C. Wright Mills and the "Evangelical Imagination"

Decoupling Personal Story and Structural Dynamics

While The Power Elite and White Collar were perhaps the most well-known books C. Wright Mills wrote, I think The Sociological Imagination¹ was the most influential. Written in 1959, the middle of the book was a brutal take-down of Parsonian Functionalism, which had dominated sociology for two decades.² But the beginning parts of the book outlines what exactly he thought sociology was all about.

Photo by his third wife taken from a review of a biography in Columbia Magazine. I selected this picture because of an apocryphal story I learned in grad school about CWM riding his motorcycle into the social science department at Columbia.

Mills contrasted between “personal troubles” and “public issues”. Connecting these two ideas, he says, is central to developing sociological imagination³.

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between “the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure.” This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science. (8)

I found myself thinking of Mills’ important distinction while reading John Fea’s article in The Atlantic about his father and the reactions from historians — namely Kristin Kobes DuMez and Beth Allison Barr — that he critiques in his piece. Kristin wrote a response on her SubStack this morning and Beth has been reacting on Threads. I have read the recent books by all three of them: John’s Believe Me, Kristin’s Jesus and John Wayne, and Beth’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood. They are excellent analyses of the factors shaping contemporary evangelicalism.

Mills’ conception was trying to articulate an understand of what we now call social problems. I dare say that Mills’ distinction between the personal and the public is in the first few pages of every social problems text used today. But I think Mills’ separation of these two ideas is bigger than social problems. He writes:

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. (6)

If I move out of the social problems realm, then it makes sense to talk of the contrast between personal story and structural forces. It follows that these can be either positive or negative.

It is this recognition that occurred to me when observing the dialogue around John’s article regarding his father. He writes of his father’s conversion and the dramatic change in his demeanor the family noted: “Over time, this scary guy became a better father and husband.” Central to this development was James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio program. John then goes on to critique a number of books that he feels have been overly negative about evangelicals while missing conversion stories like his dad’s.

I have read all five of the books John offers up for critique (in addition to those of Kristin and Beth). Some of these begin with structural forces and explore how they impinge on personal story. Others go the other way around.

Conversion stories are always tough to deal with. As Peter Berger argues, they contain within them the reshaping of the pre-conversion reality⁴. That doesn’t make them false but they are influenced by broader social factors to take on a particular patterning. The same is true for deconstruction stories. They are shaped by broader social forces, require a re-imagining of what was once taken for granted, and then involve a re-sorting of the good and bad from the past structural factors.

I’m certain that there are lots of stories of people like John’s father who were positively shaped to Focus on [their personal] Family. There are people who came to faith sitting under the ministry of Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill, in spite of the outrages Jennifer McKinney documents in Making America Manly Again. There are people who grew spiritually over the years of ministry of Bill Hybels at Willow Creek, even given the issues of a dysfunctional leadership structure described by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer in a Church Called Tov.

Yet for each of those wonderful faith stories, there are scores that describe the harm done to others. Dobson’s influence led to confusion of people spanked with wooden spoons to break strong wills. Driscoll’s misogyny and power plays drove people not just from Mars Hill but from the faith altogether. Every day we learn of new patterns of abuse in church spaces and damaged individuals ignored and then vilified for raising any concerns. We need the structural lens — identifying the public issues — to address these harms.

This requires an important calculus. How many people with bad personal issues outweigh the good personal issues? How much bad is acceptable? Is it one percent? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Forty percent?

I used Michael Sandel’s Justice in a senior capstone course for years. In his chapter on utilitarianism, he cites an Ursula LeGuin story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omalas.” In the story, the town of Omalas is idyllic with everything anyone would want. The reason this works is because of a little girl kept in a dungeon and facing unspeakable horrors. At the end of the course, this was always the image my students came back to.

This is what C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination demands of us. We must attempt to identify the public issues that impinge on personal story. We have to examine how those institutional and cultural forces shape our understanding of choices. It doesn’t mean that everyone is impacted by those forces in the same way. But we cannot elevate the positive personal story if it demands that we remain ignorant of those larger forces. Facing those larger public issues is the only way that evangelicalism can free itself from the ongoing challenges it seemingly faces on a daily basis.

1. Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology remains my favorite book in this genre, but Mills is still important.

2. I always told my Sociological Theory classes that Parsons’ books coincided with the birth of The Free Press, which made previously inaccessible theory books readily available.

3. My dog-eared copy of Sociological Imagination didn’t make it to the retirement library, so I bought a Kindle version so I could get the quotes right.

4. Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination has a chapter on this.