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"Over the past century, evangelicalism has taken on global proportions, spreading from its northern heartlands and forming new and burgeoning centers of vibrant life in the global South. Now, in Global Evangelicalism, a gathering of front-rank historians offer conceptual and regional overviews of evangelical Christianity."--Back cover

American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it. Historian Matthew Avery Sutton draws on archival research to document the ways an initially obscure network of charismatic preachers and their followers reshaped American religion, at home and abroad, for over a century. Perceiving the United States as besieged by Satanic forces -- communism and secularism, family breakdown and government encroachment -- Billy Sunday, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, and others took to the pulpit and airwaves to explain how Biblical end-times prophecy made sense of a world ravaged by global wars, genocide, and the threat of nuclear extinction. Believing Armageddon was nigh, these preachers used what little time was left to warn of the coming Antichrist, save souls, and prepare the nation for God's final judgment. By the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and conservative Republicans appropriated evangelical ideas to create a morally infused political agenda that challenged the pragmatic tradition of governance through compromise and consensus. Following 9/11, the politics of apocalypse continued to resonate with an anxious populace seeking a roadmap through a world spinning out of control. Pre-millennialist evangelicals have erected mega-churches, shaped the culture wars, made and destroyed presidential hopefuls, and brought meaning to millions of believers. Narrating the story of modern evangelicalism from the perspective of the faithful, Sutton demonstrates how apocalyptic thinking continues to exert enormous influence over the American mainstream today

When it comes to evangelicals and sex, it seems, whatever the question, the answer is "no." In Saving Sex, Amy DeRogatis argues that this could not be further from the truth. Demolishing the myth of evangelicals as anti-sex, she shows that American evangelicals claim that fabulous sex -- in the right context --i s viewed as a divinely-sanctioned, spiritual act. For decades, evangelical sex education has been a thriving industry. Evangelical couples have sought advice from Christian psychologists and marriage counselors, purchased millions of copies of faith-based "sexual guidebooks," and consulted magazines, pamphlets, websites, blogs, and podcasts on a vast array of sexual topics, including human anatomy, STDs -- sometimes known as "Sexually Transmitted Demons"--Varieties of sexual pleasure, role-play, and sex toys, all from a decidedly biblical angle. DeRogatis discusses a wide range of evidence, from purity literature for young evangelicals to sex manuals for married couples to "deliverance manuals," which instruct believers in how to expel demons that enter the body through sexual sin. Evangelicals have at times attempted to co-opt the language of female empowerment, emphasizing mutual consent and female sexual pleasure while insisting that the key to marital sexual happiness depends on maintaining traditional gender roles based on the literal interpretation of scripture. Saving Sex is a long-overdue exploration of evangelicals' surprising and often-misunderstood beliefs about sex -- who can do what, when, and why -- and of the many ways in which they try to bring those beliefs to bear on American culture

AbstractIn this article, I question to what extent future generations of immigrants will engage in practices of religious transnationalism through their ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English‐speaking Chinese Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both a pan‐Chinese identity and the belief that the Chinese have a special role in evangelizing the world. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded in Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous ground and propose that linguistic, geographical, generational and ideological fractures may diminish the participation of future generations of the Chinese diaspora in ethnically‐based transnational religious organizations. I conclude that these developments would push 'negotiated transnational religious networks' into a state of 'renegotiation'.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America was awash in a sea of evangelical talk. The Purpose Driven Life. Joel Osteen. The Left Behind novels. George W. Bush. Evangelicalism had become so powerful and pervasive that political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote of "a sense in which we are all evangelicals now." Steven P. Miller offers a dramatically different perspective: the Bush years, he argues, did not mark the pinnacle of evangelical influence, but rather the beginning of its decline. The Age of Evangelicalism chronicles the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in America since 1970, a period Miller defines as America's "born-again years." This was a time of evangelical scares, born-again spectacles, and battles over faith in the public square. From the Jesus chic of the 1970s to the satanism panic of the 1980s, the culture wars of the 1990s, and the faith-based vogue of the early 2000s, evangelicalism expanded beyond churches and entered the mainstream in ways both subtly and obviously influential. Born-again Christianity permeated nearly every area of American life. It was broad enough to encompass Hal Lindsey's doomsday prophecies and Marabel Morgan's sex advice, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Carter. It made an unlikely convert of Bob Dylan and an unlikely president of a divorced Hollywood actor. As Miller shows, evangelicalism influenced not only its devotees but its many detractors: religious conservatives, secular liberals, and just about everyone in between. The Age of Evangelicalism contained multitudes: it was the age of Christian hippies and the "silent majority," of Footloose and The Passion of the Christ, of Tammy Faye Bakker the disgraced televangelist and Tammy Faye Messner the gay icon. Barack Obama was as much a part of it as Billy Graham. The Age of Evangelicalism tells the captivating story of how born-again Christianity shaped the cultural and political climate in which millions of Americans came to terms with their times

Introduction -- Sacred archipelgaos: spaces of secularization -- Sacred scenes: postsuburbia and evangelical performance -- Purpose driven pluralities: variety, consumption and choice in postdenominational evangelicalism -- Purpose driven places: small performances in big churches -- Purpose driven planet: the globalization of evangelical postsuburbia -- Purpose driven politics: the saddleback civil forum and the new civility of evangelism -- Conclusion: assembling spaces of fusion, de-fusion, and diffusion in the postsuburban landscape

In the 1990s, many Evangelical Christian organizations and church leaders began to acknowledge their long history of racism and launched efforts at becoming more inclusive of people of color. While much of this racial reconciliation movement has not directly confronted systemic racism's structural causes, there exists a smaller counter-movement within Evangelicalism, primarily led by women of color, who are actively engaged in antiracism and social justice struggles. In Unreconciled Andrea Smith examines these movements through a critical ethnic studies lens, evaluating the varying degrees to which Evangelical communities that were founded on white supremacy have addressed racism. Drawing on Evangelical publications, sermons, and organization statements, as well as ethnographic fieldwork and participation in Evangelical events, Smith shows how Evangelicalism is largely unable to effectively challenge white supremacy due to its reliance upon discourses of whiteness. At the same time, the work of progressive Evangelical women of color demonstrates that Evangelical Christianity can not only be an unexpected place in which to find theoretical critique and social justice organizing; it demonstrates how critical ethnic studies' interventions can be applied broadly across political and religious divides outside the academy

Conservative evangelicalism has transformed American politics working not just through conventional channels, but through subcultures and alternate modes of communication. This text is a significant introduction to our understanding of the new shapes of political religion, and of American evangelicalism