Karen’s latest book, The Evangelical Imagination, is about how art, literature, and popular culture have helped push evangelicals into an existential crisis of sorts. And of course, social media, with its penchant for both joy and destruction, plays a role in this evangelical saga.

In her wide-ranging conversation with Heather, Karen brings sociological context to the recent talk of evangelical deconstruction; she makes the case for a return to virtue; and she offers a postmortem on purity culture, showing how its roots can be spotted in the pages of classic literature. This crackling, high-energy chat will leave you ready to get your copy of Karen’s book posthaste.

In this episode Heather also spends some quality time with her best friend and co-blogger Scarlett Longstreet for this week’s Safe Space segment. Today, Heather asks Scarlett, who is not a Christian, to share what she likes and dislikes about the Christian influencers that she follows.

Guest Bio Karen Swallow Prior, PhD, is a reader, writer, and professor. She is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023). She has a monthly column for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, and Vox.

Host Bio Heather Thompson Day is an associate professor of communication at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. She is the author of eight books, including I’ll See You Tomorrow and It’s Not Your Turn. Reach out to Heather on X, the app formerly known as Twitter, at @HeatherTDay and on Instagram @heatherthompsonday.

Additional Links Get Heather’s weekly inspirational email delivered to your inbox every Friday night at 7 PM EDT. Sign up now at: www.heatherthompsonday.com/links.

Viral Jesus is a production of Christianity Today Host and creator: Heather Thompson Day Executive Producer: Ed Gilbreath Producer: Loren Joseph Mix Engineer: Alex Carter Director of CT Podcasts: Mike Cosper

The post Karen Swallow Prior: Christian Culture in Crisis appeared first on Christianity Today.

• The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior
• Areopagitica by John Milton
• The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
• The work of Flannery O’Connor
• The work of Thomas Kinkade
• The work of Leland Ryken
• Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist by Karen Swallow Prior

Grab a copy of Russell’s new title, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, here! If you’re able, join us for a live event hosted by Beth Moore in Houston on August 9. Click here for details. Do you have a question for Russell Moore? Send it to questions@russellmoore.com. Click here for a trial membership at Christianity Today. “The Russell Moore Show” is a production of Christianity Today Executive Producers: Erik Petrik, Russell Moore, and Mike Cosper Host: Russell Moore Producer: Ashley Hales Associate Producers: Abby Perry and Azurae Phelps CT Administration: Christine Kolb Social Media: Kate Lucky Director of Operations for CT Media: Matt Stevens Audio engineering by Dan Phelps Video producer: Abby Egan Theme Song: “Dusty Delta Day” by Lennon Hutton

The post Losing Our Religion: Evangelical Imagination with Karen Swallow Prior appeared first on Christianity Today.

Guest Bio

Karen Swallow Prior is a Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books and has contributed to numerous other books. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The Atlantic and The Washington Post.

Mentioned in This Episode

More than half of Americans think their life is worthy of a book deal by Chris Melore

Episode 6: The Work Is the Platform by Viral Jesus Season 2

Host Bio

Heather Thompson Day is an associate professor of communication at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. She is the author of seven books, including It’s Not Your Turn. Reach out to Heather on Twitter @HeatherTDay and on Instagram @heatherthompsonday.

Viral Jesus is a production of Christianity Today

Host and creator: Heather Thompson Day

Producer: Loren Joseph

Executive Producer: Ed Gilbreath

Director of CT Podcasts: Mike Cosper

Associate Producer of CT Podcasts: Azurae Phelps

The post Karen Swallow Prior: The Work Is the Platform – Part II appeared first on Christianity Today.

Years ago, my father taught me something about neighborliness that took a long time to take root in my own life.

When I was a teenager, the father of one of my classmates (who lived nearby) was running for local office on the ticket of the party my family never voted for. So I was surprised one day to come home and see a campaign sign for my friend’s father in our yard. But it turned out that my friend’s father simply had asked my father if he could place one of his signs in our yard, and my father had said yes. Being a hospitable neighbor was more important to my father than partisan politics or a campaign sign.

Now, all these years later, this particular lesson in neighborliness is something I’ve come to apply in my own life in a slightly different way.

Often, when we talk about loving our neighbors, we are thinking in the abstract. Perhaps we are thinking about loving neighbors on a global scale—those who live far from us, whom we encounter on short-term mission trips and exotic vacations, or fill shoe boxes for at Christmas time, or learn about on missions Sunday when we put money into a special offering. And loving our neighbors can be all these things. But just as “all politics is local,” so, in a sense, is all neighborliness local, too.

I inherited my father’s keen interest in politics. Over the course of my life, I have attended campaign rallies, canvassed door-to-door for a candidate, slapped bumper stickers on my car, worn buttons, and even run for office myself. And as soon as I became a homeowner, I also put up campaign signs on my property.

When my husband and I moved to our current home 25 years ago, each fall still found me putting up those signs on our front lawn. It took me a long time to notice that our immediate neighbors did not.

Almost all of our half dozen or more immediate neighbors were already living here when we moved in. They are all still here. That’s a lot of history, a lot of tradition, a lot of heritage.

And our neighborhood is anything but homogenous. Our house is the oldest in the neighborhood. Other houses of various sizes and styles have popped up here and there over the past century, some built decades ago, others still being built. Our neighborhood has large new homes, small doublewides, and lots of modest brick ranches. Like their homes, the people who live in them represent just about every demographic box one might be asked to check. Indeed, the diversity of our little rural corner of the country could rival the hippest of urban neighborhoods.

Back then, politics seemed black and white to me—I really believed one party was all about law and order and morality, and the other one was not. Then, I didn’t think twice about putting my campaign sign in the yard with its face peering over at my neighbors, whose very lives—as I would slowly learn over the years—had been harmed and hurt in measurable and lasting ways by some of that party’s policies.

But I would eventually learn these things as our neighbors let us into their lives more and more and we let them into ours. We didn’t have much in common with any of our neighbors at first, other than living in the same neighborhood. We all had our own schedules and were in different stages of life.

But over the years, chats at the mailbox led to invitations to family celebrations and shared holiday meals. After I admired one neighbor’s climbing vine on her mailbox, she planted a similar one next to ours. Another neighbor loved my lilies, so I invited her to come over and dig some up for her yard. When one neighbor grew sick, the rest of us checked in with his spouse. When another neighbor died, my husband took over mowing the lawn of his widow. When another neighbor died, someone else in the neighborhood took over their mowing. When we lose an old tree, we call another neighbor, who cuts up the wood to burn in his family’s woodstove.

Over the years, through all these exchanges of neighborliness, I gradually learned more about my neighbors’ histories and their ancestors’ histories. I learned the history of our neighborhood—how some people faced injustice and evil, and how others overcame evil with good.

I wondered if any of those campaign signs felt like a slap in the face to my neighbors. If so, they never let on.

Let me be clear: I am not making any argument here about putting up or not putting up campaign signs. Travel to either end of our long country road, and you will find some. (Here in my neck of the woods, only one party tends to be represented. And that’s okay, too.) There is nothing wrong or inherently unneighborly in advertising one’s favored candidates for office.

Rather, my reflections are about how I learned over a long time to be a better neighbor in my own particular neighborhood, among a handful of particular families with whom I have (or had) little in common besides sharing this space, seeing each other day by day as we collect mail, wash cars, weed the flower beds, feel alarm at the occasional sight of an ambulance in the drive, or share reports of the latest bear sighting or stray dog.

Every neighborhood has a different character. Every neighbor has a different story and set of experiences. When I finally learned more of those things about my community, and observed more about how they live and have lived, I wanted to be a better neighbor to them in this small way of not creating a barrier with a sign.

And hopefully I am a better neighbor in much bigger ways, too—as they are to me.

A campaign sign can signify so much and yet so little in comparison to the ordinary exchanges and camaraderie between neighbors. It took me a long time, but I came to realize that I don’t want a printed piece of polypropylene to come between me and these people I’ve grown to know better and love more just in being neighbors. I’m grateful my father taught me that lesson so long ago.

Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, is a columnist at Religion News Service and writes regularly on Substack at The Priory.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

The post What Campaign Signs Taught Me About Being a Good Neighbor appeared first on Christianity Today.

September 9, 2024

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October 21, 2024

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The post CT Daily Briefing – 10-22-2024 appeared first on Christianity Today.

Today’s Guests:

Skot Welch is the principal/founder of Global Bridgebuilders, a firm focusing on organizational development, cultural transformation, and inclusion. Prior to the launch of Global Bridgebuilders, Skot served as vice president of business development and benchmarking services for DiversityInc magazine in New Jersey, where he worked with many of the Fortune 500’s biggest global brands across a broad range of industries. Skot’s most recent book is Unfractured: A Christ-Centered Action Plan for Cultural Change.

Karen Swallow Prior, PhD, is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books, among other titles. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, and other places. In addition, Dr. Prior is a columnist for Religion News Service, a contributing editor for Comment, a founding member of The Pelican Project, and a senior fellow at The Trinity Forum.

Resources Referenced:

“When Buying a Home Is Treated as a National Security Threat,” The New York Times

The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come by Rob Moll

“Who Will Comfort Me? The Total Care of Cicely Saunders” by Karen Swallow Prior, the Acton Institute

“The Bulletin” is a production of Christianity Today Executive Producer: Erik Petrik Producers: Clarissa Moll and Matt Stevens Associate Producers: McKenzie Hill and Raed Gilliam Editing and Mix: TJ Hester Music: Dan Phelps Show Design: Bryan Todd Graphic Design: Amy Jones Social Media: Kate Lucky

The post Springtime and the Livin’ Ain’t Easy appeared first on Christianity Today.

Chaos and confusion have followed the end of Roe as much as victory and celebration. Pro-lifers like me had been marching for life and calling for the overturn of Roe for so long. The movement was hardly prepared for what would happen next—what is now happening—in 50 different states with 50 different political contexts; legal histories; levels of medical preparedness, access, and expertise; and overall dispositions toward the needs of women and unborn children.

The reality of a post-Dobbs world is that there is no longer one big political goal. There are 50 or 500 or 5,000 smaller goals. Pro-lifers face unprecedented opportunities to promote a whole-life, pro-life ethic through a variety of policies—medical, financial, social, and educational—that will encourage those making decisions around abortion to choose life and help communities support those lives.

Creating a more pro-life America post-Roe will require work on many, many fronts, particularly since the percentage of people who find abortion morally acceptable recently increased, and abortions are actually on the rise. Changing hearts and minds is the most important work. But changing laws can help too.

Strategy Questions Divide Pro-Life Politics After ‘Dobbs’

Daniel Silliman

States now have the opportunity to pass their own abortion-related legislation. This patchwork approach makes it imperative that legislators developing laws to protect unborn children and their mothers are well-informed. They must seek out the expertise of health care providers, agency heads, and others whose knowledge and experience can ensure sound, compassionate, holistic policies.

A “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to abortion law unmoored from the best-available medical practices and technology does not uphold a pro-life ethic, and pro-life legislation must be more than mere posturing when the lives of both mother and child are at stake. The stakes are too high to experiment with exciting but ultimately impractical—or dangerous—legislation that puts lives at unnecessary risk.

Beyond medical law, financial policies can determine life-and-death decisions around abortion. Indeed, three in four abortions take place among low-income families, and women who choose abortion consistently cite financial limitations as a major reason for their choice. This month, a diverse group of pro-life leaders—including Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America, Roland C. Warren of Care Net, Kathryn Jean Lopez from the National Review Institute, and Leah Libresco Sargeant of Other Feminisms—asked Congress to expand the child tax credit in light of the Dobbs ruling.

“We understand,” they wrote in a letter sent to congressional leaders on January 10, “that the work of upholding the sanctity and dignity of life is far from over.” Pointing to long-standing bipartisan agreement around expanding this tax credit, the letter argues that such a shift is a simple, politically viable way to decrease the abortion rate. “Many mothers face significant health and financial challenges throughout pregnancy and into the early years of raising a child,” it says. “We can, and should, do more as a nation to provide for their needs.”

This kind of proposal is not only right; it’s also prudent. “In a post-Roe landscape,” as Patrick Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argued last year, “it is essential that abortion opponents stand up in favor of the health and wellbeing of mothers and the babies they carry—for political reasons, in addition to moral ones.” Brown proposed a federal provision that would extend postnatal Medicaid coverage from 60 days to one year, ensuring all babies would have medical coverage throughout infancy.

Many pro-life leaders and organizations are coalescing around similarly practical projects in municipal, state, and federal policy. These efforts, which can bolster both social and financial support networks that effect abortion-related decisions, include:

• Increasing resources for childcare, ensuring that faith-based childcare providers would be included in these expanded programs, and including resources for in-home care by parents or relatives
• Meeting health care needs for pregnant mothers, new parents, and children through existing programs, including community health care centers and pregnancy resource centers
• Supporting adoption and adoptive parents, including expansion of the adoption tax credit, along with strengthening the foster care system through expanded partnerships that assist both foster and biological families
• Creating a national online resource to offer information to pregnant and new mothers and to connect them to existing federal, state, and local resources
• Strengthening connections and collaborations between governmental resources and programs and faith-based resources and programs that serve pregnant women, children, and families

Some of these projects are already in action. For example, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch launched a website, Mississippi Access to Maternal Assistance (MAMA), which directs women and families to both public and private resources in their state. “Whether you’re a mother-to-be or a mother of three, MAMA can quickly connect you to health care services, infant essentials, clothing, food, shelter, financial assistance, child care, jobs, education, legal aid, adoption services and more,” the site reads. “Remember, Mama, you can do this!”

A website seems, perhaps, so simple—perhaps even unimaginative. But its link to resources can be a bridge between life and death, or at least a steppingstone to a higher quality of life. There will be many such small steps toward our smaller goals in the post-Roe era. The ways to help pregnant women in need are only as limited as our imaginations. And after pregnancy, care is needed into the “fourth trimester,” because the most urgent needs of a new mother and new child continue into the weeks immediately following birth.

4 Post-Roe Policies Worth Pushing For

Daniel Bennett

At the federal level, one possible route is the Providing for Life Act, which Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson introduced last year. The bill “charts the policy course for a culture of life in America,” Hinson said, by expanding the child tax credit, providing tax breaks to working families, enhancing paid parental leave, establishing a federal clearing-house of resources available to pregnant mothers, expanding WIC eligibility for postpartum women, and enacting multi-tiered child support reform, among other policy reforms. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio published a memo with similar ideas on this month’s anniversary of Roe.

Life-affirming polices at the local scale also go well beyond abortion law. For example, where I live, one hospital recently announced it will temporarily suspend obstetric services because of a national ob-gyn shortage. Expectant mothers who would normally deliver their babies at this facility will now have to travel to a neighboring hospital.

This shortage of ob-gyns is an ongoing problem—not a result of the Dobbs decision, but the consequence of a number of factors developing over the past decade. Now, some expectant and new mothers are going without the basic health services needed for labor, delivery, and postpartum care. Addressing the causes of this shortage is just one task in a breathtaking range of work we need to do to create a more pro-life world, and Christian universities with medical schools should seize this opportunity to proactively train and credential the next generation of ob-gyns.

In all this work, remember: The baby whose life we save in the womb is also a baby who deserves to be delivered safely and lovingly into the world, and that has never been reducible to outlawing abortion or overturning Roe.

Now Roe is dead. But there is much more we can and must do to make sure babies live.

Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, is a columnist at Religion News Service and writes regularly on Substack at The Priory.

Why 100,000 Pro-Lifers Still March in DC

Harvest Prude

The Pro-Life Movement Faces Blue State Backlash

Emily Belz in New York

The post Pro-Life Policy in a Post-Roe World appeared first on Christianity Today.

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TODAY’S GUESTS:

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is a reader, writer, and professor. She is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023); On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018); Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014); and Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. She has a monthly column for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, and various other places.

Krista Boan is the cofounder of the international nonprofit Screen Sanity, host of the Screen Sanity podcast and a former middle school teacher. Her current work is creating simple social media discipleship resources for tweens, which she shares through the Social Compass newsletter. She lives in Kansas City with her husband and four t(w)eens.

ABOUT THE BULLETIN: The Bulletin is a weekly (and sometimes more!) current events show from Christianity Today hosted and moderated by Clarissa Moll, with senior commentary from Russell Moore (Christianity Today’s Editor-in-Chief) and Mike Cosper (Director, CT Media). Each week the show explores current events and breaking news and shares a Christian perspective on issues that are shaping our world. We also offer special one-on-one conversations with writers, artists, and thought leaders whose impact on the world brings important significance to a Christian worldview, like Bono, Harrison Scott Key, Frank Bruni, and more.

“The Bulletin” is a production of Christianity Today Producer: Clarissa Moll Associate Producer: Leslie Thompson Editing and Mix: TJ Hester Music: Dan Phelps Executive Producers: Erik Petrik and Mike Cosper Senior Producer: Matt Stevens

The post All the Small Things appeared first on Christianity Today.

Many of us associate imagination with children’s playtime, creative problem-solving, and hobbits.

Imagination might seem to be merely a fun but optional exercise, enjoyable but indulgent. We also tend to think of it as an individual ability or gift. “Use your imagination,” we say. Or “She’s really imaginative,” we might observe about someone else curiously. Most of us aren’t likely to think of imagination as something arising from our communal experience and exerting tremendous influence on our social lives, let alone our religious beliefs and practices.

But the power of the imagination is large, pervasive, and overwhelming. Imagination entails much more than our individual fancies and visions, and its hold on us reaches far beyond the limits of our own minds. The imagination shapes us and our world more than any other human power or ability. Communities, societies, movements, and, yes, religions are formed and fueled by the power of the imagination.

Evangelicals are no exception. Now, this is not to suggest that the Holy Scriptures or confessional creeds or cloud of great witnesses are figments of our imagination. By no means. Rather, the evangelical imagination—like any imagination at the heart of any culture—has been forming a particular kind of people, and those people have been helping to form the world for hundreds of years. But what is the evangelical imagination?

Losing Our Religion: Evangelical Imagination with Karen Swallow Prior

Russell Moore

First, we must consider the imagination itself. At its most literal level, the word imagination refers to the mind’s process of making an image: the act of imaging. In this way, imagination is simple. At this level, it is also very much an individual, solitary behavior.

Yet, much surrounds this image-making activity that includes far more than an individual making an image independently in one’s own mind. The images our minds make are drawn from the objects we perceive, just as the phenomena we perceive through our bodies come through the senses. As Owen Barfield explains, there’s “no such thing as an unseen rainbow.” What we perceive depends on what makes up our surroundings.

It also depends on what we are paying attention to. What we pay attention to derives from a host of experiences, associations, emotions, thoughts, practices, and habits.

While the work of imagination contributes to the making of a culture, a culture in turn provides individuals with a precognitive framework—a framework that includes unconscious, unarticulated, and unstated underlying assumptions—that directs, shapes, and forms our thoughts and desires and imaginations in ways we don’t necessarily recognize.

Think of the unseen parts that form the structure of a house. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls these frameworks “social imaginaries.” In his early work Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor defines the social imaginary as a culture’s shared pool of “images, stories, and legends” that shape one’s social existence and expectations and “the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” The social imaginary forms a “common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life.”

Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf perceived this problem as she wrestled with the art of representing a life through memoir and biography: “Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class,” she wrote, pointing out the need to examine the “invisible presences” in our lives. “I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.”

To be an evangelical is to inherit social imaginaries that have been developing for as long as evangelicalism has existed as a coherent movement. That movement, in turn, participates in the longer history of the modern age.

Writing about a recent dustup over the definition of evangelical and who might rightly (or wrongly) be described as one, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez draws on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities in observing that evangelicalism is “an imagined religious community.” There are, she argues, “many evangelicalisms,” and they are “imagined” in the sense that it “has always been a dynamic, fluid movement, or series of movements, imagined and maintained through networks, alliances and authority structures, each drawing and enforcing the boundaries of ‘evangelicalism’ for varying purposes.”

Who or what an evangelical is differs if that question is being asked by a church historian, a pastor, a politician, a pollster, or the marketing director of a book publisher.

Of course, most labels are imaginary, as elastic as language itself. Labels are tools that are both helpful and limiting. Whether or not one goes by the label “evangelical” or whether the label goes by the wayside at some point, there still exists a group of Christians here in America and around the globe, within various denominations, who believe Christ is their personal Savior, the Bible is God’s authoritative Word, Christianity can change lives, and that message is worth sharing. We have a history that cannot be rewritten. But that history can be better understood in the present as we write the future.

While there are many approaches and angles to consider in understanding that history, one that has not been examined often or closely enough is the evangelical imagination. By this, I really mean the evangelical social imaginaries, the collective pool of ideas, images, and values that have filled our books, our thoughts, our sermons, our songs, our blog posts, and our imaginations and have thereby created an evangelical culture.

In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen examines the history of ideas, particularly those around authority, which have formed American evangelicalism as we know it today. She sees as central to evangelical existence the tensions inherent in a movement emphasizing individual, subjective experience while being based on the external, objective authority of God and his Word. By Worthen’s account, evangelicalism is characterized by competing claims of authority. Evangelicals “are the children of estranged parents—Pietism and Enlightenment—but behave like orphans,” she writes. “This confusion over authority is both their greatest affliction and their most potent source of vitality.”

One fruit of this confusion is a “fraught relationship with secular reason and imagination.” She writes, “If American evangelicals do not share a single mind, they do share an imagination.” Rather than speak of an “evangelical mind,” as many historians and critics are wont to do, Worthen suggests it “may be wiser to speak instead of an ‘evangelical imagination.’” She explains,

In every individual, the imagination is the faculty of mind that absorbs ideas and sensations as fuel to conjure something new. It is a tool for stepping outside oneself or plunging into egocentric delusion. But we might also speak of the imagination that a community shares, no matter how furious its internal quarrels: a sphere of discourse and dreaming framed by abiding questions about how humans know themselves, their world, and their God.

The ingredients of the modern imagination and the evangelical imagination may not be universal or eternal, but they are pervasive and formative. The elements of the social imaginaries of the evangelical movement—such as conversion, testimony, reformation, and rapture—are representative and, to my thinking, central to what has formed the evangelical imagination for 300 years.

Of course, the images and ideas found within the evangelical social imaginary don’t necessarily belong to evangelicalism alone. Some, in fact, are part of the larger modern social imaginary and have become part of the evangelical imagination because evangelicalism is a product of modernity. Within the current evangelical context, some of these ideas may be as representative of America as they are of evangelicalism.

The fact is that 21st-century American evangelicalism can hardly be separated from either the modern age or the American dream. As Willie James Jennings says in The Christian Imagination, “Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination.”

Christianity Today’s 2024 Book Awards

CT Editors

It is not simply that Christianity and evangelicalism are infected by other ideologies and identities—it’s also that too often we don’t recognize their undue influence on our beliefs, narratives, images, traditions, and institutions.

Wherever our evangelical imaginations are informed and formed by modernity, Romanticism, Victorianism, or any -ism other than the tenets of our faith, the disease will fester. This also means that it is hardly possible, as noted above, to talk about evangelicalism rather than evangelicalisms. This now-global movement is not contained by the qualities and characteristics of a George Whitefield, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, or any of its other founders and leaders.

This is not to say that all that is cultural is bad—or good. Human beings exist in culture, and that is by God’s design. As James K. A. Smith explains in Imagining the Kingdom, “It is because I imagine the world (and my place in it) in certain ways that I am oriented by fundamental loves and longings. … My longings are not simply ‘chosen’ by me; they are not self-generated ‘decisions.’ … We don’t choose desires; they are birthed in us.”

The social imaginary primes us even before we make any decision on our own. Gaining our bearings requires us to first recognize that we have been oriented—much the way that the one who is “it” is blindfolded, spun around, and left flailing. Only when the blindfold is removed will we see what direction we are facing, and only then can we decide which turns to take as we move forward.

The metaphors, images, and stories we live by orient us. To recognize these metaphors, images, and stories—and to understand their power as part of the imagination we share—is to remove the blindfold and to see.

Karen Swallow Prior is a speaker and author. Content adapted from The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

Beyond Narnia, Ramona, and Green Gables

J. D. Peabody

The post ‘Evangelical Imagination’ Has Formed Us. But Can We Define It? appeared first on Christianity Today.