In the field of evangelical studies, topics of morality, gender, nationalism, and political activism dominate a discourse that has been shaped primarily by attempts to explain the political impact of conservative evangelical and fundamentalist forms of Christianity. Historians and other observers of these movements have addressed the relationship between popular culture and the contemporary evangelical sub-culture with much less frequency, producing only a handful of studies (see Eric Mazur and Karen McCarthy, eds., God in the Details: American Culture and Popular Religion [New York: Routledge, 2010]; Bruce Davie Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, Religion and Popular Culture in America [San Francisco: University of California Press, 2005]; Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004]). Furthermore, the shared terrain of popular culture and the political, social, and moral concerns of contemporary evangelicals remain unexplored. In this gap David Stowe's, No Sympathy for the Devil, provides a new direction for historians of evangelicalism seeking usable models for examining the complex relationship between popular and evangelical cultures.

Drawing upon a variety of primary sources including interviews with Christian musicians and former Jesus Freaks, music magazines, films, and music recordings, No Sympathy for the Devil weaves together the history of popular music, the rise of conservative evangelicalism, and the political shifts that spanned the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s to the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Stowe's main inquiry addresses the relationship between Christian popular music and the political mobilization of conservative evangelicals and utilizes a theoretical framework that posits music as a social practice rather than as a cultural artifact. As such, the Jesus music of this era fostered a cultural space characterized by spontaneous and vibrant spirituality that encouraged public conversation about these topics. In this milieu, evangelicalism found a home among the vast numbers of young people burnt out on free love and psychedelic drugs. The Jesus Freaks turned on to Jesus and embraced a spirit-filled movement that permitted a generation to rebel against rebellion and yet retain the marginal identity that characterized the counter-culture.

Stowe's methodology draws together a number of cultural, theological, and political factors in such a way that their distinction becomes irrelevant. For example, the impact of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970) not only popularized the fundamentalist theology preached by Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisbee, two of the most influential figureheads of the Jesus Movement, but also found resonance in the mainstream as a explanation for numerous culture crisis. Popular Christian music, Stowe contends, not only reflected these concerns, but also introduced this previously marginalized theological perspective into the imagination of a new generation of believers.

By the late 1970s, these same Jesus Freaks found themselves ignited by the Moral Majority's political fire and the likelihood of imminent rapture. They also found themselves creating a world that was increasingly inhospitable to the boundary crossings that initially helped popularize their own movement. As Christian popular music moved toward institutionalization and away from its grass-roots origins, the evangelical sub-culture set an equally stalwart foundation within conservative politics. As political and theological boundaries heightened for evangelicals, so too did their desire to create separate spaces for their own artistic efforts. The spirit-filled, spontaneity of Christian popular music of the 60s and 70s was replaced by commercialization, marketing strategies, and labels exclusively committed to the production of Christian music.

Stowe tells us, like many before, that theology is not politically neutral. But more importantly, he shows us the ways in which music as a cultural practice allowed the boomer generation to address its deepest fears. For the Jesus Freaks, those fears were spiritual and political and the music they produced did not respect the boundaries that separated these categories of human experience. Fears of race conflict were also prevalent during this era of Civil Rights and Black Power activism, yet these remain obscured in Stowe's work as with other histories of the period.

In two chapters, Stowe explores Gospel and R&B musicians such as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green whose work also presumed little distinction between popular cultural and religious expression. In each case, Stowe shows how these artists were never accepted as part of the Jesus Movement despite sharing the same struggles with personal faith, artistic expression, and the pressures of fame that characterized the experiences of white artists. Though he notes some racialized tensions, such as the portrayal of Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar as a black man, Stowe does not examine the Jesus Movement as a racialized group of whites who utilized their theological boundaries as a way to maintain their racial distinctiveness. With limited exploration into the root of evangelicals' racial fears, Stowe's chapters on these artists fail to explain the role that these fears played in fundamentalist political mobilization.

Despite this one shortcoming, Stowe's contribution to understanding the relationship between popular culture, evangelicalism, and political activism reveals a unique moment in history that helps us to account for the on-going tensions that characterize the contemporary evangelical sub-culture. Pre-dating the emergence of Christian Smith's “distinction with engagement” thesis, the music of the Jesus Movement performed the negotiation that would later become the hallmark of American evangelical identity (American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 218). By attending to music as a cultural practice both shaping and shaped by politics, spirituality, and world crises, Stowe's description of evangelicalism's political mobilization sets a new starting point for scholars seeking to make sense of a sub-culture whose identity is most notably characterized by a desire to be in, but not of, the world.