Deconstructing Evangelical Research

"As much as Americans may participate in a variety of parachurch activities and support them with their hard-earned dollars, statisticians of United State religious life continue to make claims about American religiosity on the basis of church attendance. America is, according to pollsters, the most religious of Western democracies because roughly 40 percent of its citizens are in church every Sunday. If this is true, and if it is truly as significant as many interpreters suggest, then finding out what these Americans do every Sunday and what goes into that decision to atten or the consequences of such participation might be worthwhile pursuits for religious historians and other religious scholars.

But the academic hostility to religious forms and institutions, as sort of scholarly pietism, has left the church out. In turn, the study of evangelicalism has profited from this rejection of denominationals and congregational life. The history of evangelicalism has thrived while denominational history has atrophied. Yet if the Christian religion involves rities, offices, and creeds, then saying these things don't matter does not make it so. Still, the construction of an evangelical identity has yielded the conviction that a faith freed from churchly affairs is the conservative expression of Christianity.

Either way, the expansion of interest in evangelicalism has been a mixed blessing. It has produced scholarship that obscures as much as it brings to light, and its assumptions about Christianity are as novel as the neo-evangelical project itself. Yet whatever one's judgement about the born-again history of the last twenty-five years, it is reasonable to assert that the neo-evangelical effort to reduct Christianity to bite-sized portions in the interest of creating a Protestant party to rival the mainstream looks remarkably similar to the way religious historians have defined evangelicalism and read it back into the American past in order to make larger claims about a bigger constituency than denominational or church history allows, ironically, by conceiving of the Christian religion as a short set of doctrinal truths and devout activities outside the church."

D.G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham (pp. 60-61)