This book, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, by Karen Swallow Prior (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023), was recommended this past fall by a host of people I read regularly. I got around to reading it this past week. (Yes, that cover design and picture are intentionally kitschy. I also wrote more here than I originally intended; take a break if you need to and come back to finish it up!)
Prior was a professor of English literature for quite a few years at Liberty University (yes, Jerry Falwell’s school, which is still best known that way); she left Liberty in 2019 out of growing disrespect for the leadership of the school. She gained what proved to be a temporary academic position as one of the few women holding a faculty appointment at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary that fall. In the spring of 2023, she resigned from Southeastern and has, essentially, burned her bridges to the Southern Baptist Convention, in which she grew up and remained until recently. You can follow her on her substack, The Priory, and a good place to start would be by reading her reaction—anger; and she’s owning it—at what has taken place in the SBC in the past few years. She’s completely “freelance” at this point and, I suspect, needing the air to be able to clear much detritus. It’s both a terrifying and wonderful place to be; I personally wish her well.
On to the book itself.
Imagination is an important word to understand when reading this book. As Prior makes clear, she’s using the word in a broader sense than our ordinary usage, as in when we say to someone, “Use your imagination”; here, it’s more than your dreams, your fancy—that sort of thing. It’s not a characteristic said of an individual (p. 7). Instead, “[t]he imagination shapes us and our world more than any other human power or ability” (p. 7).
To take the point further, KSP (using her initials as shorthand) makes the point that our imagination pretty much determines what we believe. If our imagination doesn’t make room for something such as “heavier-than-air objects cannot get off the ground” we will rule out both balloons and airplanes; we won’t believe them to be possible (a rather mundane example, but think back 200 or 300 years).
Imagination serves as a bridge between objective and subjective human experience. We act based on what we imagine about the objective, external world, yet we also imagine based on what we perceive and receive from the world. . . . In other words, we cannot desire what we cannot imagine. (pp. 13–14).
KSP then points out that imagination is both individual and cultural, and the latter is the primary focus of her book. When we add up the individuals of a place and time, “the works of our imaginations reflect and create cultures” (p. 15), including such things as our music, film, writings, but also our roads, government, and grocery stores. None of us think directly about any of this all the time, and few of us think about it at all. But the collective culture shapes the lens, the framework through which we see everything.
How is cultural imagination expressed? In metaphors and in myths.
Metaphors are culturally shared expressions, words that we use because we don’t have to think about them; they’ve been imbued in us from an early age, they pervade our language. Citing George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, KSP notes that spatial (physical) experience is the basis of all experience:
[W]e fall asleep, we wake up, we rise early, we fall ill, we take over, we decline an offer, we incline our hearts, we stay on top of the situation, we feel down, we cheer up. (p. 18)
Furthermore, all human knowledge is based on myths that are created through metaphor(s). Quoting Mary Midgely (The Myths We Live By), myths are “imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world” (p. 19). Take, for example, the word “science.” The Latin base of this word meant knowledge of every kind. Due to the elevation of mechanistic (or machine) metaphors after the Enlightenment, it now has been restricted to a specific kind of knowledge, scientific knowledge.
We use language—metaphorical language—all the time without thinking about it, without considering the ways in which it shapes our perceptions of reality. KSP’s goal in the book is (at least) partially to unveil some of the social imaginaries that “evangelical” Christians have lived in, breathed in, and spoken in:
By [looking at how evangelical history developed], 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. (p. 27)
In the next chapter (2), KSP discusses a key metaphor for evangelicals, awakening. She notes how a work so formative as A Pilgrim’s Progress is presented as a dream, a dream that, it is hoped, awakens something in the reader. Bunyan’s work has deeply influenced the modern evangelical imagination with its portrayal of the Christian life. Awakening is both spiritual and moral, and these two aspects of it were central to the Great Awakenings, the “revivals” associated with John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield and those in their train.
The metaphor was even adopted and adapted by Black Americans in the 1930s (perhaps earlier) in the term “woke,” which they used to describe a different and yet similar awakening.1 That awakening was to a consciousness of the unique experience of Blackness in America. Sadly, that word has now been co-opted and almost destroyed by those who most need to listen closely to those who coined the term. Metaphors can also become weapons.
One final gem from this chapter: individual “conscience” as we use that term today is modern, even though shaped by Christianity. “The concept of conscience that early Christianity inherited from the classical world was based on community or public opinion. . . .” (p. 47). Christianity added the dimension of conscience as “inner, individual, and personal.” These two—public and (very) private—tend to be in conflict, and one or the other can be dulled.
Conversion is the topic of chapter 3.
Conversion as a kind of transformation can be found everywhere, in art and nature, in countless literary characters, and in the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. . . . What started out as a necessary call to replace nominal Christianity with a genuine conversion experience has devolved over time to marketing—not sharing the good news but selling it. (p. 54)
Conversion, of course, comes with its own descriptive language, such that, depending on location and time, a convert has to acquire a specific religious language. One only has to encounter Christians from another part of the world in our own time to find examples of differences in language used to describe conversion. It’s also true that the necessity of conversion arose in a time when the general culture (in the West) was Christian.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, an experience came (in some circles) to be seen as a requirement of genuine conversion, and that experience could take various forms. This gave rise to primarily emotional appeals and, concomitantly, may conversions that were less than genuine.2 As KSP notes, the emphasis among evangelicals on a personal, subjective, experience, which in some cases challenged the stream of ecclesiastical history and lodged authority in the individual experience. As she notes, “what experience gives, experience can take away” (p. 67). Jesus’s call is to “make disciples,” which is not the same thing as making converts.
“Evangelicals love a good conversion story” (p. 77). So begins chapter 4, “Testimony.” “My own imagination was formed within a culture in which having a conversion story to tell was almost as important as the conversion itself” (p. 81). For KSP herself, not being able to remember her conversion meant that, in her community, she could not speak of it—a massive disadvantage.3
Every human finds their identity in the context of a narrative about their life, which includes their situation geographically and culturally. For the evangelical, conversion is a part of that narrative, typically. Today’s testimonies—conversion narratives—“have shifted the emphasis from the authenticity or credibility of the experience itself to the authenticity or credibility of the person who had the experience,” a shift toward subjectivity, centering “expressive individualism” (p. 100). Thus, “in the current evangelical social imaginary [the question] isn’t so much about whether Jesus is real as it is about whether the person telling the story is real.”4
Who can be against improvement or change for the better? Chapter 5 is about the inextricable relationship between improvement and evangelical belief. After all, our conversion should lead to changes, and those changes should be an improvement over former things. What’s a bit surprising is that the notion of improvement as such is a relatively modern idea, beginning in England right around the time of the Reformation and having to do with making agricultural land more productive. Nothing wrong with that, right? Even the founding of the U.S.A. was trumpeted as an improvement over rule by a king; democracy was better!
The entanglement of evangelicalism with the notion of continual improvement, however, took a sidetrack at least as early as the 19th century, when prophets of improvement such as Horatio Alger (a Unitarian minister) promoted the idea that self-improvement (practicing virtue, being courageous) led to material improvement. This in time fed deeply into the “American Dream,” that successive generations can improve themselves through hard work, starting with “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.”
This idea spilled over into the idea of national improvement as well. But, as KSP notes, on both the national and individual level,
[The idea of regular, continuous improvement] brought with it the assumption that material progress will bring only benefits and incur no losses. ‘That’s the price of progress,’ we often hear. We don’t nearly as often ask what exactly that price is. (p. 109)
Try selling your house today. One thing that the real estate agent will immediately ask you is “When was the kitchen (or bath; or bedroom; or basement, etc.) last updated,” implying that if the improvement was too far in the past, it will be more difficult to sell the house. The house needs to be “current,” “up-to-date,” and last decade’s furnishings, colors, and styles won’t do; they have been improved upon! We live in a culture that determines whether we and our possessions are improved enough. We have moved from a culture in which luxury and pursuit of profit and material comfort were condemned to one in which they’re highly desirable.
KSP’s point is that evangelicals are deeply entangled in the culture of improvement, which may or may not reflect the reality that every Jesus-follower is a new creature (p. 124).
“[W]hat tends to make evangelical Christian art bad is its sentimentalism” (p.125). Thus begins chapter 6.
This chapter exposed me to a cult that I’d never heard of before: the “cult of sensibility.” Apparently, in the 18th century, the word “sensibility” was used to describe what humans perceive through the 5 senses.5
According to the cult of sensibility, our moral judgments, our abilities to discern good and evil, arise from properly attuned emotional responses evoked by the powers of sensory perception. (p. 132)
Pity at others’ misfortunes was especially prized. This was, and is, not a bad thing, of course. However, emotional response without action or response (other than feeling the emotion) is not good.6 After noting that Charles Dickens’s novels were so successful in part because of his use of sentimental techniques—making visible the plight of people who for long simply weren’t seen by the rest of society—KSP says that sentimentality is a fine virtue, but
Because it focuses on the self and one’s own emotional response, sentimentality does away with the most important thing needed for benevolence: the forgetfulness of the self. (p. 136)
Because in sentimentalism the focus is too much on the personal and private rather than the public, even politically motivated sentimental rhetoric replaces “the ethical imperative toward social transformation” with a more “passive and vaguely civic-minded ideal of compassion. [quoting Lauren Berlant] Sentimentalism inches toward change; it does not revolutionize. (p. 139)
Prior then launches into a 7-page disquisition on the very sentimental painting, Head of Christ, by Warner Sallman. (Actually, there were many similar paintings by Sallman; it was a veritable industry.) This romanticized, very sentimental painting hung in many churches and houses—and still does, in some places. What do you think it conveys? It’s been roundly criticized and supplanted by other renditions, some of which are equally sentimental, even as they reflect the masculinity of the current decade—the decade of choice and the current culture—is reflected in all of them.
Chapter 7’s topic is materiality. “Material culture is alive and well within evangelicalism” (p. 153). Here, KSP notes the significant change brought about at the time of the Reformation, when both the invention of moveable type and the printing press and the anti-image prejudice of the Reformation created a huge shift. During the 1,000 years or so prior to A.D. 1500, images conveyed the stories of Scripture and the truth of Christianity to the people. The Reformation, with the assistance of the printing press and the ubiquity of the printed page, elevated word(s) over image; most of the Reformers were iconoclasts.
KSP notes that in the Victorian Age (most of the 19th century), Scripture itself was distinctly materialized, in that a (usually massive) Bible, gilt-edged, functioned “more like religious furniture than biblical texts” (p. 163). Of course, in 21st-century American culture, the sheer variety of translations, target audiences (there are Bibles marketed to more demographics than I can recount), and their sheer ubiquity in many homes speaks volumes. Scripture has become one more thing. And this doesn’t begin to describe all of the Jesus-kitsch that’s available, formerly in Christian bookstores and now on the internet.
What I wondered—and what KSP does not address directly—is whether Scripture has become more of an icon than what it actually is. It’s the evangelicals’ core icon, and the road to that began with the Reformers’ principle of sola Scriptura (‘Scripture alone’ as a source of authority), which is a reaction against the Catholic Church of the time and, in my opinion, no longer serves us well. Like many reactions, it was an over-reaction. I prefer the phrase prima Scriptura (‘Scripture first’).7 In any case, the Bible itself has become a core material aspect of evangelicalism.
“Domesticity” (as an imagined thing) is the subject of Chapter 8. Here, KSP traces the origins of ownership of private property, especially the house, after the medieval period and notes that this was the domain of males. Women almost never owned a house. It was the man’s job to defend the house, making it a sanctuary, and it was the woman’s job to ensure that the home was the locus of virtue found nowhere else in society, a place where values were promoted (p. 175).
One of the key aspects of house-ownership was that it encouraged the separation of public from private life. The house also became a locus of private worship: family worship and family prayers, hitherto not common, became a sacred responsibility of the head of household, the male house-owner. Male household-heads were on a pedestal due to their “protection of the family”; but wives also were put on pedestals, as something like a “goddess of the house,” who was to draw both her husband and her children closer to God. (Singleness was an undesirable state, an imaginary that remains to this day.)
In these ideals of masculinity and femininity, evangelicals were not alone; they shared this perspective with the culture of the time, both influencing it and being affected by it. The fruit of this imagination came in the Victorian era, but is certainly still present today. Jerry Falwell Sr. said, in his 1980 book, “historically, the greatness of America can be measured in the greatness of families.”8 I wonder: how many churches in any community continue to proclaim that they are a “family-oriented church”? Who and what is excluded in this proclamation? It’s code that we all understand, implicitly or explicitly, pointing to the culture (and, hence, the imagination) of that church.
In Chapter 9, “Empire,” KSP takes on the relationship between the extension of empires, particularly by western European countries, in the name of both commerce and also with the intent of spreading Christianity. This is of course a mixed bag (even if some today see it primarily as a positive thing). Foreign lands were seen as “pagan” even if Christianity was or had been present in them from early in the history of Christianity. As KSP notes, this spirit has been present in the U.S. in the divide between White and Black churches, with White congregations and pastors sometimes seeing the Black church in the local community as somehow needing help or even to be evangelized (pp. 199–200). The clearest evidence of this spirit, for me, is that this sort of imperialism
undergirds the prevailing tendency of evangelicals to confer greater honor on those who evangelize and disciple on foreign soil than on those who do so over backyard fences or neighborhood coffee shops or local homeless shelters and schools. (p. 208)
The working assumption under this spirit is subtle. It can create guilt (for not going to that foreign land) and a sense of superiority (that we have more of what the world needs than others).
The most extreme form of imperialism present in some dark corners of evangelicalism today is what critics refer to as “Christian nationalism” and what its proponents define as “bringing our nation back to God, under God’s laws.” The U.S. is a plural society, with freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution, and yet it was Christianity that strongly pursued placing “In God we trust” on our coinage and as a national motto (in 1952). But which God? It has to be left undefined in order not to contravene the Constitution, but woe betide the politician who does not invoke this motto at least occasionally; and it remains unspoken but understood that it is the Christian God to which the motto points. What imaginations provide the ground on which this crop grew?
Chapter 10 is essentially a call to a New Reformation, one that KSP argues needs to find itself more in seeing (imagining) Jesus as The Way, the Truth, and the Life than in institutions (which tend to defend their lives at the cost of all the institution’s members, if need be) and even statements of doctrine.
If the Reformation was over the Word as written (over who can and should read and interpret it), then this reckoning of evangelicalism concerns the Word as it has been incarnated. If the Reformation was over the truth revealed in Scripture, then this evangelical reckoning is over the way and the life revealed in Jesus—and how the church has failed to follow and embody it. (p. 227)9
I like the subtitle of the final chapter, “Or How a Thief Came in the Night but Left My Chick Tracts Behind,” better than the main title, “Rapture”! KSP outlines the ways in which end-times apocalyptic prophecy interpretation has shaped much of evangelical imagination in the time especially since WW II. She’s particularly disturbed about the ways in which this perspective arose out of a non-literary reading of Scripture, mixed with the stresses of the 20th century, both in war and in internal cultural conflict.
But it’s also more than that: it’s an “outgrowth of a Cartesian dualism that separates things that cannot be separated: mind and body, spiritual and physical, rational and emotional, immaterial and material (p. 251). This desire shows up in such varied cultural artifacts as Christian romance novels (see esp., says KSP, the Amish romance genre), the appeal to symbols and archetypes found in internet sensations such as Jordan Peterson, and even the incredible force that conspiracy theories exert. Everyone is looking for a transcendent explanation that allows one to escape the real.
The current cultural context is complicated and, it seems to some of us, extreme in many respects. How do we sort it all out? We need an imagination of what The Way that Jesus proclaimed is, for our time and place. And, rather than looking so much at the end, we need to remember that
The best stories aren’t about the ending. The best stories are about how we get there. (p. 257)
What does one do with a study such as this, which primarily looks at the past and the ways in which evangelicals have contributed positively to culture, how positive contributions have had unintended consequences, and how evangelicals have been trapped in cultural currents not necessarily of their devising and sometimes clearly not Christian? KSP doesn’t provide specific instructions, other than to learn to read (both books and one’s culture) literarily, eyes wide open. And to consider the Way as more important than the end itself.
My takeaway is that it’s always worth reading history. Reading history should enable us to see more broadly what’s gone right and wrong in the past, and perhaps even why. This does take some discernment, some thought, some imagination. Unfortunately, many today want to live in the past as if the past’s solutions were both entirely good (they were only partially good) and will meet the present challenges. This is unlikely; it’s never worked in the past. Instead, if we pay attention to the past, and if we’re willing to change based on an honest reading of the past, we will have a better chance of meeting today’s challenges. Change is not easy. Change also involves community.
I highly recommend this book; my copy is underlined and marked up on almost every page. You may well disagree with this or that bit of analysis (as I did), but if you’re a Christian, you’ll be challenged to think—to imagine—more seriously what cultural and Christian imaginations you are living by and to consider, to imagine more clearly how you could live.
Historians have traced the term “woke” in Black usage back at least to the 1930s; for more information, see pp. 47–49 of The Evangelical Imagination. It was only “catapulted” (KSP’s term) into prominence after the death of Michael Brown in 2014.
Does anyone else remember times when an individual’s emotional uncertainty about whether “I am saved” led to a dramatic response to an emotional appeal—or an attempt to generate an additional emotional experience? This was part and parcel of a certain perspective on what conversion means.
“It’s a paradox. Evangelicals heavily promote child evangelism. On the other hand, evangelicals also encourage the sort of salvation testimony that requires not only a good memory of that decision but an understanding of it sophisticated enough to tell the story of that conversion well. . . . Yet, as one of my colleagues wryly observed over a recent faculty lunch, ‘No parent prays for their child to have a dramatic testimony.’” (pp. 83–84)
I know of numerous individuals who have “abandoned the faith” due to the failures of supposed Christians (evangelicals) who became, for one reason or another, untrustworthy. The person who told them that Jesus is real proved unreliable, untrustworthy.
It had nothing to do with “common sense” as we use that phrase today.
I didn’t know this: KSP points out that Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was intended, in part, to satirize the excesses of the sensibility movement, an over-valuation of the outward signs of emotional responses (p. 132). “Sense” in the title meant reason; “sensibility” meant emotions.
It may be that my friend James Spinti first used this expression in my hearing/reading; I’m not certain. At any rate, it’s a helpful phrase. I may expand on this matter at some point in the future. I only note here that if the Gospel and Christianity only gains authority via Scripture—that is, sola Scriptura—vast numbers of people in various times and places have no access to knowledge of God, which seems to me to contradict Scripture itself. (I suspect KSP would disagree with me on this.)
Jerry Falwell Sr., Listen, America! (New York: Bantam, 1980), 104.
See footnote 7 above. I’d prefer to use “Scripture” to refer to the Bible and “Word” to refer, in the Gospel of John’s language, Jesus alone. I’ll likely not win the day! Though I do think that this fits Scripture’s own usage better than that of modern evangelicals.
Thanks, Jim. Makes me want even more to read the book. As for sola vs. prima scriptura, I believe I first ran across it in a Paternoster dissertation while still in Winona Lake. It percolated for a couple of years until I started using it. It's a definitely more accurate!
James