This is an important and also an unusual book, because it combines an authoritative and superbly annotated summation of historical and sociological work about American evangelical Christianity with what amounts to "A Devout and Serious Call" to fellow evangelicals, especially in the United States. As a summation it will be essential reading for myriad courses where its subject figures. As a "call" it offers a theological reading of the political implications of the gospel which reminds me of Cromwell's exasperated appeal to the Scottish Puritans in 1650: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be wrong."

American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction by Mark A. Noll Blackwell, 320 pp. $29.95, paper

A conscientious reviewer has to deal with both of these aspects separately. Responding to the implicit comparative history and sociology of evangelicalism is relatively easy, and my way of doing so is to run some of Noll's themes through my personal experience of how they have played in Britain. However, once one comes to his discussion of Canada one finds that an interesting case for comparison, intermediate between the United States and Britain, is also used as an example for American evangelicals to follow. Thereafter the heart of the book is Noll's account of how theological norms could and should inform Christian political theory and practice. This is a very distinct kind of intellectual enterprise, obliging me to engage both as sociologist and as theologian. The change of gear is palpable.

There is another important matter which bears on the tenor of what follows. It is clear from several indications that Noll is exercised by the question "Whatever happened to Methodism?", though he only offers an explicit response to it in the chapter on Canada. So, I treat that question as the hidden issue behind the whole book. After all, the revivals and awakenings so specially characteristic of English-speaking peoples, most influentially in the contrasting cases of Britain and the United States, amounted to a dramatic conversion and expenditure of accumulated theological capital. Theology as the reflection on the deposit of faith by established Christian intelligentsias became translated into a direct appeal to the heart of the emergent masses (or "outcasts of men" in Charles Wesley's phrase). It was one of the ways in which outcasts mobilized and became self-conscious. Coolness of head became warmth of heart, with evangelical revivals moving mightily on the American frontier and in industrializing Britain; and we now see something similar happening on an even bigger scale as Pentecostalism takes off among the poor of the developing world.

At the same time, the demotic principle of sincere and enthusiastic hearts, so central to Methodism as well as to the early formation of the United States, also embodies a spirit of self-improvement which aspires to Gothic sanctuaries, social reform, and academic respectability. So doing it has fractured in myriad directions, both in terms of its social constituency and its original theological capital. Methodism now fulfils all political righteousness and is the theologically most confused church in the English-speaking world, to the point where its very existence in Britain is in doubt. Though I personally have every reason to be grateful to Methodism and its aspirations, its trajectory remains a cautionary tale implicit in all the interstices of this book, even though the focus is on the whole evangelical spectrum.

Alan Wolfe in the Atlantic Monthly for October 2000 saluted the way a number of conservative Christians has succeeded recently "in creating a life of the mind broader and more imaginative than anything previously found in their tradition," having been hitherto bottom of the pile, and he singles out (among much else) Books & Culture, Wheaton College, and Mark Noll. He also asks "But can they maintain it?", a doubt which maybe undergirds the pain motivating Noll's urgent text. One senses that the costs and tensions have been severe.

That said, however, I can turn to the relatively easy task of responding to the themes in the first section of the book. I hope I may be forgiven for writing from a British perspective and as a "mere Christian" in (C.S. Lewis's sense) who eschews labels.

Migrations and empires

Noll's historical work has always been comparative in a way which complements the efforts of comparative sociologists. Though the present book focuses on the United States, there are constant sidelong glances at the wider universe of comparison, especially Canada, because Noll is acutely aware that you do not understand the United States unless you understand the way it both resembles and differs from other Anglophone societies, and also have a sense of the historical trails of persons and ideas from all of northern Europe, including Protestant Ireland. That means grasping the meaning of evangelical in the Anglo-American sense and of Evangelisch in the German sense, and returning to sources in Lutheran pietism (where the book begins) as well as in Swiss, Dutch, English, and Scots Calvinism.

Of course, such an understanding is utterly remote from the self-consciousness of ordinary Americans, which seems to depend on seeing their whole vast continent as self-contained, created ex nihilo with only a mythic "history," and shorn of such reference points in cultural space as might require engagement with "the other." That is America's great strength, though it has rather somber implications for anyone like Noll who attempts to address "fellow Americans" from the vantage point of history without myth and even recommends the modest "other" across the U.S-Canadian border. (Of course, American intellectuals know this well enough, but they are mostly not evangelicals, and that is precisely Noll's problem: how to bridge the gulf between them and Middle America).

The most significant "other," of course, from the point of view of understanding America—and evangelicalism—is Britain, in spite of the fact that Britain offers sharper contrasts than either Canada or Australia. What Britain and the United States share is law, language, politics, and ethos, as well as the association between a burgeoning evangelicalism and an early dawn of modernity. Where they differ relates to the separation of Church and state, the dissociation of religion from territory, the extent and role of voluntarism and pluralism, and the balance of power between metropolitan centers and provincial peripheries. It is these differences in combination which bear on the conspicuous difference in degree and kind of secularization.

The crucial reason why Britain is America's "significant other" when it comes to thinking about religion in general, and evangelicalism in particular, lies in the staggered succession of their respective empires. In the British case that begins in the Anglo-Caribbean in 1656 and ends up three centuries later in anglophone Africa (and certain "points east"). In the contemporary American case it involves a global irradiation specially evident in the Pacific rim and Latin America. One is, of course, not supposed to refer to these massive realities, except by way of excoriation, or else to identify—falsely—the misfortune of global evangelical expansion with the misfortune of imperialism. All the same, there is an obvious association between evangelicalism and the Franco-German Creole—English—which is now the global dialect. So when Noll recommends his critique of American evangelical politics by reference to the worldwide upsurge of evangelical political activity, it is these mere realities which provide the essential background.

With regard to the balance of power between the metropolitan and the provincial, Britain and America are at the extreme ends of the spectrum. As peripheries, North Wales and the Western Isles of Scotland hardly compare with the American South. The theme first struck me when I was in the Yucatan. The southeast periphery of Mexico has a much higher proportion of evangelicals than the rest of the country, and an encounter with Scottish names among the missionaries there suggested not only that evangelicalism might have disproportionate influence in peripheries but that these could be linked. One might even imagine a trail from the peripheries of Britain to the American South, and on to Mexico. Certainly it would not be difficult to identify analogous peripheries in Scandinavia: Jutland, the Bergen hinterland, and Vasterbottenland.

This theme could be linked with a Scottish diaspora, which was the efflux from the most influential of the "peripheries" of Britain: to parts of western Canada and the maritimes, and to parts of Australia, New Zealand, Malawi, and India. Once you have stumbled on a tiny hamlet called Calgary on the Isle of Mull and a plaque on a chapel in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, commemorating the exploration of the Mackenzie River, you begin to imagine the trails of migration all over the globe, which include the transplantation of evangelicalism. Scotland only provides the example. If evangelicalism is a movement, then one has to track where it moves. As Grant Wacker has shown, Azusa Street, Los Angeles, was a terminus of many trails which then led to a starburst of trails all over the globe.

Returning for a moment to the inner ring of North Atlantic comparisons, we are also dealing with a migration of ideas and people "stepping westwards." That migration happens to have special relevance to the broadening of the evangelical mind in the United States because it has brought together the accumulated historical resources of established Christian intelligentsias in Europe and the demotic power of American evangelical sincerity and warmth.

So what began in Holland—the genealogy most relevant to Noll—can end up in Grand Rapids, and what germinated in Halle, Germany, and in Aldersgate Street, London (while "one was reading" Luther's preface to Romans), can end up in London, Ontario, or in Dallas, Texas. Putting it another way, what began as incipiently democratic church song and choralism within an established church context (Lutheran chorale, Puritan metrical psalm, and the great Evangelisch composers Bach and Handel) can by successive mutations become "O happy day that fixed my choice" and the plangent pathos of "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Where creeds are sung more than said, the mutations of a music are prime indicators of transformations of faith.

Tensions between demotic and learned

This musical illustration again emphasizes the problem behind Alan Wolfe's question, "But can they maintain it?" After all, the aesthetically and intellectually powerful forms of evangelicalism mostly lie in earlier generations and in religious traditions retaining a link with learned ministries and high culture. Nor is this surprising. The culturally adaptive and demotic style which enabled evangelicalism to mobilize and give a voice to those not heard from before, thereby running in parallel with the extension of democracy, is bound to be suspicious of traditions which defer to the accumulated riches of knowledge and intelligence. Those people who have become newly awakened and newly literate expect the Bible to be an open book that "whosoever runs may read," given sound common sense, and they are not likely to hand the Bible back to expert panels endlessly discussing "the hermeneutic problem" or marking up the sayings of Jesus according to some theologically driven criteria as to what he could and could not have said.

The same holds for political attitudes. At Westminster Congregational Chapel, London, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to assure his great congregation that sound social consequences flowed from the existence of "soundly converted" individuals. That was taken for granted, and the conservative Christians in that huge oval space would not have been given much of a hearing to a sociological address concerned with the unforeseen consequences of social structural arrangements. Nor would they have been much engaged by the ambiguous political effects flowing from an evangelical constituency with excess capacity for cultural adaptation. Yet that is very much part of Noll's message, and I doubt if it will be much taken up by the Baptists of Tennessee or the Methodists of Austin. And the reason is that all forms of democratic Christianity are chronically adaptable, and it is only the hierarchical churches which in very specific circumstances, such as those obtaining in apartheid South Africa, may occasionally act otherwise. These inertias are sociological givens, and I have to confess that the message about overachieved adaptability is not one I have set forth in the commuterland cathedral where I occasionally preach.

The basic difficulty arises because the demotic demands the simple and is inherently athwart the complex deliverances of learning, based by definition on an elite of achievement as harsh as that of athletics or music. If people are empowered by a message straight to the heart they will want power holders in the church who mirror themselves. If salvation is "for all," then those who are saved don't much care how many of these "other things" are "added unto them," except maybe when it comes to material improvement. Such attitudes become increasingly adamant once cultural warriors like H.L. Mencken or Richard Hofstadter have scarred the psyche of Bible believers with metropolitan contempt.

The inner conflict of the evangelical intellectual

George Marsden has documented the way in which Christian university foundations lose contact with Christian fundamentals, and it is notorious that the institutions of the older clerical traditions, whether of Cambridge, Mass. or Cambridge, England, end up with cool heads controlling warm hearts. In the Gothic quadrangle of Duke University, there is a public statement by the founder about the good news of Jesus Christ, pointed out to me with some irony by Stanley Hauerwas. All the same one suspects the best news of all concerns the university's national ratings.

Today I am in touch with emergent Pentecostal intellectuals who are lineal descendants of the Holiness strand of Methodism, and I try to do what I can to nurture them in a constructive way, introducing exposures while indicating possible protections. All the same, I wonder whether their aspirations may not merely land them in the lowest and newest rung of the academic hierarchy. The head of a Methodist college in Chile told me with shocking pride just how easy it was to "blow the minds" of his Pentecostal students.

It is precisely that process, in the past so often repeated, that makes the achievement of Wheaton College, Billy Graham's alma mater, truly remarkable. No matter how deep the mutual repulsions between evangelicals and secular others, some institutions have combined evangelical faithfulness with intellectual quality, even though (as Alan Wolfe points out) one or two stars in some other places have gone up higher. Inevitably the achievement has been costly and painful, and Noll hints how grievous have been the tensions between faithfulness to the movement and scholarly convictions. Presumably, like many Catholic scholars, he feels constrained in what he can say, and the fact that he advances a critique based on a recall to fundamentals does not make the path one whit easier. Evangelicals, like other Christians, may enjoy the prestige of scholars with an international profile, but that does not mean they want to hear what their scholars have to say on matters of theology and/or politics. No wonder this book is a masterpiece of tact and charity.

Nor is this the only cross to be borne by those who inhabit a no man's land athwart the entrenchments of cultural war. The prejudices of the enlightened in the academy also require conformity, and their excommunications are, if anything, more damaging than those which occur in the household of faith. In my experience of British and American universities, the scholarly community harbors its own secular utopian "rejections of the world" (in Weber's phrase), and those who interrupt such hallowed reveries with news from outside are rapidly harried into silence and self-censorship. That is as true in theological and religious studies as anywhere else, since so many theologians have translated religious commitment into political gesture. I can imagine that in such an atmosphere an evangelical scholar or theologian has to be very strong indeed.

I have already mentioned the particular historical trail "stepping westward" as most relevant to the genealogy of Mark Noll. It is a trail whereby the older, colder, and tougher intellectuality of Dutch Reformed spirituality was opened up by encounter with the hospitable warmth and simple sincerity of American evangelicalism. Once "strangely warmed" it then helped bring about the opening of the evangelical mind. The Dutch connection is important, but there is also, as Noll suggests, a sober British connection located in the contributions of such scholars as J.I. Packer and John Stott. Beyond the major role played by these "in-house" writers, Noll notes the influence of British lay theologians like C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, and even Malcolm Muggeridge. Noll wryly comments that not one of these Christian apologists could have taught at Wheaton College, since they would have been excluded on behavioral grounds or doctrinal ones—or both.

I suspect this popularity of non-evangelical authors arises because evangelicalism is better at raising questions among its next generation than at giving answers. It is one of the hazards which evangelicalism creates for itself by attracting the more energetic and intelligent among those not heard from before, and then encouraging the educational aspirations of their children and grandchildren. That is one reason why the biographies of famous authors, like Kingsley Amis or Malcolm Bradbury, so often reveal a living faith two generations back, a husk of respectability retained in the next generation, and finally an educational trajectory which may or may not lead to academia but goes up and away, powered by a residual Protestant work ethic.

That is the general form of the dilemma as the local densities of the older evangelical culture are broken up by social and geographical mobility. But there is a specific form which affects those who are nurtured at the heart of an evangelical culture as they find themselves emerging into wider worlds. I do not know Mark Noll's own trajectory (and in any case there are stronger supports available in the United States compared to Britain), but I do discern a typical trajectory within which he and I and others like us follow varied paths, and in briefly setting it out I anticipate the later stages of my argument as they bear on Noll's "serious call."

As young evangelical Christians mature and encounter different and hostile cultural horizons, they may well come to feel that the evangelical reform of a particular band of traits, though empowering their parents, also acts as a limit. In particular evangelicalism seeks, against the odds, to sustain stable families; to encourage seriousness, work, and aspiration among its young; and to nourish a kind of integrity and respect for self and others which resists corruption, personal deterioration, and indulgence. That is no small contribution, even from the instrumental viewpoint of those whose main concern is the maintenance of virtue as a cornerstone of the res publica. Yet at the same time evangelical individualism elides the structural nature of political and cultural change.

Anglo-American comparisons

How now to respond in turn to the implicit comparative history and sociology of evangelicalism among English-speaking peoples and to the "devout and serious call" which Noll sets under the head of "opinion"? As to the first it would take too long to remarshall the arguments, so I content myself with surveying the thematic repertoire set out in the (mainly) American context, amplifying it somewhat and suggesting comparisons with Britain based on the microcosm of my own family. After all, mature theses have their antenatal origins in personal hunches. Then I follow Noll in his comparative comments on Canada, which conveniently offer an intermediate case between the American way and the British and also recommend the Canadian way as worthy of emulation. I turn finally to Noll's internal critique of evangelicalism, whereby he appeals to its fundamental theology as against its cultural practice and its excessive capacity to adapt.

How then do Noll's themes resonate with my own British recollections? Well, in the first place I recognize instantly how necessary it is for any forward movement to be promoted under trusted auspices, such as were offered by Billy Graham in the mid-twentieth century. Noll gives a whole chapter to the centrality of Graham in the burgeoning of the loose coalitions and networks that so often characterize evangelical organization. Comparably in my father's case, for example, it did not matter so much what denominational label you wore as whether the new could show lineage with his own version of the apostolic succession. The word went about as to who was and was not "sound." Somehow, and in spite of drawing huge crowds at London's Albert Hall—which was one of my father's crucial tests—Aimee Semple McPherson was not in the succession marked out by D.L. Moody, Torrey and Alexander, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Gypsy Smith.

The North Atlantic provenance of these towering figures of my father's world illustrates another Noll observation about a pattern of cross-investment between evangelical cultures. Though evangelicals draw boundaries around themselves within nations they are also international in their shared connections. Evangelicalism creates its own geographical proximities and remakes people in a shared image, so that had my father ever visited the United States he would have realized (without ceasing to be totally British) that he had already received a version of citizenship. That is also true of millions who today migrate to America, either physically or figuratively. For him, of course, it would have been much easier than for them. He would have been moving from one culture historically informed by evangelicalism to another, both originally joined at the hip, while those who today undertake that journey from Latin America or Korea or the Philippines have to undergo a symbiosis of the local and indigenous with the global American, and may find the journey quite problematic. If, for example, the authentic voice of the original culture is Confucian, with a strong emphasis on ancestral pieties, male privilege, and female invisibility, then acquiring dual cultural citizenship may seriously divide the soul. The soul may end up even more divided if western mentors teach migrants that local cultural authenticity is of value in its own right irrespective of content.

Noll also discusses a rather different border: the overlapping demarcations between degrees of fundamentalism and kinds of evangelicalism. This has been well-analyzed recently by Jon R. Stone,[1] but to anyone looking in from outside the myriad distinctions among evangelicals, like those among Pentecostals, rapidly blur—apart, that is, from those based on differences of color. What Noll shows by use of surveys is the looseness of fit between denominational address and evangelical persuasion. Certainly in Britain evangelicals were simultaneously inclined to create cells within other bodies, and to assemble in large mixed gatherings. Our family mingled freely with sheep of other pastures beyond our Methodist "church home," so that at one time we "sat under" Dr. Dinsdale Young and Dr. Sangster at the Westminster Central Hall, then shifted either to Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel or Alan Redpath at Richmond Baptist Church. That was three denominations for a start, and even the Pentecostals were eventually given a brief try, though their style did not appeal.

Clearly, keeping pace with the gospel in the mid-twentieth century required a car, and it is a truism that modern communication is part of the expansion of the evangelical gospel. If one links geographical mobility with upward social mobility, then the car is one of the outward and visible signs of grace.

I do not make this observation flippantly or critically since my observations in Latin America indicate how natural it is for those not heard from before to seek visible validations of their arrival, and this attitude can persist long after the people concerned have well and truly made it. Evangelicals read the Old Testament as assiduously as the New, and in the prophet Joel, for example, the Lord "does great things for us"—which are marvelous in other people's eyes. Moreover, this kind of validation can include the validation of numbers, so that citing the number of the converted becomes a further recommendation of gospel power.

Yet, at the same time, there can be an attachment to the principle of the small cell regarded as in constant danger from without. Elijah retiring to the brook Cherith, with his message unheeded and supposedly the only true believer left, always provides an apt role model. A sense of difference is branded on the psyche which is potentially dissident in any context whatever. Nineteenth-century opponents labeled this attitude "the dissidence of dissent," and it has generated plenty of political analogues. Like the early German pietists "we" in "our small corner" are an "ecclesiola in ecclesia," and in my youthful recollection the believing remnant colonized the Prayer Meeting, the Sunday School and the open-air witness. Here, the status differences were palpable: robed choir and organ on the one side and open-air witness with accordion on the other.

A strain toward prosperity also includes a strain toward what Noll calls "therapeutic individualism," and the shift can proceed unnoticed provided enough of the language remains familiar. So while psychological liberalism such as was preached by Dr. Weatherhead at the (London) City Temple was anathema to my family, sage spiritual technology about how to circumvent life's difficulties was not. Here was an adaptability which could end up almost without comment in the power of positive thinking. I have never forgotten a jamboree for "great achievers" in a Dallas Hotel where salvation seemed to be measured in dollars and Dr. Schuller addressed his Maker as "God, you are the greatest achiever of all!" The great tradition is somehow vulnerable to a pragmatic psychologization.

It is not part of Noll's remit to pursue all the kinds of "postevangelicalism," but to a sociologist these varied trajectories are highly significant. Evangelicals are not only potent in the social reproduction of their faith, but adaptable in ways that mutate toward rather different destinations. They also create a wider cultural penumbra—in South Yorkshire, for example, where the whole region was suffused with an evangelical spirit. For that matter there is so much in American society as a whole which partly derives from and/or is partly consonant with evangelicalism without any longer demonstrating overt connection: the preference for sincerity over manners, for the inner over the outer, and for what works over the merely academic. One of the more surprising discoveries of my Latin American research was that in Argentina two of the most popular movements are an interdenominational health and prosperity gospel, expelling the malevolent demons, and psychoanalysis doing likewise; and from time to time enterprising individuals try both.

The gender paradox

In a chapter on gender Noll borrows from John Stackhouse a typology of roles for women in evangelicalism, ranging from thoroughgoing subordination to full participation: the "speechless majority" role according to which women operate behind the scenes; exceptions to subordination justified by the exigencies of the mission field; analogous exceptions enabled by free-wheeling parachurch ministries; extended participation yet still ultimately under male authority; and equal partnership in ministry; the last still very much a minority view. Noll stresses how little evangelicals have differed in this matter from their immediate social peers, though one might also recollect the kind of evangelical mutation generated in the "Burnt Over District" of upstate New York, which produced a new generation of women leading the way in early assertions of female equality.

Here we encounter what Bernice Martin in the context of Pentecostalism has labeled the "gender paradox."[2] The essence of the gender paradox as documented by various researchers is the capacity of practice to subvert doctrine, both through avoiding overt conflict by leaving certain key aspects under male control, and through recommending a shift to mutuality where each is subordinate to the other. Women have everything to gain by the emphasis on domestic stability rather than the street license granted by machismo, and there are lots of contexts where it is as important to bring the man back in as to let the woman out.

Suspicion of the aesthetic

Noll has a chapter on the tension between science and evangelicalism which I want to supplement by emphasizing what could be much more significant: the tension with the aesthetic. So far as science is concerned Noll shows just how intermittent the tension has been and indicates the long-term alliance between the experimental and the empirical. After all, the classic tension which arose in the late nineteenth century varied hugely from one evangelical culture to another. Though maximal in the United States, it was much more moderate in Canada and Britain. Noll also brings together the conclusions of a revisionist historiography (D.C. Lindberg and R.L. Numbers; J.H. Brooke) which undermines the old picture of cumulative and necessary conflict.

In dealing with the problem of the aesthetic, on the other hand, there is of course a long-term tension within Christianity itself as to the relation between the holy and the beautiful, but the case of evangelicalism has its own complexities, partly because it is a popular faith in the Word which is "born in song." So perhaps one may select the study of "the Word"—literature—and the practice of music, to sketch just where the problem lies. That also allows some modest response to Noll's splendid chapter on hymns, where it seems to me he is more moving and engaged than anywhere else.

I write as someone who spent many thousands of hours trying to keep in mainstream use the traditional Book of Common Prayer, the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, and, in a very modest way, the corpus of hymns by the Wesleys. After all, the undermining of all these reference points simultaneously involves issues of doctrine, especially our embrace of the personally penitential as distinct from political apology and forgiveness, and the question as to whether the high poetry of faith "serves the present age," especially if that age has shifted away from preaching the Word and away from complexity. I am saying that a movement to open the evangelical mind, and to encompass complexity, faces shifts in a contrary direction. It follows that people passionately concerned for the high poetry of faith and aware of the complexity of the issues to be faced, are not going to have any more of an easy time now than in the past. When Alan Wolfe referred to the way the intellectually and aesthetically impressive expressions of the faith have mostly occurred under the aegis of the "older" historic churches, he had his finger right on the button.

Let me put it this way. One knows plenty of "hard" scientists who are evangelicals, and evangelicals are also well represented in practical and useful sciences, like medicine and agronomy. The Victoria Institute in London to which Noll refers was full of such people. But the real problem lies in the different kinds of soul which exist to inhabit the "many mansions" of eternity. Evangelicalism is clear about our equal need of redemption but poor in its provision for artistic and sensitive souls. Catholicism may be less democratic, but it is decidedly superior in its provision for the varieties of the human spirit.

Just how many evangelical poets and musicians, or even novelists, does one know? In my case one: Jack Clemo. I suspect that if one looks at the biographies of those raised in evangelical homes, the emergence of musical or literary leanings decrees a schism in the soul. Certainly one recognizes the dilemma of the Protestant believer in a novel by Andre Gide (himself of Protestant background) where he wonders whether faith demands he put away for ever his copy of Pascal's Pensees. Moreover, literature all too clearly aligns itself with one side of the culture wars in its depiction of the evangelical: Elmer Gantry, the Reverend Chadband, Augustus Carp, and Angel Clare.

If we are canvassing "the Word" there used to be a serious literature capable of sustaining piety, which in my childhood Sunday afternoons might include John Bunyan. But after a moment of initial greatness Protestant literature tends to undergo a secular translation. Thus Bunyan's story of the Christian pilgrimage becomes in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe the story of the self-reliant individual.

Our hymnbooks tell (or used to tell) the same story of decline after the great period or else of mutation into different kinds of sentiment. After the Wesleys, Watts, and Cowper the plain is flat with pimples, and writers have to be coralled from other traditions, like Whittier. That indeed is implied in Noll's own selection of examples. The classical hymn writers deployed the rhetorical strategies of high culture to convey a "full gospel" through inspired reconstitution of Scriptural imagery. Donald Davie (a Baptist who became an Anglican) has recalled Christians to these riches, as well as discussing writers sympathetic to Protestant themes, such as Browning, and even Kipling. Yet one is struck by the way "Protestant" poets and writers stand somewhat aside from the classic evangelical formulations or take off for different destinations. John Ruskin and George Eliot are obvious examples. Eliot initially wondered how she might choose between faith and literature, before converting faith into seriousness and going on to translate Strauss's Life of Christ. John Ruskin remained passionately engaged by faith throughout his life, but in Italy he experienced something like a deconversion. (If Mexico and Ireland offer a subconscious to the United States and Britain, then Italy is the seductive subconscious for the whole Protestant world of northern Europe and the North Atlantic.)

This minatory history of literature is also the spiritual biography of thousands who, if their imaginations had been fed, might have been part of an opening of the evangelical mind. As an Oxford don put it to me, herself an evangelical and teacher of English, you cannot engage in practical criticism with an overmastering interest in godliness and virtue. It is not remotely possible even with Milton, Renaissance Puritan though he was. If you are apt for Christian sustenance then you turn to the metaphysicals, to Johnson, Hopkins, Auden, Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, and the like—none of them evangelical, and usually Catholic or high Anglican. Once again here lies a clue as to why evangelicals turn to writers like C.S. Lewis.

The case of music is mainly a variation on the same theme and represents Noll's fundamental problem transposed in a different key. Contemporary serious music, including the work of those dubbed the "holy minimalists," is to an astonishing degree religious and Christian, but the tally of composers—Part, Tavener, MacMillan, and so on—is Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, or Lutheran. Musical performance does not turn on sincerity of heart but on the most rigorous criteria of excellence, and that can only be pursued in ecclesiastical contexts where mass participation is not the primary concern. Mass participation is powerful and moving, but it excludes the contemplative mode where the Christian is engaged by a luminous fusion of text and music in traditions which go back to the twelfth century and beyond to plainchant. Bach's cantatas arguably represent the greatest corpus of sacred music ever written, and the texts are evangelical to the core, even down to spiritual warfare, but no way can you just get up and sing. A sociologist colleague once summed it up rather neatly: "You know, he was the sort of person who began in Methodism and ended up in the Bach Choir." (Of course, such considerations in no way take from the power of those popular expressions of the "old, old story"—Havergal, Crosby, Sankey—which speak directly to the soul).

The contemplative mode offers a clue here, because participation can be coercive, and especially so in requiring positive feelings and collective happiness. Just because conversion brings tears of joy and turns a soul from bleak despair to "rejoicing in the light," there is some kind of ban on listening to "the still sad music of humanity" and the "lachrymae rerum." We are too easily forced back to the kind of childishness represented by the repetitions of "I'm H.A.P.P.Y" or "A little talk with Jesus makes it right." "Loathed melancholy" is as great a sin for evangelicals as acedia was for medieval Christians.

The observed trajectory of either decline or mutation can be further illustrated. Here the history of performance, "reception," and taste respecting Bach's great contemporary Handel is instructive. Handel was not an evangelical, though the text of Messiah sought to reaffirm traditional views of prophecy against rationalistic criticism, but the fact that part of his vast output had religious themes, was affirmative and apt for performance by massed choirs, made his music, along with Mendelssohn's Elijah and Haydn's Creation, the staple diet of Protestant choralism. What followed in its trail however was the musical equivalent of the reconstituted cliche and lugubrious sentiments too often found in hymnody.

Two related developments ensued. First, and roughly from the 1890s on, Protestant choralism changed, as non-evangelical traditions inaugurated a new sensibility, often somber, contemplative, and hieratic (Elgar, Faure, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Stravinsky, etc.); and second, the criteria of performance shifted in favor of small forces made up of professionals. Handel and Mendelssohn became unfashionable for decades in metropolitan circles, in part at least because tainted by the enthusiastic love of provincial choirs in evangelical Wales or in England's stagnating industrial heartlands. Handel's reputation did not recover until his operas were rediscovered and the oratorios cleaned of the patina of piety by vivacious professional performance.

If this seems somewhat marginal to the themes of Noll's book, its direct relevance is certified by Winton Dean's article on Handel in The New Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1988), where evangelicalism is blamed for the distortion of his legacy and the (temporary) occlusion of his fame. Sadly, the amateur choirs of the old industrial districts today encounter straitened circumstances, and the glory of the Sacred Harmonic Society of London is long departed. Once again one has an exemplary instance of how evangelicalism can be a kind of bridge passage, first liberating and offering a voice, and then constricting; and one wonders if the deeply moving expressions of contemporary Pentecostalism, transforming tens of millions of lives with a new sense of selfhood, dignity, agency, and aspiration, may not one day repeat the same history as the forlorn or converted chapels of industrial Britain. Where now are those Bethels, Bethesdas, and Ebenezers?

Canada: Analytic case/attractive option

An important pivot for Noll's argument turns on Canada examined analytically, and on Canada recommended as an attractive option. As regards the analytic examination Canada is intermediate between the United States and Britain in several ways: in possessing quasi-establishments rather than engendering a strict voluntarism, in the extent of its religious practice, in possessing an area or areas where culture, religion and territory are allied, in the proportion of evangelicals, and in the extent of their political engagement. What characterizes the United States, Canada, and Britain alike is the emergence of evangelicalism as the most vibrant form of Christianity, alongside Catholicism, so that in Canada and Britain, at least, it bids for the center ground and attempts also to firm up protective boundaries. Such boundaries parallel the focus on committed eucharistic participation in liturgical churches, and they exist to resist encroachment. What is surprising is that while American influence in Canada has increased by comparison with British influence, nevertheless Canada has moved from a time where its practice may even have been higher than American practice to a trajectory of increasing secularization rather like Britain's.

Noll makes other comments on Canada following the kind of characterization provided by S.M. Lipset, such as a strong commitment to welfare, readiness to use the state and to abide by the law, and a disinclination to turn either the country or its leaders into idolatrous icons. What, however, he finds most admirable, and specially worth recommending to evangelicals south of the border, is the conspicuous moderation and civility of disagreement in Canada, so that evangelicals and others may come together to debate as if listening to the other side. Clearly, Noll has had enough of a militant dialogue of the deaf. Near the heart of his agenda is civility, in every sense of the word. (I have to say that I wonder whether the remarkable recent showing of the Reform/Alliance Party in Canada, with its evangelical component, may not introduce a sharper tone than we have heard before.)

The political witness of evangelicalism

Basically Noll's argument concerns the political witness of evangelicalism and the theory and practice of Christian political intervention. He begins by clearing away myths, especially the evangelical supposition that the American Constitution reflected an evangelical ethos rather than a broadly Protestant attitude touched by enlightened Deism. The late eighteenth century was a time of transition from the staid churches of the East to the vibrant new religion of the frontier; and in his view any attempt to understand the political role of evangelicalism would do well to focus on the period from 1815-1860, and would include a salutary scrutiny of its implication in the Civil War. This same period saw evangelicalism embrace and, indeed, inform national self-consciousness and American values of sincerity and self-reliance. At the same time, evangelicalism was identified with a wide variety of political positions. On one side the "formalists" were keen to promote national programs of reform, while on the other the "anti-formalists" resisted. The common ground then (and now) was a relation between religious virtue and the good of the Republic, especially in the creation of stable families and sober citizens.

However, the late twentieth century saw a change, in terms of the emergence of new political players like the Pentecostals, changes in the South, notably the shift from Democrats to Republicans, the takeover of the Southern Baptists by self-styled conservatives, and the arrival of leaders who took up more pugnacious and partisan stances than those espoused by Graham. All this was activated by an increasing metropolitan pressure on the culture of Conservative Protestants, much of it necessary with respect to the rights of African Americans (who are, of course, overwhelmingly Democrat) and gender equality. Moreover, the way secularists put their own one-sided gloss on the Constitution, especially in the matter of judicial separation between religion and society, has had serious consequences for evangelicals. Noll sums the issues up in a lapidary sentence: "National efforts to legislate morality struck many conservative Protestants as so instinctively wrong-headed as to justify their own counter-attempts at legislating an alternative morality. They wanted to tell others what to do in the name of being left alone."

In the upshot, political debate was bedeviled by perceived divisions between the children of light and the children of darkness. There emerged an aggrieved sense of a national inheritance spirited away, which fueled the increasing shift to the Republicans. (Exactly the same aggrieved sense exists, incidentally, among many British Protestants in relation to the secular coloration of the BBC and the educational establishment. The systematic ambiguity of the concept of "multiculturalism" is used to destroy the public presence of Christianity—just as the ambiguity of "elitism" is used to destroy all distinctions and judgments of quality.)

With the ground cleared of myth and the problem out in the open, Noll seeks a better way rooted in fundamental theology rather than automatic cultural assumptions. For him any self-conscious evangelical attempt to articulate Christian political thought and practice should go beyond what has been argued on the basis of the creation, the fall, the potentials of a God-given reason, the rule of Christ, and a restored cosmos. It needs also to take full account of the Cross as God's way of working in and for His creatures. This implies a Christian philosophical anthropology which avoids either a "world-denying pietism" or a "redemption-denying immanentism." God the creator and God the trinitarian redeemer are held together, so that the image of the saint ruling alongside Christ is qualified by the real situation of a sinner redeemed by grace alone. Likewise, Calvinist kingly rule is qualified by a Lutheran focus on the Cross. We are saved "not of ourselves," and we are not gods.

Once armed with humility evangelicals might recognize the complexity and potential ambiguity of all political initiatives, without despairing of reform or amelioration. Christians, says Noll, should begin in an understanding of the mutuality of the Trinity and ask whether those movements which claim the Christian name reflect that understanding. Does a Christian politics take fully into account both sin and grace? The former counteracts the potential for human flourishing embodied in a good creation and the gift of reason; and the latter enables Christians by the grace of the Spirit to pursue peace and justice. All of which matters very much given the global upsurge not only of evangelical and Pentecostal politics but the renewed activism of the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics.

Noll's recurrent emphasis is on the moral and intellectual fallibility of everything we humans undertake, redeemed or not, and the stark impropriety either of pronouncing from Sinai as if interim custodians of the tablets, or of anticipating divine judgment in our own persons and preachments. In pronouncing on the political order humility should be endless. A further corollary of Noll's position is the necessity of articulating complex judgments, always recognising the possibility of unforeseen consequences which may reverse or nullify good intentions and good principles. Fallen creatures are always falling over into imbalances between one presumed good and another. The Archimedean point either eludes us, or in given circumstances does not even exist. The dialectic 'centre' does not hold, contradiction and paradox are of the essence, and benevolent schemes often go astray, as two sincere Christians, President Carter and Prime Minister Blair, have found out.

Noll's position is crystal clear: the evangelical practice of politics in the United States and elsewhere has often been anti-Christian. Even if "dominion" were an option as it sometimes has been in medieval times, or in England's "rule of the saints" (and may be now in Chiluba's Zambia), it would lead to ruin and Christian disgrace. A combative, adversarial understanding of a Christ who was himself a suffering servant, ends up in chronic contradiction. When it comes to politics we are all implicated in a mixed, ambiguous condition, born again or not, and indeed the children of light are sometimes less wise than the children of darkness because in their naivete they only recognize the Mammon of Unrighteousness when it is already too late. The trouble is that "Once in dominant positions, 'Christian politics' usually features themes of righteousness, holiness and commandment-keeping more associated with doctrines of restored creation than the themes of humility, self-abasement and repentance associated with the cross."

Noll's crucial and most controversial theme has to do with relations between the universally true as embedded in the idea of one God, creator of a universe, and the local and contingent as represented by the doctrine of the incarnation. By this he seeks to show how contingent situations modify general principles, and circumstances alter cases. This sensitivity to circumstance is presented as a desirable norm, and he gives various examples of the constraint exercised over principle by context, such as the mixture of tribal hierarchy and "democratic capitalism" in contemporary South Africa. It so happens I feel unhappy with these examples because it seems to me they are not so much instances of a norm derived from the dialectic of creation and incarnation as empirical examples of entirely incidental mixtures of social principles. But that trespasses on what is now to follow by way of critique.

I sympathize with the thrust of Noll's argument as it is directed against Christian triumphalism and militant anathemas unleashed on opponents; and also as it emphasizes the sheer complexity of policy decisions where circumstances are very different, and consequences are partly beyond calculation.

However, three issues worry me: the sheer flexibility of interpretation when we seek to infer political theory and practice from Christian images and doctrines; the ease with which such approaches are susceptible to a naturalistic or common sense translation; and the nature of "the political" and of collective action as they resist moralization.

With respect to the first, I suppose it is some measure of British pragmatism and secularity that I cannot imagine Christian doctrines being deployed in this way to establish a political theory and practice. Anglicans have argued for social engagement by invoking the incarnation and the kingdom; and the way of the cross has been used to underpin both pacifist and nonpacifist stances. In general, however, I hear little beyond exhortations to observe the golden rule and tell the truth, along with recommendations to forgive and go "the extra mile." But British aversion to high theory does not of itself invalidate this mode of argument, which I take it has roots in Dutch Reformed Christianity.

Flexibility is, however, a serious problem, and perhaps I can offer an illustration. Noll counters the triumphalism which invokes Christ's kingly rule with the self-abasement of the Cross. However, someone of a different persuasion has only to stress the Cross as the power of God and link it to our exaltation with Christ to reverse its sense. The Cross is an open-textured sign susceptible to multiple interpretations, in particular to interpretation both as a sign of power and a powerful sign. The hymn "The royal banners foward go"—Vexilla regis prodeunt—illustrates the point perfectly. Historically that has been understood either as Christ's unarmed entry into a city that did not "understand what belonged to its peace" and Christianized versions of imperial entry in the crusader style. Moreover, both of these positions can be arrived at with equal ease from evangelical or Catholic premises. Catholic notions of Christ the King notoriously fuse with the temporal interests of the Church in a way just as potentially idolatrous as some evangelical ideas of kingly rule.

With respect to naturalistic or commensense translations of complex theological argument they seem all too easy to arrive at. Commonsensically one might say that utopian aspirations are dangerous, and though one should not cease to work for amelioration, all our policy decisions have to be undertaken in the knowledge of our human fallibility and the interested character of political action. Naturalistically I suppose one might speak of the drive to solidarity and mutuality sharply countered by a self-interested drive not only to survive but preempt the attacks of predators. Of course, it is obvious that arguments of a theological kind are directed specifically to those who share those beliefs, but again one has to recognize just how easily such arguments can be switched in a contrary direction. (That is the plainest possible implication of the quite different readings of evangelical political responsibility on the part of white and black evangelicals).

On the third issue concerning the nature of politics and collective action, I have to speak in my own voice simultaneously as sociologist and theologian, and perhaps with a confidence some may find offensive. It seems to me that the rule of Christ on earth comes about through a leaven and a seed that is carried by the Church but disseminated far beyond its bounds, often without any label of origin. Anything beyond that is either a perversion where "saints" rule in the name of King Jesus or an ending to history in a sense not intended by Francis Fukuyama. That means, as Noll clearly realizes, that the Genevan or Savonarolan approach is out, either as norm or as practice.

That leaves us with the Lutheran option, though not in such a way as to inhibit serious attempts by Christians and the Church to promote human flourishing. Noll rightly comments that he is in some ways moving in a Lutheran direction; indeed I believe that the logic of his position doesn't merely point that way but leads decisively to a version of the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, because Christ Crucified cannot be realized in any discourse of political power whatever. The kingdom really is "not of this world."

A full-blown Niebuhrian realism will not allow us to forget the constraints and limits on the moralization of collective action, whether we consider the politics of party or nation. Collective behavior may be many things from time to time, but it is always "interested," and beyond that has a tendency to conflate ideals of righteousness with the social reality of party, nation or Church. The exigencies of survival, which easily become the engines of aggrandizement, are wrapped in the vocabulary of solidarity and, moreover, of a solidarity most easily maintained in relation to a hostile and malevolent "other"—an "other" who is usually to hand. Minimally the pursuit of truth, justice, and peace seems to entail considerable indifference to all three en route.

It may be that so saying I have merely provided a sociological translation of original sin and idolatry, but I think something of that sort would have driven Noll's powerful and moving appeal to a logical conclusion. And if the addressees will mostly not listen, that too can be anticipated on precisely the same premises, leaving one with yet another Lutheran conclusion: "Here I stand, I can do no other."

David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the University of London at the London School of Economics. His latest book, The World Their Parish: Pentecostalism as Global Option and Cultural Revolution, is forthcoming from Blackwell.

1. Jon R. Stone, On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism (London: Macmillan, 1997).

2. Bernice Martin, "The Pentecostal Gender Paradox: A Cautionary Tale for the Sociology of Religion," in Richard K. Fenn, ed., The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (Blackwell, 2001), pp. 52-66.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• American Evangelical Christianity, by Mark A. Noll

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.