Victorians, Evangelicals, and the Invitation
Imagine, if you will, that you are in my classroom. We are studying Victorian literature, a subject I teach often, whether within the context of a general education survey class (the kind every college student is required to take) or an upper-level course filled with English majors.
The Victorian age (as well as the literature it produced) is named after Queen Victoria, who reigned in Great Britain from 1837 to 1901. The period’s beginning is often marked at 1830, as this was the year the nation’s first Reform Bill was introduced, setting off a series of social and political reforms that would define the age—from expansion of voting rights to increased protections for laborers. It was a heady age marked by rapid change, optimism, prosperity, and progress—all undergirded by the evangelical faith that had grown increasingly influential throughout the previous century.
In this imaginary class, we are reading a variety of literary genres, including essays, novels, poetry, and drama. We will read writers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and many others. (Some of these writers, and others, will appear in the pages that follow.)
If you are an evangelical Christian (as most of my students are), you will probably begin to notice something over the course of our study together. You will notice a pattern emerging from all this Victorian literature. You will see in both the texts and their surrounding historical contexts qualities strangely similar to many of the defining characteristics of modern American evangelical culture. And by seeing in that literature many of the values and beliefs prominent within American evangelicalism today, you might find yourself wondering whether some of the ideas that characterize today’s evangelical culture are Christian as much as they are Victorian.
It is this recurring question that raised the idea for this book, one that explores the origins and continuing power of some of the primary images, metaphors, and stories of the evangelical movement that began around three hundred years ago. The Victorian period sits right in the middle of this story. Most scholars agree that evangelicals, who emerged a century before, created much of the ethos that defined the Victorian age and, as I hope to show in the pages that follow, this ethos defines much of evangelicalism today. As historian Timothy Larsen, who writes frequently on both Victorians and evangelicals, observes, “Almost all of the issues that we are wrestling with today that have salience for us the Victorians had a version of that conversation that is still ongoing.”1
Yet, in my own context—in the classroom and out, inside the church walls and outside of them—I’ve found that there is not enough of this conversation happening. Instead, the religious beliefs and cultural currents that birthed the evangelical movement in the eighteenth century and manifested as political and social values in the centuries that followed exist now as unexamined assumptions swirling within the evangelical imagination.
If evangelicalism is a house, then these unexamined assumptions are its floor joists, wall studs, beams, and rafters—holding everything together but unseen, covered over by tile, paint, paper, and ceilings. What we don’t see, we don’t think about. Until something goes wrong and something needs replacement. Or restoration. Or reform.
The evangelical house is badly in need of repair. We must confess, with Augustine, about ourselves and our movement, “My soul’s house is too meager for you to visit. It is falling down; rebuild it. Inside are things that would disgust you to see: I confess this, and I know it. But who’s going to clean it?”2
The crisis facing American evangelicalism today—manifest in increasing division, decreasing church membership and attendance, mounting revelations of abuse and cover-up of abuse, and an ongoing reckoning with our racist past and present—is one in which the decorative layers that have long adorned the evangelical house are being peeled away. Now we can see, some of us for the first time, the foundational parts of its structure. Some of these parts are solid. Some are rotten. Some can be salvaged. Some ought not to be saved.
Many have said that what has been exposed within the evangelical movement in recent days, months, and years is apocalyptic.
It is.
The biblical meaning of the Greek word translated into English as “apocalypse” is simply an uncovering or revelation. We often associate apocalypse with the end of the world because of the vision given in the book of Revelation about future days. We also make this association because some moments of revelation in human, church, or personal history do seem like the end of the world. There are times when this particular historical moment—which has included crises in the church, the first global pandemic in a century, and deep political polarization—seems to portend the end of the world. But perhaps it’s only, as the rock group R.E.M. put it, “the end of the world as we know it.” And maybe that’s fine.
Many truths that have been hidden are being brought to light. Many deeds that have been covered up are being uncovered. Many assumptions that have been unexamined are being brought to the surface and scrutinized in order that we may consider whether they are rooted in eternal truths or merely in human traditions. In the process, Jesus is revealing more of himself. As he said to his Father in Matthew 11:25, “You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” It is significant that the word translated as “revealed” in this verse is the Greek word for “apocalypse.”
Some of what is hidden from us is spiritual reality, divine truths that can be revealed to us only through God’s divine power.
But some of what is hidden remains so because of our own limited human nature, along with our habits, practices, and traditions. Human beings and, cumulatively, human cultures develop language, stories, metaphors, images, ideas, and imaginations that shed light on some corners of reality only to cast shadows in other places. Every good story offers a slice of reality. Every true metaphor illuminates certain likenesses. Every beautiful image has a frame. Each of these reveals something but also leaves something out. We see through a glass darkly, as Paul reminds us (1 Cor. 13:12).
There is no limit to the things that fill the evangelical imagination. And there is, of course, no one evangelical imagination. There are dozens more subjects I could have chosen to cover in this book beyond those in the chapters that follow. And there are hundreds more examples of each of these I could have included. But these are the ones that I know—the images, metaphors, and stories that I have pondered, taught, examined, or questioned, and seen others do the same.
I must also note that I am not a historian. I am not a theologian. I am not a philosopher. I am an English professor. I am a reader and writer who cares about the way imagination shapes our world and each of us. And I am an evangelical, one who has been formed by the surrounding culture—and cultures—just like everyone else. I am not attempting in these pages to outline a historical linearity, a doctrinal critique, or any post hoc ergo propter hoc claims. I know that correlation is not causation. The human imagination is not so neat as any of these.
In a way, what follows in these pages is simply my testimony. It is a picture of the evangelical imagination as I have found it over the course of years of researching, studying, reading, worshiping, and living and grappling with my own imagination—what fills it and fuels it.
The stories, metaphors, and images I identify in these pages as influential within evangelical social imaginaries are not strictly evangelical, of course. Nor are they uniquely Christian. They are certainly not exhaustive. They are simply part of the larger culture that has made evangelical culture—and that evangelicalism has made—for good and ill.
As you read about the images, metaphors, and stories I have chosen to illuminate as forming part of the evangelical imagination, as you consider with me how these things have brought good and how they have been distorted or abused, I hope you will look for other ones around you. Let them be evocations. Let them invite your own examination. Examination is an act of love.3 Look for the images, metaphors, and stories that fill your own imagination, your community’s social imaginary, and your own cultural experience.
Weigh them against the eternal Word of God.
Weigh them against the truth, justice, and mercy to which he calls all his people.
Weigh them against what Dante calls “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”4
I make this invitation without asking you to close your eyes or raise your hand. In fact, keep them open. Look. See. Go forward, down the aisle, to the altar. Walk in confidence that God’s foundation is true, the walls of the house he has built are strong, the steeple is upright, and all the windows will allow the light to stream in, now and for all generations to come.