The Evangelical Imagination

May 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.