's prognosis for the mainline churches is written
solely from within the tradition of liberal theology.
More broadly, the bias toward perceiving evangelicalism as a lower-class
phenomenon combined with the middle-class identification of sociologists (an
other professionals) at the very least does not make it likely that they will
attuned to its emergence in their midst. Evangelicalism will be regarded as,
best, an alien phenomenon.
Liberal bias. In the past century of United States history, sectarian religious
movements have not been particularly oriented to protest and social change.
This relatively apolitical or anti-political stance of Christian true-believers re-
verses an earlier pattern wherein political rebellion was often the result of
religious enthusiasm (cf. Walzer, Cohn). According to Niebuhr, the depoliticiza-
tion of religious purity movements came in part through the influence of
Methodism, which substituted "individual ethics and philanthropism for social
ethics and millenarianism" (1929:65). Be that as it may, by the time of
Niebuhr's writing, the social locus of relatively liberal religious tendencies-the
locus of social toleration and of social concern-was not the evangelical (what
Niebuhr called the "other worldly") but the mainline churches, and especially
the urban churches (1929:180-187). And in his call for greater social aware-
ness, Niebuhr could only recommend a further move away from what we are
here calling the evangelical tendency. Niebuhr, then, was simply among those
who noted and attempted to explain the correlation between theological and
political conservatism (and its converse).
But this correlation, too, has been reified and has become a blinder to
understanding. I am not claiming that the correlation no longer holds true
generally, but I am claiming that its reification (a) prevents the researcher from
perceiving exceptions (exceptions that historically ought to be expected) and (b)
adds to the perceived unattractiveness of evangelicalism for most social scientists.
An example of the reification of the correlation is to be found in a recent survey
of lay and clergy persons in the suburbs of Chicago (Schroeder et al., 1974).
Schroeder and his colleagues surveyed the opinions on political, ethical, and
theological issues of a number of white and black, and National Council of
Churches-affiliated and non-NCC affiliated clergy (as well as Jewish clergy), but
their lay sample was confined to NCC affiliates, which we have earlier identified
as the locus of "liberal" Protestantism. As experience would predict, the NCC-
affiliated clergy expressed politically liberal attitudes, more liberal than the
attitudes expressed by non-NCC-affiliated clergy. The lay sample excluded
white non-NCC lay persons, but the findings showed that on many attitudes,

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6 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

NCC-affiliated clergy were further from the members of their congregations

than the non-NCC clergy were from the NCC congregations. This not-
unexpected finding leads the authors to the following conjecture: "This situation
is illuminating, for it helps to explain the popularity of mass evangelists such as
Billy Graham and Oral Roberts. The majority of Protestant lay people outside
the southern and southwestern Bible Belt do not share either their biblical
fundamentalism or their evangelical fervor, but they are more apt to be in
sympathy with their view on social (not private) morality than with the views of
their own NCC-affiliated clergy" (1974:156-158). What has happened here is
that the authors have so reified the theological-political conservatism correlation
that the political attitude has become a proxy for the theological and in fact the
theological is technically "reduced" to the political. Thus, in the absence of data, the
authors conjecture that it is the political rather than the religious stance of mass
evangelists that is the source of their appeal. This conjecture effectively fore-
closes for them the possibility that the constituency of Chicago suburban religion
might be receptive to a more evangelical stance on the part of their churches.
Stark and Glock, in their survey of American Piety, also express surprise that
members of Protestant sects should score highest of all groups on "ethicalism,"
an index composed of the importance for salvation placed by the individual on
"doing good for others" and "loving thy neighbor." Generally speaking, the
more (theologically) conservative, the less ethical. "The single exception to this
liberal-conservative trend is provided by members of the various small Protes-
tant sects. These groups showed the greatest proportion of high scores on
ethicalism (61%). This at first seemed mysterious. On all other data in this
chapter sect members behaved like other conservatives. The answer lay in their
unselectivity on the criteria of salvation. A reexamination of sect members'
responses to the salvation items reveals that for all practical purposes these
people think everything bears on salvation" (1968:73). In this fashion, Stark and
Glock dismiss the expressed ethicalism (similar to political liberalism) of their
theologically conservative sectarians, and protect their conception that sectarians
are still to be seen "like other conservatives."
The reification of the theology-politics correlation and reduction of the
theological to the political tendency has as its extreme conceptual expression the
consequence of denying the authenticity of other-than-liberal religiosity. At
least, this is what is implied in the dichotomy that is posed between the church's
function as either "challenge" (authentic) or "comfort" (inauthentic). Hadden
and Longino, for example, write that the church can focus on either "social
change, the quality of human life [usually meaning the life of underprivileged
persons not members of the congregation], and ajust social order" (challenge) or
on "personal financial gain and comfort" (comfort) (1974:232). One need not
dig very deep to see the contempt in which "non-challenge" religiosity is held
the eyes of Hadden and Longino, but the theoretical consequence is more than
simple political (or evaluative) bias. It is the cognitive bias of failing to recogni
that there may be authentic religious tendencies that are oriented to personal
challenge, the challenge to get one's own moral life in order, for example.
Evangelicalism, which in one respect is just such a religiosity of personal
challenge, simply cannot be seen by those who wear such conceptual blinders.

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 UNDERSTANDING OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY 7

In sum, for so long have politically liberal sociologists looke

cal liberals as a constituency for social justice that they canno
cally conservative seriously.
Evolutionary bias. Perhaps the most impenetrable of the theoretical barriers is
the view that evangelicalism is historically passe. Ours is a world, the argument
goes, of unbelief or of disenchantment. This view is perhaps most associated
with Weber's name, and indeed he did speak of the Western world as increas-
ingly bereft of magic and of religious meaning. In the written history closest to
us, that of the United States over the past century, there is little doubt that the
elite segments of the theological world have come to a more metaphorical, less
literal, interpretation of the Scriptures (see Ahlstrom, c.46). A pernicious reifi-
cation is introduced, however, when these discrete statements are generalized
and extrapolated into the past and future.
An example of extrapolation is to be found in Stark and Glock's prognosis for
the future of Christianity (1968, c. 11). Finding an alarming lack of orthodoxy
among their sample population, they argue that Christianity's days are num-
bered. Of course their data are only cross-sectional, but they maintain that "until
now the vast majority of people have remained unshaken in their faith in the
other-worldly premises of Christianity" (1968:205). This statement is made
despite the authors' admission that "there simply is no reliable evidence on the
state of faith in past times" (206), in the evident conviction that it was easier in
the past to believe in tenets that now increasingly appear absurd. Stark and
Glock thus disregard the troubles that spiritual leaders have always had in
convincing constituencies of the truth of what have always been improbable
religious claims. From the point of view of the secular sociologist, our contempo-
rary world is in the cognitively privileged position of no longer requiring or
being susceptible to supernatural belief. If that is so, then not evangelicalism but
liberalism is extrapolated to be the faith of the future, if indeed there will be a
faith.
The extrapolation of unbelief or more liberal belief is given explicit theoretical
grounding in the work of current neoevolutionists (see Bellah, 1964, Johnson,
1978 and especially, Parsons, 1969). In line with his general theoretical stance,
Parsons does not see the malaise of the churches as evidence for the decline or
decay of religion per se. He rather sees religious institutions as going through a
process of structural differentiation and religious beliefs as undergoing "value
generalization." The social systems that have evolved a differentiation between
temporal and spiritual powers are seen by him to be more advanced in an
evolutionary sense than those that have not. More to the point in the present
connection, he maintains that the movement toward theological liberalism is an
evolutionary advance. From this point of view, fundamentalism, as Parsons
designates the insistence on the literal tenets of the traditional faith, is seen as
atavistic. It is either an evolutionary survival, or an example of temporary
"deflation" in the sphere of what he technically calls "commitments" (or "value
commitments"). For Parsons, then, contemporary evangelicalism can only have
precisely the same social significance as did political McCarthyism in the 1950s: it
is a temporary and retrogressive, albeit disruptive, phenomenon, a symptom of
the growing pains of society. Now I do notmean to imply that Parsons has made this

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8 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

argument specifically about the current evangelical revival; the article from
which I am paraphrasing was written a decade ago and the analysis of fun-
damentalism as a deflationary phenomenon was made of a religious tendency
much less widespread than is current evangelicalism. My point is simply that
Parsons' evolutionary framework, with its confident equation of liberalism with
historical progress, prevents the conceptualization of evangelicalism as anything
other than an exception to a general rule. Johnson's very recent article has the
merit of making this biased framework more apparent.
I do not argue here that evangelicalism is the wave of the religious future,
though I do share the skepticism expressed by Stark and Glock (1968:212) about
the viability of churches based on theological liberalism; but I do argue that we
sociologists ought to be prepared to consider that possibility. The view that the
long term movement is in the direction of more liberal belief or of downright
unbelief, when that view is reifed, blinds us to the potential significance of
evangelicalism.
Summary. The three biases I have briefly outlined-social class, political, and
historical correlations reified into theoretical constructs-have the effect of
discounting an important emergent religious movement. Each of them serves as
a device through which the observer is alienated from the phenomenon with an
"us versus them" mentality. "We" are privileged, liberal, and enlightened; "they"
are disinherited, reactionary, and credulous; and insofar as the historical ten-
dency of modern times is in the direction of greater affluence, greater social
inclusion, and greater secularization, "their" belief system is an anachronism.

A Brief Prospect

I propose that sociologists return to the stance of cultural relativism that

informed the great critique of nineteenth-century evolutionism with which the
modern history of our discipline (and of modern anthropology) began. From a
relativistic point of view, evangelical Christianity, for all of what may seem its
naivete, is no less and no more valid as a belief system than other theologies.
Evangelicalism and related enthusiasms have always been in the repertoire of
available Christian world views, and those enthusiasms have come and gone
often in the past. The current evangelical revival evidently meets not only
emotional, but also moral and cognitive, needs of vast sectors of the population,
needs that are going unmet by competing systems of faith. We ought to
remember that Weber's notion of intellectualization in the modern world did not
presuppose a greater extent of popular scientific knowledge now than in the
past. Rather, Weber held that "intellectualization" meant that the popular belief
was that secular experts could be found who could without "magic" explain the
workings of our technology and our institutions (Weber, 1946:139). Intellec-
tualization, that is, was simply another faith. Insofar as faith in secular expertise
has declined in the past decade, it seems plausible that orthodox religious leaders
will step in to fill the gap. Insofar as popular faith in the moral qualities of
secular leaders has also declined, those religious leaders who speak for absolutist
moral positions will gain a hearing. The value system for which evangelical
religious leaders speak may appear to liberals as a craven one, but it is one that
places a great emphasis on the inner life, the problems of which sociologists have

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 UNDERSTANDING OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY 9

been too quick to believe have been overcome. For the evangelical value system is
genuinely inwardly directed; it demands that the adherent pay closer attention
to the state of his personal and immediate interpersonal life (cf. Neal 1965, who
assumes that "values" must be outward-looking). As a first step, we must take
that belief system as fundamental to its own understanding. Rather than suppos-
ing that we already have the key to the explanation of evangelicalism in the older
notion that it meets the needs of the socially downtrodden, the politically
reactionary, and those unready for the challenges of the contemporary world,
we must at the beginning suppose that there are authentic religious yearnings
that it is meeting for "everyman" in the modern world.

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