Searching for the Evangelical Octopus
The UCCS Center for the Study of Evangelicalism
On Monday I had a great conversation with Jeffrey Scholes, professor of philosophy and department chair at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.1 He is serves as Director of their Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life.
Jeff had contacted me because he and his colleagues had just received a grant from the Luce Foundation to create a Center for the Study of Evangelicalism2. He kindly asked me to be on the advisory board of the new center.
Over the course of a very interesting hour, we explored lots of topics. Some dealt with logistics like who might be a good speaker to kick off the center in the fall. We also discussed other like centers across the country.
Some of those are theological in nature where others are data driven. Still others deal with religion and politics or with evangelicals and particular public policy issues like immigration.
Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, I had some connections to the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton. Mostly I was a lonely sociologist in a room of religious historians. I was much more amenable to evangelicals as self-defined than they were (I remember Princeton featuring heavily in their discussions). In the early 1990s, I got a research grant from the ISAE (through Lilly money) and did a project on congregational networks.3 ISAE closed in 2014.
As Jeff and I continued talking about different books, authors, and research strategies we listed the variety of ways these have been expressed. There’s been work on complementarianism and masculinity. There has been work on pastoral celebrities and religious publishing. There has been work on the Nones and Exvangelicals. There has been work on various para-church and political advocacy groups. There has been outstanding work on the dangers of Christian Nationalism or race. And of course, there has been work on the various sex abuse and power dynamic scandals across the evangelical landscape.4
I’m pretty sure it was Jeff that first used the “tentacle” image. We started listing everything in the previous paragraph as the tentacles of evangelicalism. Somewhere in the last few minutes of our conversation — when there wasn’t enough time to dig deeper, I asked “What about the Octopus?”
How do we think about the totality of Evangelical World? This is a bigger question than how the gatekeepers define who’s in. It’s bigger than the four components of the Bebbington Quadrilateral.
Evangelicalism includes people who attend church every week and those who rarely do. It includes the people who are now claiming to be evangelical or born-again, even though they are Catholic or Hindu. It involves those in the South for whom being evangelical is almost a birthright and those in the Northwest who feel oppressed on all sides by secularity. It includes those who have deep theological understandings and those who have their six go-to verses on plaques around the house.
I’m not suggesting that my question about the Evangelical Octopus should be the guiding focus of the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism. On the other hand, I think I’m one of the first advisory board members, so we may talk about it more.
For now, I guess I’ll watch the National Geographic miniseries Secrets of the Octopus and let my imagination run wild.
In addition to me and my wife, Jeff was the third officiating witness when our daughter and son-in-law got married.
What better place than Colorado Springs: home of Focus, Compassion Intl, Navigators, and some powerful churhes?
In which I focused too much on bonding social capital and not enough on bridging social capital.
People referenced in this paragraph: Beth Allison Barr, Kristin DuMez, Katelyn Beaty, Daniel Vaca, Ryan Burge, Sarah McCammon, David Schwartz, Daniel Bennett, Andrew Whitehead, Sam Perry, Scot McKnight, Rob Downen, and many more.