No scholar can wade into the study of evangelicalism without weighing in on the question of what, exactly, evangelicalism is. For decades, historians relied mostly on theological criteria to determine who counts as an evangelical. But recently a number of scholars have moved away from this focus on doctrine in favor of an approach that highlights the aesthetics, emotions, and other non-rational aspects of evangelical culture. In Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, Jason Bivins traced the “aesthetics of fright” in popular evangelical piety and political rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 18). Lynn Neal's Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction explored her subjects’ piety through their encounters with Christian romance novels (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), while Tanya Luhrmann's When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God examined charismatic evangelical congregations where faith is “more like learning to do something than to think something” (New York: Knopf, 2012, xxi).
Todd Brenneman continues this turn in Homespun Gospel. He rejects historians’ traditional emphasis on systematic theology. “Evangelicals have in fact abandoned a concern with doctrine, although the beliefs stereotypically associated with them still shape the evangelical worldview,” he writes, somewhat ambiguously (4). To Brenneman, sentimentality—appeal to emotion—is the key to understanding modern American evangelical culture and politics.
In this study, the main characters are not theologians with advanced degrees, but the best-selling authors and mega-church ministers whose glossy paperbacks dominate the “religion and spirituality” section of your local bookstore: Max Lucado, Joel Osteen, and Rick Warren. By the measure of sales numbers and celebrity, these pastor-authors do deserve more scholarly attention than they have received. A survey by Lucado's publishers found that one in ten Americans had read at least one of his books. Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life has sold over 30 million copies.
Brenneman argues that these authors and their colleagues in the sentimentality industrial complex stress the same central themes: God as the loving father, Christians as his children, and nostalgia for the traditional nuclear family. Jesus—especially in evangelical hymnody—is more a devoted lover than a divine redeemer. In books like You Are Special (Lucado), What On Earth Am I Here For? (Warren), and Your Best Life Now (Osteen), the anxious believer finds her worries smothered in God's love and streamlined into a step-by-step plan for self-actualization. Warren promises that The Purpose-Driven Life “will reduce your stress, simplify your decisions, increase your satisfaction, and, most important, prepare you for eternity” (48).
Appeals to emotion, the fusion of theology and therapy, a customer-service ethos that shapes faith for the marketplace: Brenneman grants that these are long-standing trends in evangelical culture, and, indeed, are not unique to evangelicals (what do Lucado and Warren have on Oprah, the great prophetess of spiritual self-help?). But he insists that there has been a crucial shift since the time of the Great Awakening's market-minded revivalists and the sappy excesses of Victorian Christianity—one that does not cast today's evangelicals in a flattering light.
Nineteenth-century sentimentalists like Horace Bushnell and Harriet Beecher Stowe used emotional appeal to provoke empathy for suffering and challenge the surrounding culture. By contrast, modern writers like Lucado and Osteen appeal to individual “healing and narcissism” and promote “a culture of victimhood that elevates even the smallest problem to grand proportions” (10, 45).
Brenneman credits this blend of prosperity gospel and self-help with veiling a political agenda, enabling these authors to enforce their own authority, exalt traditional gender roles, and lament the threat of gay marriage while claiming that they remain humble pastors who favor no activist platform. They merely are calling for the faithful to live by the Bible. But he exaggerates the difference between modern evangelicals and their forebears, who also played on emotion as a means of social control. The lens of sentiment may sometimes help explain the political differences between the social reformers of the nineteenth century and today's culture warriors—but only if we consider it alongside more cerebral matters of ideology and doctrine, which are never solely the purview of egghead seminarians. A believer need not be fluent in jargon to act on dogmas absorbed from his community.
What troubles Brenneman most about modern evangelical sentimentality is the way in which it has provided believers with an escape from intellectual and social challenges to their faith without their realizing what has happened. “There is generally minimal cultural self-consciousness about the presence and use of sentimentality in evangelicalism,” he writes (12). Their abbreviated version of Christianity “becomes true because it feels true” (20). He is right, but the millions of laypeople who identify as creationists and gender complementarians also avail themselves of a rationalist approach to scripture—one that has centuries-deep roots in the Protestant response to early modernity—in order to defend their “common sense” interpretation of the Bible against secular learning.
There is a longer history here too—one that Brenneman leaves aside. The Bible is saturated with romantic and familial metaphors describing the mutual love between God and his people. Medieval monks devoted themselves to erotic commentaries on the Song of Solomon, and divine affections tingled the spines of mystics like Teresa of Avila. In the Christian tradition, agape and eros are serious theological business. To write, paint, sculpt, or sing of them typically has not been an act of narcissism or an evasion of critical intellectual inquiry, but an attempt to articulate the most fundamental and most baffling dimension of religious life: the relationship between human and divine.
Brenneman's careful analysis of evangelical sentiment belies his claim that it has little intellectual content. After all, despite his denigration of Lucado and company, Brenneman's most persuasive argument is that we should take these pop-pastors seriously.
