Well, now. Here’s a barrel full of fish. Let’s start shooting.
Matthew Sutton is a historian teaching at Washington State University who specializes in the critical, some might say “jaundiced,” study of American evangelicalism. Previous alarmist titles of his oeuvre include Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War (Basic Books, 2019) and American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard, 2014).
He recently published an article in the generally respected Journal of the American Academy of Religion with the following abstract. I have been a member of the AAR for many years, but didn’t re-up this particular year, so I don’t have access to the whole article. Never mind that. The abstract gives me lots to work with for the purposes of a mere blog post:
Writing in the shadow of the religious right, a group of historians beginning in the 1980s crafted a new history of American evangelicalism to counter the politicized, right-wing faith of their era. Rather than focus on the movement as a product of specific historical, cultural, and political contexts, they defined it by a set of abstract theological principles. Then they identified those people from the colonial period to the present who fit their definition and who made positive contributions to North American history. The result was a new, singular, multi-century, “evangelical consensus” in the literature that decoupled the movement from politics, race, class, gender, and sexuality. I assess the historiography they created and then argue that we should drop the use of the term evangelical from our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, and I offer a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that embeds it in its cultural context.
This abstract possesses the singular quality of being tendentious, if not simply wrong, from top to bottom. Shall we begin? Lock and load.
Writing in the shadow of the religious right, a group of historians beginning in the 1980s crafted a new history of American evangelicalism to counter the politicized, right-wing faith of their era.
This group of historians was led by George Marsden, whose masterful survey of Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford) was published in 1980. George (an old friend—full disclosure: I count the subjects of this essay to be friends of long standing) has testified in several places that he began this work a decade before. But let’s not quibble about dates in a historical discussion.
It is true that some few volumes produced by this prolific group did counter “the politicized, right-wing faith of their era”: e.g., Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Crossway, 1983) and Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1995). Still, the unprejudiced reader would be hard-pressed to find evidence of any sort of explicit “countering” in the main stream of historical articles, reviews, and books that poured out from these historians. Most of it is just . . . history.
Rather than focus on the movement as a product of specific historical, cultural, and political contexts, they defined it by a set of abstract theological principles.
Now we’re into it—except we’re already there. Note that Marsden’s landmark book is titled Fundamentalism and American Culture. Marsden’s volume takes pains to describe, yes, the specific historical, culture, and political context of fundamentalism. So does Mark Noll in his magisterial America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 1995). And so do the others in books too numerous to mention here.
Indeed, it is this group of historians who have constantly opposed the tendency among American theological and Biblical scholars, especially those caught up in the inerrancy debate of the 1980s, to define evangelicals strictly by theological commitments. Over and over, Marsden, Noll, et al. refer to evangelicals by what they do, not just what they profess.
Moreover, they early on engage in a long-running historiographical debate with colleagues such as Donald Dayton precisely over the problem of defining evangelicalism solely by theological criteria—and Reformed criteria at that. See, for instance, Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, The Variety of American Evangelicalism, a book published by IVP more than thirty years ago (1991).
Then they identified those people from the colonial period to the present who fit their definition and who made positive contributions to North American history.
As a student of this group of historians, I have long been impressed by how wide their historical net could be. Mark Noll’s has actually reached beyond the USA to take in Canada and the U.K. in a number of comparative studies.
I was even more impressed by how they refused to focus only on “positive contributions.” Instead, these historians have made clear that evangelicals held slaves and resisted emancipation, discriminated against women, despised Roman Catholicism, and in a number of other respects fell short of the gospel they proclaimed, even as others fought for abolition, women’s suffrage, ecumenism, and so on.
Sutton makes these historians sound like boosters, if not propagandists. It’s a silly slander to slight their work this way.
The result was a new, singular, multi-century, “evangelical consensus” in the literature that decoupled the movement from politics, race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Actually, that "new . . . 'evangelical consensus'" goes back “in the literature” pretty far. Back beyond Timothy Smith’s pioneering historical work of the 1950s. Back beyond the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. Back beyond the founding of the international Evangelical Alliance in 1846. Back to the friendly sharing of news and good wishes in the trans-Atlantic correspondence of the eighteenth-century revivals out of which evangelicalism emerged.
As for the various categories Sutton commends, Randall Balmer’s work has, if anything, been increasingly preoccupied by politics—not least his biography of Jimmy Carter, who was, as I understand it, a noted . . . politician. Race, class, and gender show up all over the work of Marsden, Noll, Hatch (especially his magisterial The Democratization of American Christianity [Yale, 1991]—please note the title!), Edith Blumhofer (such as her important biography of Aimee Semple McPherson), and the rest.
If these historians haven’t been preoccupied by whatever Sutton means by “sexuality,” it’s because they mostly haven’t dealt with the last few decades, since they are, after all, historians. Noll mildly refers to anything dealing with the last few decades as “journalism," and those are the decades in which such issues have come to the fore in evangelical life. So what’s the problem here?
I assess the historiography they created and then argue that we should drop the use of the term evangelical from our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, and I offer a new definition of postwar evangelicalism that embeds it in its cultural context.
Well, Sutton is far from the first historian to breathlessly advocate for the dropping of the term “evangelical” from describing vital, orthodox Protestantism. He is among the few, however, who would advocate for restricting it instead to post-1945 white American Billy Graham-style religion.
I remember conferences debating this very issue in my graduate school days in Chicago—at meetings of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, led by, yes, this very group of historians. I myself have challenged such a restriction in an article I published three decades ago (ahem) comparing the National Association of Evangelicals with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. It might serve the interests of such organizations to co-opt the term for themselves. But it isn't obvious why a historian would want to let the term be narrowed thus.
Why drop a perfectly apt term and let one tiny group—considered globally—take over a word used confidently and helpfully by, say, the World Evangelical Alliance and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, as well as by historians of, yes, evangelicalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? I defy Sutton (or anyone else) to come up with a better term for what appears to me, and to millions of other people, to be a style of Christianity demonstrably similar across eras, cultures, and denominational lines.
(This is where I cannot avoid suggesting an alternative take on the word “evangelical” in a nice little book that is ready-to-hand.)
Professor Sutton therefore appears to be wrong about pretty much everything. Perhaps readers of his article will tell me that his abstract doesn’t do justice to his article, or that I have otherwise misconstrued his argument. If so, I’ll revise or drop this post. Until then, I think I’ll pay for and read something more promising.
[For a similar demolition of a similar argument presented by Daniel Silliman in Church History, please click here.]
UPDATE: I have now had opportunity to read the whole article. It's a little better, but it's also worse, than the abstract.
It's better in that Sutton clearly knows more than his abstract indicates and the article is more careful about dates and developments than one might suppose. Alas, the tendentiousness of the article is overwhelming.
Randall Balmer's biography of President Carter is ignored when Sutton accuses the evangelical historians of ignoring politics, but then deployed when Sutton wants to chide them for picking such an attractive fellow as an exemplary evangelical. Mark Noll's America's God, which is candid about evangelical defenses of slavery, is ignored on that crucial matter but accused of "sanding edges, massaging differences, and downplaying conflicts and divides among his subjects"—of which Sutton stoops to providing not one example.
Even more centrally in an article focusing on definition, David Bebbington's quadrilateral is simply ignored in all the ways it points to evangelical practice, not just evangelical theology. Evangelical activism is, after all, one of the four criteria. Since Sutton doesn't pause to actually name Bebbington's points or critique them directly, however, the reader might not realize that Sutton is just wildly off the mark.
Along the way, Sutton snarks at how these evangelical historians managed to get funding for scholarly projects, a level of funding that if the latest generation of historians of liberal or so-called mainline Protestantism were to enjoy, the scholarly world would tip the balance back to—what? The previous generations of liberal Protestant (or lapsed Protestant) American religious historians had the field pretty much to themselves, as Sutton briefly concedes. They demonstrably still control the main journals and presses—such as the AAR and JAAR. So what's Sutton's problem? Such ressentiment is unbecoming, especially from someone who enjoys a university chair of his own and publication by good outlets.
Finally, however, Sutton tries to champion a boldly different approach. But he comes up with the likes of Anthea Butler and Kristen Koben De Mez, and their work, at least as he summarizes it, is hardly going to win the day:
Other historians contend that we can no longer afford to separate evangelicalism from race, sex, gender, and politics. Anthea Butler argued in her White Evangelical Racism (2021) that “racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism” (Butler 2021, 2). She highlighted evangelicals’ long support for slavery and segregation, which, she contended, “speaks to a history that is obscured by some historians of evangelicalism who cannot or will not deal with the racism at the core of evangelical beliefs, practices, and political allegiances” (Butler 2021, 5). . . . Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in her surprise bestseller Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), argued that sexism and a commitment to patriarchy are central to any definition of evangelicalism.
These arguments, however, are nonsense. In Butler's case, yes, evangelicals in slave-holding areas generally supported slave-holding. And those areas would include most of the known world until the nineteenth century.
Then, however, the British Empire divested itself of slavery and began its global campaign to end slavery—and why? As historians of various stripes have pointed out, the motive here seems to have been provided, by gosh, by evangelicalism. Meanwhile, what kind of religion are the slaves themselves practicing? Most of us would say it looks awfully like evangelicalism. Butler's point evanesces. As for Jesus and John Wayne, the bestselling part is hardly a surprise given the political climate in which it appeared. But the idea that "sexism and a commitment to patriarchy are central to any definition of evangelicalism" is, again, to say both too little and too much.
Virtually everyone everywhere has been demonstrably "committed to patriarchy" until very recent times, as any historian should appreciate. Yet when evangelical (or "Biblical") feminism arises in the 1970s, its proponents don't somehow cease being evangelical—which they would be, if "sexism and a commitment to patriarchy" are not just previously common (as they were, again, pretty much everywhere among everyone) but "central to any definition of evangelicalism." Just because a trait you don't like happens to be common among white American evangelicals really doesn't mean it is somehow essential to the definition of evangelicalism. The majority of white American evangelicals, not to put too fine a point on it, aren't all evangelicals. Globally considered, not by a long shot.
I'll be less modest in conclusion. I've spent a lot of time—most of my adult life, in fact—living among, studying, and writing about evangelicalism. I think both the term and the style of Christianity it signifies continue to make sense and are worth both retaining and defending. So take a look at my Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction and see if a non-American, non-presentist view of evangelical Christianity makes sense to you. I dare to hope it could even make sense to Professor Sutton.
