The Books of My Life: That Old Time Religion in Modern America

I have long had an intellectual interest in religion and religious groups like the Quakers, the Mormons, and White American evangelicals. My academic career, in fact, reflects these interests. I have a B.A. in Religious Studies, an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology, and a Ph.D. in History. I wrote my master's thesis on Quakers. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Mormons.

My interest in religion and religious groups, particularly religious oriented social and cultural movements, is not purely grounded in an interest in religion and religious groups per se. I have long had an interest in culture and ideology and how culture and ideology create and continually recreate socially and culturally constructed realities. There seems no better place to look at how culture and ideology creates reality than in religious groups. One can readily see the role culture and ideology plays in the construction of reality and identity in the history of White American evangelicalism.

There have, of course, been several books that have explored the history of White evangelicalism since the 1960s when they reemerged out of their self-imposed wilderness and became an important fraction of American  conservatism and America's post Jim Crow conservative party, the Republican Party, most notably George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1980 to 1925 and Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, both published by Oxford University Press. There has, however, been a dearth of books on the history of American White evangelicalism generally. D.G. Hart's That Old Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002) attempts to fill that gap.

There is so much to like and admire about Hart's book. Hart explores, both emically and etically, how America's White evangelicals tended to want to make the world look like the church and simultaneously tended to want to make the church look like the world, a contradiction, as Hart notes, at the heart of White evangelical culture that has structured White American evangelicalism's history of seemingly endless and repeating cycles of worldliness and separation from the world, of not yoking themselves to unbelievers and of trying to make America into the image of itself. Hart's book explores the evangelical fetishisation of the Bible. It explores the evangelical fetishisation of modern American nationalism and ethnocentrism. It explores the evangelical fetishisation of modern American capitalism. It explores how White evangelicalism became the unofficial official religion of America from the 19th century to the mid-twentieth century when immigration turned the US from a WASP nation into a more religiously, ethically, and culturally diverse nation. It explores the inability of America's White evangelicals to come to grips with America's increasing ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity after 1965. It explores American White evangelicalism's modern traditionalism and traditional modernism.

For anyone looking for a wonderfully written and very readable history of White American evangelicalism, this is the book. For anyone looking for an exploration of the role White American evangelicalism has played in American history, American culture, and American politics, this is the book. Highly recommended.