Syracuse University

Graduate Student, History

Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs

Thesis Title: Everyday Apocalyptic: Radical Politics and Evangelical Society, 1969-2000

About

My dissertation focuses on the fraughtness of the evangelical world during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Entering the last quarter of the twentieth century, American evangelicalism was culturally, intellectually, and practically divided along a number of fault lines. Previously alien Pentecostal religious habits were making inroads in evangelical congregations, liturgical practices were undergoing a greater shift than at any point since the Gilded Age, and dogmatically unruly unaffiliated congregations and independent Bible studies were becoming increasingly important to the cultural and ideological life of the movement. While evangelicals were becoming increasingly prominent and influential, they often felt as if their movement—and, indeed, their faith—was under intense pressure and threatened with a precipitous and immediate decline.

This sense of endangerment, I argue, is fundamental to understanding the striking new directions which evangelical society and politics took during this quarter-century. Faced with the unraveling of the world they knew, evangelicals turned in large numbers to radical political and social projects as a way to reconstruct disintegrated societies large and small. My dissertation is structured around the Christian World Liberation Front, a radical group at Berkeley. By following the history of this group and the subsequent histories of its members, I show how evangelicals from across the political spectrum were shaped and motivated by the openness to socio-political radicalism which grew out of this moment of collective uncertainty. From evangelical converts to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy to conservative Anglophilia, from the counter-cult movement to attempts to construct a uniquely evangelical feminism, my  dissertation argues that evangelicals won converts and rose to public prominence because of their unique ability to adapt to—and flourish during—the end of the world.