A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism - Hardcover

Watt, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813517168 ISBN 13: 9780813517162

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Over the course of the twentieth century, evangelicals have in a variety of ways adjusted their world view to accommodate the changes in modern life. At the same time, there are important continuities between the ideas and attitudes of evangelicals in the 1920s and those of the late 1970s. Little attention has actually been paid to changes in this important social and political group since the Scopes trial and the election of 1976, when evangelical concerns played a major role in national politics. David Watt, in this readable and persuasive book, examines what happened in that fifty-year period. This book is an intellectual history of the evangelical movement in the period of its rise to prominence and power.

What Watt finds is that changes were more striking than continuities. Many of these changes manifested themselves in shifts of focus--from an emphasis on the second coming of Christ to the family, from privatization to politicization of religious concerns, from an antipathy to therapeutic practices to an acceptance of many of the assumptions of modern psychology. Watt believes that evangelicalism, as every other "ism," is subject to the influence of conflicting ideologies.

The book explores ideas and attitudes, not practice. It is based on the popular literature produced by evangelicals. In many ways it does not develop and prove a thesis; rather, it puts what we think we know about the experience of evangelicalism in this country into the context of the lives of evangelicals themselves.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

A Transforming Faith examines the cultural history of American evangelicalism in the years between 1925 (the year of the famous Scopes trial) and 1976 (the year Jimmy Carter was elected President). David Harrington Watt focuses on one particularly influential group of evangelical Protestants-the group that helped create what is now commonly referred to as the "evangelical mainstream."

Although Watt carefully documents the continuities between the ideas and attitudes of the evangelicals of the 1970s and their predecessors, his account gives special attention to the permutations that took place within the evangelical subculture. Some of these changes, such as evangelicals' attitudes toward therapeutic values and practices, were quite dramatic. Others-such as their views of capitalism, the state, the family, and "the proper role of women"-were more subtle, but no less important.

This gracefully written book, which is based on extensive research in primary sources, presents a carefully nuanced analysis of those changes and of what they tell us about the way that American evangelicalism has been molded by the dominant cultures of twentieth-century America.

About the Author:

David Harrington Watt is an assistant professor of religion at Temple University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0813517168
• ISBN 13: 9780813517162
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 213