"Berger’s is a stunning claim, and it’s worth pausing to consider its implications. The process of [disenchantment or] secularization transforms religious institutions into what he calls 'marketing agencies' and religious traditions into 'consumer commodities.' . . . Evacuated of a central teaching office or a shared liturgy, with a phenomenology void of the supernatural, evangelicalism is a religious consciousness that needed to market itself to private individuals who were no longer constrained to participate in religious activities.
"Evangelicalism, therefore, has adopted private values that would appeal to the widest possible audience. These values, however, have shifted historically. . . . The values that are often associated with evangelicalism were not produced by evangelicals out of whole cloth; rather, they presented the best way to market a religion with any hope of surviving. . . . .
"Although Du Mez’s [Jesus and John Wayne: how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation] reads as an apt description and indictment of [Evangelicalisms B’s] twists and turns, the private values and cultural norms that were easily marketed in 1990s America are [of course] no longer the ones being marketed today. A shortcoming of Du Mez’s book is that she does not reflect on whether she, too, has taken part in a process of secularization whereby one’s religious beliefs must square with the concerns of the marketplace and, perhaps unintentionally, has become [herself] just another participant in the process of secularization Peter Berger describes. Seen from this perspective, Jesus and John Wayne is an example of how quickly values change, and the alacrity with which purveyors of evangelical religion rush to market themselves accordingly. They did not find the 'God, faith, and family' values problematic in the days of Evangelicalism B because such values weren’t problematic during that cultural period. Du Mez identifies those religious artifacts marketed most avidly to evangelicals during Evangelicalism B, when religious identity reached the apogee of its mass-market appeal. But she analyzes them through the lens of what I’m calling Evangelicalism C, the landscape we currently inhabit. . . .
"When it comes to matters of gender, sexuality, and race, . . . Evangelicalism C stands apart from Evangelicalisms A and B. Its emerging class of influencers is more affirming of sexual expression, more sensitive to matters of social justice, and at times acutely critical of the stands aging generations of evangelicals have taken on both. Still, there remains a striking continuity that can be traced across the decades, a parade of salesmanship built on a view of the religious life, conceived through the lens of the home and consumer identities. As Peter Berger writes, 'A sky empty of angels becomes open to the intervention of the astronomer and, eventually, of the astronaut.' We are in a moment when sexuality, gender, and race have become the astronauts of the modern religious sphere. . . .
"Many influencers and leaders prominent in the world of Evangelicalism C tend to reject the 'evangelical' label. But in seeking to distance themselves from a previous movement and casting around for a new religious identity that better squares with their social concerns—one that correlates broadly with the culture of the day—such religious figures bear an uncanny, if unintended resemblance to their evangelical predecessors. As inheritors of an increasingly secular religious landscape, they have been left with little choice than to market their religious beliefs and values to whoever will buy them. The best way to do this is to adopt the preferences, values, and strategies of the surrounding culture.
". . . It is not simply that the movement resists easy definition. It is, rather, that evangelicalism has been so buffeted by the waves of consumer trends, been so malleable and revisable for every cultural moment, that the movement cannot be meaningfully distinguished from a broader American religiosity. The disturbing conclusion might just be that evangelicalism does not exist."
Kirsten Sanders, "The evangelical question in the history of American religion," The hedgehog review: critical reflections on contemporary culture 24, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 59-60, 62-65 (56-65), underscoring mine. There are some problems with this approach, for there have been profoundly counter-cultural evangelicals in every age of the movement, beginning well before 1904 and what Sanders calls Evangelicalism A. And there have been and are (say) Catholics (Protestant Catholics) desperate to cut Catholicism down to the size of this very same Procrustean bed. But Sanders does, in my view, a nice job of taking the likes of Du Mez (for I have not yet read Du Mez herself) to task for being guilty of the very same sorts of conformism for which they excoriate their predecessors.
