The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

by Karen Swallow Prior

Overview

Christianity Today 2024 Book Award Finalist (Culture and the Arts)

"Provides plenty of fodder for those wishing to explore what evangelicalism is and reimagine what it might become. It's an eye-opener."—Publishers Weekly

"Akin to enjoying a lively conversation over a cheering yet bracing cup of tea."—Christianity Today (5-star review)

"A breathtaking reminder of just how powerful the evangelical imagination has been and how much is lost when we forfeit it."—The Gospel Coalition

Contemporary American evangelicalism is suffering from an identity crisis—and a lot of bad press.

In this book, acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior examines evangelical history, both good and bad. By analyzing the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded evangelicalism, she unpacks some of the movement's most deeply held concepts, ideas, values, and practices to consider what is Christian rather than merely cultural. The result is a clearer path forward for evangelicals amid their current identity crisis—and insight for others who want a deeper understanding of what the term "evangelical" means today.

Brought to life with color illustrations, images, and paintings, this book explores ideas including conversion, domesticity, empire, sentimentality, and more. In the end, it goes beyond evangelicalism to show us how we might be influenced by images, stories, and metaphors in ways we cannot always see.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587435751
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/08/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	54,760
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Karen Swallow Prior (PhD, SUNY Buffalo), one of today's leading evangelical writers and commentators, is the award-winning author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. She is a frequent speaker, a monthly columnist at Religion News Service, and has written for Christianity Today, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Vox. She is a contributing editor for Comment, a founding member of the Pelican Project, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, and a senior fellow at the International Alliance for Christian Education. Prior lives with her husband in central Virginia.

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction: Victorians, Evangelicals, and the Invitation
1. Made in His Image
Imagination, Imaginaries, and Evangelicalisms
2. Awakening
Mumford, MLK, Hurston, Hughes, and Other Poets
3. Conversion
Language, Dr. Pepper, and Ebenezer Scrooge
4. Testimony
Grace Abounding and "Evangelically Speaking"
5. Improvement
The Puritan Work Ethic, Paradise Lost, and the Price of Progress
6. Sentimentality
Sweet Jesus, Uncle Tom, and Public Urination
7. Materiality
Jesus in the Window, the Virgin Mary on Grilled Cheese, Gingerbread Houses, and the Sacramentality of Church Space
8. Domesticity
Angels and Castles and Prostitutes, Oh My!
9. Empire
"The White Man's Burden," His Man Friday, the Jesus Nobody Knows, and What Johnny Cash Really Knew
10. Reformation
Pardon Me, Reckoning or Rip Van Winkle?
11. Rapture
Or How a Thief Came in the Night but Left My Chick Tracts Behind

Editorial Reviews

05/29/2023

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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

06/01/2023

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

Library Journal