Are all evangelicals charismatics now?

[Here's another post with an open-research question bent. Feel free to share your thoughts.]

Selection bias is a dangerous thing. Neck deep as I am in neo-charismatic literature about the growing overlap between “new evangelicals” (i.e., those coming out of the NAE in the 1940s) and the “third wave” of the charismatic spirit (e.g., Peter Wagner), it can easily feel as if all conservative evangelicals are charismatics now.

Just to be clear that I’m not headed entirely off the deep end: the answer to this post’s title question is clearly, No, not all evangelicals are charismatics. 

And yet the complex union of conservative religious groups of all stripes under big tent Republicanism have provoked some very complicated theological intersections. One need not go far for double-takes at the curious umbrella that attempts to cover Mormons like Mitt Romney as well as Catholics like Bobby Jindahl or Paul Ryan and seemingly non-charismatic evangelicals charismatics like Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann and then also welcomes unabashedly charismatic figures like Sarah Palin. (I’m being generous here, too. Bachmann and Perry are likely using some range of spiritual gifts in their worship.)

I commented in a previous post about the way that Donald Miller has attempted to frame the emergent features of this post-baby boomer religious marketplace. Apart from my earlier criticisms, one of the major hurdles of a metanarrative of “new paradigm” churches is that it desaturates the dynamic range of Christian activities that we see in America today. There’s much more going on in the, forgive me, Culture Wars than can be captured if we look solely to evangelicals as the counterparts to mainline denominations (or to metaphysicals). This doesn’t even begin to address the challenges of fracturing evangelicalism into liberal and conservative branches (as recent posts over at The Immanent Frame have addressed).

My research on power evangelism suggests that the more fundamental concern of churches is not their political affiliation but rather their embrace or rejection of spiritual gifts. If we were to see fundamentalists as non-evangelicals (tricky business I think), then the split among conservative evangelicals today started in the 1940s between evangelicals ready to engage with the world and those more willing to retreat from the world as fundamentalists had done. (This is tricky as well.) Among those two groups of evangelicals the next major question was whether they came to embrace the charismatic renewal of the late 1950s and 1960s or, further, what appears to be another set of charismatic renewals in the 1980s.

It’s a tangled web, right? Even if you pick some feature like spiritual gifts then there are still some serious theological gaps you might have to bridge. Are these gifts the sign of Christ’s immanent return? Are they the tools Christians will use to usher in the 1,000 year kingdom? Millennialism–whichever side of the 1,000 years you place Jesus’s return–continues to play a central role in the activities of Christians today.

My dad likes to tell a story about his time at the University of Arizona during the presidential candidacy of George McGovern. Living among a group of well-educated graduate students in the sciences, his peers were convinced that George McGovern was headed for a landslide victory. In those remarkable days between 24 hour news and Twitter, it was still possible to be ignorant of cultural trends in a non-willful way. (Sorry, dad.) When Nixon won his 520-17 victory over McGovern (just Massachusetts and the District of Columbia voted for McGovern), Arizona’s McGovern supporters were stunned.

I wonder when I look at the evangelical landscape today to what degree there are biases in our views about what evangelicalism looks like in American today. Could it be that evangelicalism–that of Billy Graham, Dwight Moody, Charles Fuller, and so on–is less alive today than we think it is in Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Charles Colson, James Dobson, and so on. 

When you’re in the forest all you can see is the trees around you. What do you do in your research to get a better of the forest you’re in? How do you avoid thinking all there is is forest? What do you do when you hit the tree-line?

Related articles

• Power Evangelicals: Growing Trend or Passing Fancy? (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• It’s SLSW or Bust (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• ‘New Evangelical’-Progressive Alliance? Not So Fast (religiondispatches.org)

It’s SLSW or Bust

As I’ve been furiously writing and editing my dissertation to make an end of quarter deadline, one of the major elements of my project that has kept me focused is the distinction made between the three levels of spiritual warfare advocated and practiced by third wave evangelicals (or neo-charismatics). It clarifies my work because unlike others who have recently written about demons–say Michael W. Cueno’s American Exorcism–I can always remind myself that my focus is only a a fraction of the picture.

Here’s the basic spiritual warfare breakdown. This version is taken from Peter Wagner’s 1997 Praying With Power, but there are many other near-identical versions of it in the spiritual warfare literature:

Ground-level spiritual warfare confronts demonic spirits that molest individuals. This is personal deliverance: casting out demons.

Occult-level spiritual warfare exposes organized forces of darkness such as witchcraft, shamanism, satanism, Freemasonry, Eastern religions, New Age and the like.

Strategic-level spiritual warfare involves wrestling with principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness as Paul defines in Ephesians 6:12

There are many, many works on ground-level spiritual warfare. It’s also a great source of inspiration for Hollywood horror films. The fascination with personal deliverance has left its pentecostal and Catholic quarters for the wider waters of popular culture. I don’t know that it was a great move–it’s surely resulted in an explosion of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion–but it has been profitable and popular.

Occult-level spiritual warfare is less well studied and less frequently practiced. Evangelicals (and Catholics) have long waged a war against non-Christian religious traditions. The most threatening of these are traditions that can be practiced alongside Christianity. A recent example would be the treatment of yoga in schools, but many others fit this billing. Some of these traditions are openly anti-Christian, but most are dangerous simply because they are not Christianity. It doesn’t have to be much more complex than that, but for occult-level warfare these traditions are seen, unrepentantly, as the domain of Satan. Good intentions mean nothing here, this is a hard and fast line being drawn.

Strategic-level spiritual warfare (or SLSW) is, pardon the theory-talk, a structuring structure. In a significant way, it is framework for the other forms of spiritual warfare. SLSW says that the forces of darkness are organized and hierarchical. This corporate evil is the means by which smaller units of organized darkness (occult-level) multiply. Sure, you can fight the New Age bookstore. The problem is that you’ve only dislocated and disrupted the middlemen. In a drug-metaphor, ground-level warfare attacks junkies, occult-level attacks local dealers, and strategic-level confronts the cartels. Why bother harassing every junkie if the drugs will continue to flow downstream to other users?

The work I do with SLSW is trying to explain, practice-wise, why this form of spiritual warfare is so concerned with the world in spatial ways. A colleague, Sean McCloud, is writing a whole book about the first level of spiritual warfare. His work will deal considerably with the therapeutic and materialistic qualities of this level of warfare. Those elements are present in SLSW but significantly diminished because of the way this ‘umbrella’ level of warfare sees its first priority as participating in a cosmic battle between Satan and God.

Remembering the three levels of warfare keeps me focused because I know I don’t need to say everything about spiritual warfare. There is no book, yet, that successfully explains why all three of these levels of warfare are necessary and how they work and why they are all coming together in the 1980s. Pieces of the story are clear: deliverance ministry has a long history in American pentecostalism. After a brief hiatus around WWII, exorcisms came back into fashion in the 1960s and then exploded in popularity in the 1970s after popular culture picked up on the practice and sensationalized it.

But the pieces of the story that explain occult warfare? Very murky. The pieces of the story that explain spatial and territorial demonology that is at the heart of SLSW? Almost absent. I’m working on it, but I’m also thankful I don’t have to account for everything just yet.

Related articles

• Warfare in the 1980s (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• Power Evangelicals: Growing Trend or Passing Fancy? (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• Contested Missionary and Historical Paradigms (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• George Otis, Jr., Giant? (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• Studying the Controversy: Territorial Demonology (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)
• Mapping Spiritual Mapping (mcconeghy.wordpress.com)

Power Evangelicals: Growing Trend or Passing Fancy?

[I've been working on some sections of my dissertation that call upon me to connect my evangelicals (spiritual warriors doing strategic-level spiritual warfare against territorial demons) with the broader currents of evangelicalism during the same era. These are just some thoughts about it--definitely unfinished thoughts about it. Feel free to disagree, suggest problems, and so on! Just sharing in a continued effort to bring more of the scholarly process to light.]

Donald Miller argued, in his controversial Reinventing American Protestantism (1997), that mainline denominations were the losers in the religious economy of the late 20th century. The winners, on the other hand, were churches like Willow Creek Community Church and Saddleback Community Church, but also Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and Hope Chapel. Together these churches represented a new “seeker-friendly” church model that shared many of a dozen characteristics Miller outlined: 1) started after mid-1960s; 2) most members born after 1945; 3) seminary training optional for clergy; 4) contemporary worship style; 5) elevation of lay leadership; 6) extensive small group ministries; 7) informal dress of laity and clergy; 8) pluralism of personal styles valued; 9) humble, self-revealing pastors; 10) bodily worship favored over cognitive worship; 11) affirmation of spiritual gifts; 12) avoids topical sermonizing in favor of verse-centered teaching.

For church historians, students of religious studies, or historians of American religion, Miller’s “new paradigm” churches and their features pose a number of problems. Without rehearsing the many complaints of his work (especially his ethnography’s aging Jesus Freak, California-bias), one of the major features of my own work has been a growing fascinating with the broadness of conservative evangelicalism after 1980. Miller’s work helpfully frames the transition of liberal (or progressive) themes, such as anti-establishment sentiments and religion as therapy and religion in service for individual aspiration, into the conservative evangelical movement. In other words, Miller’s churches marry typically conservative elements with progressive stye. How that happened is one of the great stories of the long 1960s or the Vietnam era or the Pre-Reagan evangelical world. 

For me–as I study movements that arose in the late 1970s and share many features with Miller’s churches, including the major figure of John Wimber–the most essential problem is one of emphasis. Which one of Miller’s 12 characteristics is most essential for these churches. That question fractures Miller’s arbitrary paradigm, forcing it to acknowledge that many of the features of these churches are secondary to the ways they theologically marry the Jesus Movement with northern California’s personality. That these churches have been less successful maintaing the full breadth of Miller’s characteristics outside of the West is no surprise.

When I look back on my spiritual warrior evangelicals in the broad context of the last 30 years, the primary and most essential characteristic is nearly missed by Miller’s list because it falls halfway between “bodily worship” and “affirmation of spiritual gifts.” Deliverance ministers, prayerwalkers, spiritual mappers, and other prayer warriors don’t simply affirm spiritual gifts or emphasize bodily worship–they radically and substantially expand our understanding of the body in religious practice and force us to acknowledge the new ways spiritual gifts are being used. That the participants may not be dressing up on Sundays (or several other days of the week) is entirely secondary. Why? These Christians care about renewing the power of Christianity.

For Miller, the cause of new paradigm churches is a larger cultural shift. Using social theory from Max Weber (on routinization and bureaucratization), the contention here is that somehow the seekers looked to the “spiritual” as restorative and the “religious” as primitive. This is, to a a great degree, similar to the arguments of Wade Clark Roof in Spiritual Marketplace or Robert Wuthnow’s After Heaven. It’s something about those darned baby boomers. Sorry, dad, your generation is to blame.

What’s problematic about this, though, is that it doesn’t help explain the conservatism that emerges from folks out of Fuller Theological Seminary like John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner and their emphasis on power evangelism. At the end of the day, these folks argue, the only thing that matters is true commitment to the Great Commission. It is their extensive involvement with global missionary work that provokes a return to Christianity as imbued with power. Part of that power must emerge to participate in a cosmic spiritual war between God and Satan. The contours of this perspective shares much more–and don’t get too bent out of shape–with the religious terrorists described by Mark Jurgensmeyer in Terror in the Mind of God. Power is a conduit for better evangelism because it removes Satan’s roadblocks. It’s a grand strategy for Christianity for the whole world.

In that sense, to see these Christians as caring about the religious economy or spiritual marketplace scholars describe (using the secular sphere as a container for these exchanges and interactions) is to entirely miss the reclamation of power exercised by these Christians. Why don’t they train their leaders at seminaries? Because the power of the Holy Spirit anoints them. Why do they elevate lay leaders? Because they have a religious duty to wield the power Jesus granted them. Why do they dress casually? Because being sanctimonious about dress doesn’t show the power of the Kingdom of God. Why do they worship bodily? Because rationalizing the supernatural world is not a means to exercise the power of Jesus over it. And so on.

In short, Miller and other sociologists have been too willing to look at the socio-cultural context of these movements without really grappling with some of the essential theological issues that emergent. What we don’t know because of this emphasis is whether the renewal of a power-based Christian mode of practice and theology is growing or declining. As I’ve suggested before, when using Google’s N-gram viewer to look at spiritual warfare, this is an area of contemporary Christian that may be in decline. We simply don’t know. But finding a more appropriate home for these evangelicals will be essential if we want to find answers to the question of their growth/decline. Miller made them visible (for many folks for whom they had not been), but he didn’t successfully explain where they came from or why they were becoming popular or even what made they unique. That’s a project scholars are still working.

Healing America’s Wounds

John Dawson’s Healing America’s Wounds came out in the wake of the Rodney King Riots of 1992. After the trial of the officers who beat King on March 3, 1991 ended in not-guilty verdicts, the city of Los Angeles exploded in violence.

Here’s Dawson’s account of the riots:

On April 28, 1992, following the not-guilty verdict in the trial of four white officers from our local police station, a peaceful candlelight vigil was held right here [at the spot of the beating]. Afterwards, thugs and gang members began to loot two nearby stores. A roving crowd of about 200 began to break windows and loot stores in the surrounding communities of Pacoima, Arleta and Panorama City. Ralphs market where Julie and I shop was saved by its butchers, who stood in the doorways threatening the mob with their meat cleavers. A few miles away, the central part of Los Angeles entered three days of terror.

What we saw was appalling. For more than 20 years, my wife, Julie, and i have been part of those working and praying for revival and racial reconciliation. The enormous racial diversity of Los Angeles had always sparked in us a hopeful vision of the future and now it was literally going up in flames, our worst nightmares surpassed.

Angelinos experienced the brutality of mob rule. Parts of the city virtually ceased to function. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were sent home from school, officers and public facilities, and all sporting events were suspended; 3,700 fires raged out of countrol over a wide area. This, along with vandalism during looting, destroyed or damaged more than 5,000 buildings. National guardsmen and federal troops began to pour into our neighborhoods because city police were totally overwhelmed. Worst of all, like a mirror-image replay of the King beating, was the live television broadcast of the assualt on a white truck driver, Reginal Denny.

Pulled from his truck by at least five black men, he was battered into semiconsciousness with a five-pound oxygenator, punched and robbed. Soaked in blood and calling for help, he was repeatedly hit by beer bottles, kicked in the head and beaten with a claw hammer and a piece of concrete. He was finally rescued by four black bystanders and taken to a hospital where he underwent four hours of brain surgery.

Under a curfew each night, we huddled in front of the TV with our boys, hardly able to speak to each other about the numbing images of hatred, blood and flames flickering in front of us. Occasionally we would go to the balcony to observe the columns of smoke rising from points all across the city.

I just want to raise one point about this narrative: Dawson describes King’s beating as “beating, hitting, slugging” and “56 crashing, bone-jarring blows.” It’s as if the provocation that led to the trial is less indelible than the mirror-image, described blow-by-blow in gross detail.

It may be that the moment was more provocative for Dawson than understanding the pain and anger of rioters, but what’s left unsaid, strangely so, in Dawson’s account is that it could have used–but did not–the trope of the passion to layer his narrative. This might have been the expected version of these beatings, moments of sacrifice that were really opportunities for grace.

Instead, Dawson’s book goes on to express how these events call to mind the long history of racial reconciliation that America needs because of the blood on its hands thanks to slavery and the treatment of Native Americas. The Puritans, for Dawson, were not religious exiles but devoted missionaries. The covenant they established with God for America’s providential future has been tarnished by injustice (and idolatry) and only the reparation of that religious pact can save America’s future.

Dawson could have, but didn’t, layer this history against the redemptive power of the passion. Why not? He historicizes America’s travails in the 1990s as linked to perennial injustice, but not to the heart of the Christian narrative.

As a moment of American religious imagination, I have been struck by the opportunity Dawson did not take in telling the story of the King riots. Maybe you will be, too.

I Have Been to the Mountaintop

Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern. Deutsch: 1964: Martin Luther King Português: Martin Luther King (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is little I love better when teaching the Introduction to Religion in America than discussing the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

It is a masterpiece of King’s sermonizing, effectively showing his mastery of the cadence and repetitive verse style he is best known for (“But I wouldn’t stop there” or “Somewhere I read”). It is historically significant, coming on the eve of King’s assassination.It is religiously significant, showing the deep roots of the civil rights rhetoric in the Old Testament and the Exodus.

I play excerpts in class, but I have students read it in full (usually encouraging them to read it with the full audio or video clips). For you reference, the full text is available at American Rhetoric (along with a video excerpt and full audio) and the full video is available at, among other places, this YouTube account.

It goes very well with several excellent chapters on King in Gary Selby’s Martin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom as well as a chapter or two (with the introduction) from Bruce Feiler’s America’s Prophet or even the PBS documentary God in America episode 5 “Soul of America” (which also has excellent study/reference guides for each episode on their website). Any or all of these work well depending on how long you’ve got to work with the civil rights movement.

On this day in 2013 when Barack Obama was inaugurated for the second time and when we celebrate the memory and life and Martin Luther King, do yourself a favor and listen to this amazing moment in American history. It’s still a powerful and evocative moment for helping to explain and understand religion in modern America, and especially helpful for understanding the last 4 years and what the next four years may promise.

Final thoughts: Remember that the promise of America that King sees, “Be true to what you said on paper,” is still palpable. “Somewhere I read,” King says, that the “greatness of American is the right to protest for rights.” If you don’t believe this still guides the civil rights movement and the political ethos in America, watch Obama’s inauguration today and its evocation of the obligations and duties that bind Americans together from our mutual connection to the Declaration. .

On Deadlines

I can literally count the days until the full draft of my dissertation is due. I’ve been disciplined so far, if exceedingly slow. I think my writing process, which used to be quite voluminous, slowed considerably after I taught in the university’s writing program for a year or two. Now I am exceedingly self-conscious about my prose and its quirks. (Have you noticed yet that I love hyphens?)

I am going to try very hard to maintain a minimal level of activity here on the blog, too. Not only do I need a pressure valve to avoid getting lost in my own work over the next 8 weeks, but I need to stay in the writing flow. I find the relative freedom of prose on the blog here helps me move myself along from the grips of personal critical paralysis in the dissertation.

I already have a steady non-academic release–my triathlon training. Exercise is a known de-stresser. It also helps give you more energy, improves quality of sleep, and structures my otherwise endless hours at my desk. I hope that my bicycle, which is at the shop having a pedal repaired, will soon be back so I can pedal my way to the finish line. Literally. I’ll be submitting the draft just a couple days before my triathlon, which if all goes to plan will be both competitive success and miniature vacation. (It’s in Hawaii after all).

In all of this I feel badly about two things. First, my neighbors. I like to listen to music–all kinds of music–while I write and edit and read. It’s probably not the greatest habit, but it works for me. Since my wife and I both work at home it is also necessary to, uh, drown out her non-stop telephone conferences. So as I get set to spend even twice as much time as I have been attached to my desk, my neighbors will get twice the musical goodness. I imagine some things aren’t such a terrible burden. Fleet Foxes, the Shins, and most of the folksy music I listen to probably doesn’t carry much into the adjacent apartments. Neither will quite a bit of the rock and pop I listen to. Or the jazz or classical music. I’m not worried about any of those. Nope. It’s the Skrillex, Deadmau5, Eminem, Kanye, Jay-Z, Macklemore, and Blackalicious. Well, let’s just say I might have to turn down my subwoofer. Sure, I have some excellent headphones somewhere. But I find that it is harder to work with them on. They get in the way of my typing and the rotating pile of books. The pressure from the headphones can also give me headaches. Woe to the academic music lover, eh? I wonder what folks in the music program do when they have to listen to hours and hours of music.

Second, my wife. Bless her heart, she tries very, very hard to keep me on schedule with the triathlon training. She’s already a triathlete and she’s now training for an ironman, but dealing with me as I slowly am enveloped by a very, very, very fixed deadline for this draft doesn’t bode too well for her. I’m sure my meals will get even more erratic as I self-caffeinite all day to keep my energy up.  Who knows when I’ll find time for 20 mile bike rides or mile-long swims or six mile runs. Since it is winter and the sun sets at roughly 5pm my night owlish temperament doesn’t help me get out the door for 6am workouts. Not to mention the local pool is outdoors. And unheated. Only in California, right? At least if I go out midday it’s 65 and sunny all the time. It’ll be a sad day for us both weather-wise when we leave sunny southern California.

This is probably not the last time I’ll mention managing the stress of the final stretch of the project, but it may be the only time I personalize it in this way. If you like it and want more, you might let me know. Otherwise it’ll be back to academic posts, and you’ll forgive me if they are a bit shorter than I usually like to make them. Priorities and deadlines.

Mapping Spiritual Mapping

Short post today on works-in-progress. 

One of the questions about spiritual mapping that has emerged in my studies is whether it has a geographical component. Is spiritual mapping in the United States primarily confined to urban areas? Is it mostly a Sun Belt phenomena? Etc.

Thanks to some quick THATCamp training at the American Historical Assocation, I feel a little more comfortable with my Google Earth skills. Eventually I hope to map the full database I’ve been collecting of churches that have clear involvement in spiritual mapping. I trace “involvement” mostly by looking at testimonies in my primary sources. It’s limited in its scope but it’s all I have until I start sending surveys and doing some fieldwork. (My dissertation is mostly textual, so this kind of fieldwork has been put on the back burner.)

I’ve inputted one or two that you can see in this map, but mostly it’s been cataloguing so far. Since Google Earth outputs what is basically an XML document, I can add details later with a better editing platform than Google Earth itself. XML will also make it easy to use the data in another platform, like my SIMILE authorship project.

Google Earth is just a platform for the development and organization of this geographic information. Thankfully the information isn’t tied to the platform! It’s the visualization of the information itself for me that’s the payoff–a better grasp of the range of places where spiritual mapping happened.

The related project, a more difficult one, will be to map the routes that were used by prayerwalkers. Thankfully these are often the same churches. What’s challenging isn’t mapping the paths, it’s knowing what paths to map. This is another area where future research will be helpful to continue developing this project. Gotta plan for the long-term, right?