Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work explores how people come to experience nonmaterial objects such as God as present and real, and how different understandings of the mind affect mental experience. She is the author, most recently, of When God Talks Back (Knopf, 2012), which The New York Times Book Review called “the most insightful study of evangelical religion in many years,” and of other books including Of Two Minds (Knopf, 2000), The Good Parsi (Harvard, 1996), and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Harvard, 1989). Her latest project, supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, builds on and extends her research for When God Talks Back, taking her to India and Africa. On a recent rainy afternoon in Palo Alto, I spoke with Luhrmann about her work and its new directions.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony: In the final chapter of When God Talks Back, you argue that God for evangelicals is not a rejection of modernity but rather an expression of what it is to be modern. How is this the case?

Tanya Marie Luhrmann: I think that the two big characteristics of modernity are the availability of science, and pluralism. And these make the uncertainty of your own cognitive position much more available to you. So using the imagination to make God real helps to make God real. Doing this also has characteristics that we associate with postmodernity—the playfulness, the uncertainty, the sense that there is a there there but maybe we don’t really get to it directly. From what I know of early Christianity, the idea of seeing through a glass darkly was extremely salient in the first and second centuries, was less salient to a faith that was very confident, and is highly salient to modern people. It allows you to imagine God walking by your side. Are you just making that up or is it real in the world? C.S. Lewis is sure that God is real, but then, he’s also writing a novel about it. The availability of disbelief is a condition of modernity. You cannot but be aware that other people think differently—that they may disbelieve your belief. And the evangelical walking with God is a sort of suspension of disbelief, which is not really relevant unless disbelief is relevant.

SBA: And yet the evangelicals you study do not often turn away from their disbelief or doubt or skepticism; they are constantly returning to it.

TML: They don’t think of themselves as doubting God, but they are extremely articulate about how God is present through the human. They know that there are Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims, and it’s very difficult for a smart, university-educated person to say, “Hindus have culture, but we don’t, we have truth.” So you are committed to having truth, but you also have culture. You also know that if God is talking to you in your mind, first of all you have God. But at the same time, you are aware that you are mistaken some of the time. Holding both of these simultaneously is the modern predicament—the awareness of the uncertainty of your knowledge.

SBA: That’s fascinating. And it runs up against the typical critique of evangelicals, especially by Dawkins and the new atheists, that evangelicals are turning away from the modern predicament, away from ambiguity and rational discernment.

TML: Yes. And the new atheists are not exceptionally articulate about the limitations of human knowledge. These guys are just seeing a different beyond, a different more, whatever it is. It took me a while to recognize how sophisticated people were about belief. My own preconception was that belief was a proposition rather than an attitude. And I remember doing research for When God Talks Back and being in this prayer group with a bunch of women, and they were all so clear about their awareness of the possibility that they were wrong—not about whether God exists, but about whether God is present right here. So in fact as you bring God closer you become more aware that He might not be present. You allow yourself to tolerate the uncertainty, because the uncertainty is very clear. You give yourself the real literal text, but you interpret it in a way that makes it flexibly fictional even though it’s nonfiction. You are saying things like, “this is a love letter written to me,” but you’re sitting in a room with ten people, all of whom cognitively see the same text, but also believe that it is God’s specific, unique love letter written to each individual self.

SBA: I’m reminded here of how for Robert Orsi belief is less important than relationships. And for you as well, equating religion with belief seems inadequate.

TML: That’s right. It’s about attitude. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is my lens here. We think of belief as propositional, and of faith as an attitude, an orientation, a way of committing to a sense that the world is good despite all evidence to the contrary. So from that perspective, I resonate with faith. Belief is tough for me. Adopting the idea that the world is good despite evidence is almost an emotional attitude, a way of being in the world. The evangelicals are certainly strong on belief—but their practice is about changing faith.

SBA: A major form of the evangelical practice is kataphatic or “imagination rich” prayer. How does this prayer work in terms of altering the mind and helping evangelicals achieve an interactional relationship with God?

TML: It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good. Kataphatic prayer helps you to do this. You are allowing yourself to live in a daydream, to walk with God, talk with God, hang out with Mary. And by treating the daydream not as ephemera but as something real in the world, it becomes a skill on which you can improve.

SBA: Thinking about religious experience in the language of daydreams and the like, how do you walk the line in your research between psychological reductionism where there is no such thing as God, and the reverse?

TML: Well, I think that if there is a God, then God speaks to us through our minds. So you need to accept and understand the psychology to understand the process. You can read When God Talks Back from different perspectives. From the purely secular angle, you might say that these people are just making it up, which demonstrates that it is all imagination. But from a religious angle, you might see the puzzle as: If God is always speaking, why doesn’t everybody hear? It’s really helpful to walk that line. I genuinely don’t think I have the right to pass judgment. And I don’t think that passing judgment is the point. Given that the question of ultimate reality is fundamentally undecideable, it’s more interesting to ask what we can know if we treat that seriously.

SBA: Readers persistently try to gauge your relationship to your evangelical subjects. Joan Acocella in her The New Yorker review of When God Talks Back observed that your attitude toward your subjects is “wavering,” difficult to pin down. Is this intentional?

TML: It is intentional. And I also probably do not have control over all of it. I think that the question of whether God is real is undecidable—but I still have a decision about it. I have a view. I struggle with the idea that there is this external ontology, but I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of faith. People do say things that are sort of ridiculous, and I cannot not hear those stories. I don’t tell a lot of those stories because I want readers to pay attention to these amazing experiences. But I also think that Joan Acocella struggled with the ambiguity of the anthropologist’s role. My duty as an anthropologist is first to understand. And as a journalist you are also trying first to understand—but judgment is much more part of the story that you’re telling. The Boston Globe called this “a curiously polite book.” And I mean, I do have a lot more to say about politics, but I didn’t want the book to be about politics because in my world it is such a powerful idea that their politics are wrong and therefore that these people are foolish. Of course, now I’m thinking that perhaps I should have included more on politics—but the book was so long already.

SBA: Non-evangelicals may view evangelical religion as weird, but politics often seem the bigger sticking point. Does introducing readers to evangelical religion absent politics allow outsiders to then begin approaching the politics in a way that is less divided?

TML: That is my hope. Since spending time in this world, I have come to understand how one could become so agitated about government programs.One of the things that is so striking about this world is that people imagine themselves in a relationship with God in which they are both changing.God is interacting with you, and you are becoming a better person, and your understanding of God is changing over time. There is a real aspirational quality to evangelical Republican politics. For many but not all evangelicals, this translates into the idea that government programs that encourage dependency are wrong: “We aren’t going to need entitlements. I’m not going to be an entitled person. It’s weak to want entitlements.” And now I have a much richer sense of how you could take that position. I still get driven up the wall; I find that my own political convictions are still as they were when I began. But I am less angry. When somebody says that we should cut welfare, at least I can appreciate more of where they are coming from.

SBA: Your project for the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative seems to emerge from and extend the research you did for When God Talks Back. You are looking at similar prayer practices, but comparatively across cultures that you view as having different “theories of mind”?

TML: Yes. I noticed two things from this book. First of all, the way people paid attention to their mental events changed their mental events. Giving significance fundamentally changed those experiences; the mental images felt sharper. And at the same time, there’s also something about the way people think about their minds. Americans think of thoughts as basically ephemeral, flighty, contradictory, and chaotic. And so in the American context what kataphatic prayer practice does is to teach people to take certain kinds of those thoughts very seriously. Now, when you look across the world, there are different conceptions of mind, different theories about the way that thoughts act on the world. And so I began to wonder: How would this affect the experience of God, the experience of prayer? I worked together with one of my postdocs looking at unusual spiritual experiences. One of these experiences was sleep paralysis or “night terrors,” a physiological experience where you are sort of awake but your body is sort of asleep, paralyzed. I talked to evangelicals in America, and something like 30 percent reported experiencing this, but it wasn’t a very rich category for them. Then my postdoc went to Thailand to research these experiences. Everybody in Thailand knew what sleep paralysis was, and they gave it a name. Two thirds had experienced it. And so it seemed to me that there was a story to tell. My hypothesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind and body probably shapes the experience of the mind and body.

SBA: You chose to extend your research on evangelical prayer in two places where you have also conducted research on schizophrenia—Accra, Ghana, and Chennai, India. What have you gathered so far about the operative theory of mind in each of these places?

TML: Very quickly and naïvely—part of the project is to become more confident about this—in West Africa, there is a sense that thought affects the world independent of the thinker. And so there seems to be this really powerful concern to scrub the mind clean. Negative thoughts are bad, and consequential. People are clear that prayer is about organizing the mind into the right position, about having the right thoughts and getting rid of negative thoughts. If you talk to Americans about talking to God, they’re hanging out with God, jumping with God, cuddling with God. And they have this idea that the mind is private, walled-off. Thoughts come and go. Their presumption, which even many psychologists share, is that it’s bad to ruminate about thoughts; that you make thoughts real by thinking about them. In Accra, evil is real, and it matters. And it is in part generated by the mind, so you have to clean out the mind. Thought is substantial; it’s not mere thought, it is more important than mere thought.

SBA: And in Chennai?

TML: In Chennai, thought is much more transactional. You are in some ways made as a person through interactions with other people. I haven’t yet figured out how this works religiously. But it’s clear from talking with people with schizophrenia that other people show up in your mind. Your relatives tell you what to do, they give you all these commands, good commands—You should do this, or don’t do this, or clean up, do chores, and so forth. There’s an interactive quality. It’s as if other people have the right to know what’s in your mind, or they do know what’s in your mind. So that’s very different.

SBA: What is the central hypothesis that you’re testing?

TML: That different local theories of mind change the experience of spiritual experiences, of God. I anticipate that people in these different locales will report differently their audible experiences of God, the presence of God, mystical experiences, out of body experiences. That people will talk very differently about prayer, about this daydream-like conversation with God. That there will be a shift in the topography of mental experience.

SBA: I wonder how your own spiritual or magical experiences have shifted your perspective or your desire to do a particular kind of work? You wrote an essay for Frequencies about an experience you had while doing your dissertation research on practitioners of magic in Britain—

TML: I had what I would call a hallucination. I was reading a book about a priestess of Avalon, and there was a lot about druids. And I woke up early in the morning and looked out the window—on the second story—and there were six druids standing there. I saw them. Then I did a double take, and they vanished. But the perceptual experience was a kind of veridical sensory experience. And that really impressed me. It wasn’t the only unusual experience I had while hanging out in that world, but it was the most vivid one. And it persuaded me that this was not about acquiring discourse. I was coming of age in the linguistic turn in anthropology, which focused on the way people used language, how they used and acquired words, the narratives they used, rather than talking about the psychological experiences that their words might represent. There was a shift against psychological experiences. And this was also at the dawning of cognitive science. If I were to describe what I went in looking for, back then—although I didn’t have the words then to describe it—I would say that I went into the world of magic looking for prototypes and schemas and heuristics and narratives and ways in which people cognitively organize their ways of understanding themselves so that they come to experience magic as working. But as it turned out, this was not about heuristics. This was something quite different. And that has altered the course of my intellectual life. I became really interested in training, and the way that spiritual and prayer practices change mental experience.

SBA: How do you think that coming from this position affects your ability—or whatever word you want to use—to yourself have experience while you do this research, and how do you think it colors your interpretation of that experience? Is it less real for you?

TML: I’ve sort of allowed my imaginative experience to become more real. I feel like I have given myself a little bit more freedom as a result of doing this research. But I am not right up there in the high absorption world. I am certainly not somebody through whom words march of their own accord. Really good novelists feel the story move through them, they don’t feel that they are in control of the story—the story happens to them. So, I’m impressed by the capacity to change mental habits, but I am also impressed by how difficult it is. I was part of a prayer group for a couple of years, and I enjoyed the prayer experience a great deal. I would not say that I am now an active pray-er. But I do give myself more freedom to pause and engage in the garden. It’s not as if I have created my own spiritual discipline. When I was doing the experimental work for When God Talks Back, I created a couple of these spiritual discipline tracks that I would use for myself and try to get caught up in the experience. I’m not doing that currently. I probably should.

SBA: You have written that walking and talking with God is “a process through which the loneliest of conscious creatures can come to experience themselves as awash with love.” Does this translate into addressing or beginning to heal late modern or postmodern alienation and anomie, or all the rifts and impoverishments that somebody like Robert Putnam talks about?

TML: I think so. There’s a lot of pushback against Putnam’s data, but I think that there is enough support to feel confident about it. God works as a social relationship in people’s emotional worlds; they hold God as what you might call a “self-object.” We know that when you pop people into a brain scanner and ask them to talk to God, the part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up when you have them talk to their friends or when you engage them in social activity. And I have done quantitative work that shows that the more strongly people affirm the statement, “I feel God’s love for me directly,” the more their loneliness and their stress decrease. So, does this God arise because of increased loneliness? That’s a stronger question. But I’m certainly persuaded that intimacy with God decreases loneliness.

SBA: I wonder if there are any social effects? If all of us were to begin walking and talking with God, would we enter a world that is just as disconnected socially but is experienced as far less lonely, or would that somehow translate into concrete person-to-person connectedness?

TML: In the church it certainly translates. If you go to one of these evangelical churches, one of the things happening is that you are creating very strong social bonds. A third to half of the church, depending of course on the church, meets together in small house groups. And those groups are powerful social engines. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece arguing that membership in the small group was the most powerful predictor of whether people donated money to a church. We at least know that people who are able to imagine God and to have a relationship with God also show up as more empathic, and my guess is that the more able you are to represent God, the more able you are to represent other people. That’s probably socially conscribed—you are probably imagining people in your group rather than other people around the world. This is one way of thinking about different kinds of political stories. People are often struck by the fact that I’m arguing that you can increase your empathy as you increase your relationship with God—but it doesn’t necessarily increase your commitment to social justice politics. What happens if somebody is by themselves and does these prayer practices, do they become more connected to other people? I don’t know. The kind of Dalai Lama-driven, Richard Davidson, Zen Buddhism-is-good-for-you approach would say “yes.” But we do not have that kind of data on kataphatic prayer practices.

SBA: Perhaps this falls under a lack of data, but what do you think about a connection between kataphatic prayer and ethics? I’m thinking of Jeffrey Kripal’s argument that there is no necessary connection between monistic mystical experience and ethics. Do you see ethical frameworks emerging from kataphatic prayer?

TML: I think that the more you feel loved, the more loving you become. We know this from human psychology. There is probably a certain amount of variation in what counts as the person to whom you become more loving. Being able to use your imagination is a content-free activity; you can use your imagination in various ways. If you are using your imagination in a Christian setting, and you’re doing Christian kataphatic prayer, you do more strongly connect to the Jesus of the gospels. Of course, there’s a lot of ethical variation in what that means to people. There probably is a story of increasing your empathy and compassion and concern, and again that’s the Richard Davidson story. But I think it is up for grabs toward whom you increase your compassion. It’s not obvious to me that just because you engage in spiritual practices, that you feel more compassion toward somebody who is not like you.

Newness is a fascinating, and very loaded concept.  It expresses ideas of innovation and progress, as well as rupture and substitution.  Whether presented in the form of prophetic revelations, revolutionary ideologies, or consumer branding, “the New” is always wrapped in a combination of promise and threat – it promises to improve upon the old, while threatening to eclipse and even replace it.  Newness inspires hope as well as fear, with a provocative power that sometimes borders on the messianic.

It is hardly surprising then that evangelical Protestants, for whom “authentic faith” is all about radical rebirth and regeneration, have historically placed so much stock in things new and improved, often against heavy resistance in their own ranks.  There were the “New Light” evangelicals, whose religious enthusiasm inspired mass conversions in the eighteenth century, but also led to historic schisms. In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney promoted “new measures” of revival, generating celebrity while drawing his own share of detractors. The 1940s saw the emergence of the “new evangelicalism” (version 1.0), a self-conscious effort by the likes of Carl Henry and Billy Graham to recover the evangelical brand from fundamentalists.  The “New Christian Right” of the 1970s was a reactionary juggernaut that redefined the arena where evangelical political and cultural activism took shape.

The point is not to downplay the actual newness or significance of growing evangelical centrism—or as I prefer to call it, plasticity—in contemporary US politics and public culture, but rather to think about this shift in relation to evangelicalism’s long and fraught history of constant renovation. This is important because every new movement and shift in the field of evangelical engagement stands in tension with its densely layered past, and this tension can be felt most acutely by participants on the ground. Exacerbating the tension further is the fact that virtually all known varieties of evangelical religiosity, whether they are branded as “new” or “old,” rely on the common (but conflicting) belief among participants that what they are doing is closer in spirit to the ministry of Jesus, and truer to the letter of biblical law.

Several years ago I did fieldwork among socially engaged evangelicals who sought to mobilize popular support for social outreach initiatives in predominantly conservative congregations. The resulting book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, focused on individuals who would likely gravitate toward, or at least be sympathetic to the current “new evangelical” agenda. Yet my research also showed that socially engaged evangelicals occupy very complex positions in the wider milieu of white evangelicalism. They engage in ministry activities that many churchgoers admire and even valorize, but their efforts also bring out lingering disagreements, fears, and doubts about the future of evangelism, and intensify longstanding debates about whether the mission of the church is ultimately meant to be a proselytic or social one.

Rather than representing one side of that debate, the socially engaged evangelicals I observed often found themselves caught squarely in the middle of it, seeking to draw both inspiration and institutional legitimization from multiple strands of Protestant tradition, from the defense of strict biblical orthodoxy and personal pietism to the millennialist optimism of nineteenth-century social reforms and the prophetic justice orientation of Martin Luther King.

All of these influences make up an intriguing mélange of ideals and sensibilities that animate the moral universe inherited by today’s evangelicals.  They are the reasons we perceive evangelicalism as a field in constant flux, oscillating between paths of engagement and separatism, progressive reform and reactionary protest.  The reality is that much of the time these apparently polarized impulses are actually coexisting and overlapping throughout the evangelical subculture, even within the same denominations, churches, and small groups.

For those evangelicals who stand committed to one path of engagement over another, the matter of newness is often unambiguous—in with the new, out with the old, the only way forward.  But for others, perhaps a more reserved majority of non-activists, newness is a motivational framework that is at once extremely attractive and problematic.  This is because any tradition that thrives on newness must also seek to protect the continuity of tradition, paradoxical as all that might seem. As we evaluate the potential long-term effects of evangelicals gradually (and partially) moving away from the religious right, we should remain mindful of the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that will fuel their movements and at the same time restrain or subvert them.  This is not just about a pendulum swinging back and forth from right to left, though this will almost undoubtedly occur over time. In a grander sense, it is about agonistic and heroic quests for newness, and evangelicalism’s enduring struggle to be continually reborn.

To read of “robust polyphony” among evangelicals was especially welcome to me, as I addressed this phenomenon in a recent ethnography, Emerging Evangelicals (NYU Press, 2011). As a cultural anthropologist, I explored the identities fashioned, practices performed, histories claimed, institutions created, and critiques waged among evangelicals influenced by the Emerging Church movement. Pally’s astute analysis returned me to a question I stopped short of fully developing: does fragmentation equal change?

While it is clear that evangelicalism is diversifying, it is unclear what this amounts to. We see voting blocs split, financial donations broaden, volunteer labor disperse, and moral-political agendas expand. But, do these fragmentations signal tectonic, hard-wired, all-bets-are-off cultural change? Or, is it more superficial (which is not to say unimportant or not deeply felt) social change? Do electoral politics and other shifting forms of activism amount to fundamental change, or merely changing patterns of action?

Briefly, consider one example: evangelical anti-human trafficking campaigns. This is not an example Pally cites, but it exemplifies her point about a diversifying consciousness. Evangelicals, in step with other faith-based and secular actors, are devoting increasing attention to the global problem of labor and sex trafficking. A thorough canvassing of evangelical anti-trafficking would be most welcome: how many organizations exist, how much money they raise, where in the world they work, and so forth. But, the more vital qualitative question is what cultural materials evangelicals use to conceptualize and conduct anti-trafficking activism. Consider a representative organization. Unearthed, a film ministry founded in 2009, culminates its lead documentary with: “Even if we were to rescue every victim of sex trafficking today, there’s still gonna be a demand for millions and millions and millions of new slaves tomorrow. Because at the root of sexual exploitation is a demand, and it’s driven by men. If we want to change this thing systemically, if we want to stamp it out at the root, what men want at the deepest level, like their hearts and their desires, have to be changed.”

Does this hint at a profoundly different evangelicalism? I would say ‘no,’ because the organizing cultural logic is individualist, moralist, and male-centered. Unearthed relies on a thin model of agency. If men stop masturbating to pornography, going to strip clubs, and paying prostitutes for sex, then human trafficking will grind to a halt. Females – and, strikingly, a wide range of females – have little to no agency: an adult exotic dancer and a 10-year old sex slave are imagined as much the same. Moreover, the structures that create the conditions for and reproduce trafficking are systematically undervalued in the discourse of organizations like Unearthed. Global poverty, hunger, labor demands, punitive and legal policy, and transnational migration routes are scarcely mentioned or completely absent.

The fragmenting of evangelical activism is undeniably important. However, we must be cautious in what we make of it. As the case of anti-trafficking suggests, it would be easy to mistake a “new” evangelical cause for a “new” evangelicalism. We need clear theories of cultural change to make proper sense of shifting ground. What kind of re- project are we witnessing: a re-organizing of existing evangelical culture, or a re-making?

As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors.

You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World).

The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.”

This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report.

As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru.

It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.”

Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections.

Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals.

Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness.

By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.

Increasingly, many of these non-American evangelicals have begun to speak back to the United States, revealing American conditions not only as anomalous but also as subject to influence from abroad. Scholars are recognizing that despite the imperial nature of the “American Century,” influence flows in both directions. People of the two-thirds world have, in fact, shaped American evangelical missionaries and Cold Warriors.

This global reflex often takes progressive shape. Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, my history of the small, but energetic, American evangelical left of the 1970s and 1980s, chronicles the activism of just one of many international sources of non-rightist politics. Figures within Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL) are obscure outside evangelical circles, but they have voiced trenchant critiques of American consumerism and social injustices. As Samuel Escobar, a native of Peru and FTL’s first president, told thousands of delegates at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, “Christians in the Third World…expect from their brethren a word of identification with demands for justice.” Institutions such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the World Evangelical Fellowship, Christianity Today, Wheaton College, and World Vision have listened to a surprising degree. For example, under pressure from international evangelicals, World Vision de-Americanized in the 1970s, a move that resulted in adding economic development to the organization’s agenda of disaster relief and personal evangelism.

Escobar and World Vision represent the leading edge of what will almost certainly become a larger and stronger global reflex. To be sure, the reflex seems uneven in the context of current North American political orthodoxies. African critiques of libertine sexuality, Asian critiques of American techniques of evangelization, and Latin American critiques of North American consumerism combine in ways that defy the imaginations of most Americans. Indeed, the exotic melody from abroad is rich and complex, and international voices likely will swell to a chorus in the next century as the Global South demographically overwhelms northern and western centers. In a world where 60 percent of all Christians now live outside the North Atlantic region, and in a nation increasingly opened to nonwhite immigrants since the Immigration Act of 1965, global influence will only intensify. As that happens, contemporary manifestations of right-wing evangelicalism may seem even more anomalous.

First, in the movement Marcia Pally describes, evangelicalism is no longer synonymous with white evangelicals. Conservative black churches have long held a pro-life, pro-marriage ethic in balance with energetic social activism. Immigrant churches, the fastest-growing segment of Christianity, tend to be conservative theologically while progressive on issues like poverty and immigration. The increasingly influential Hispanic community naturally aligns with this movement. As Samuel Rodriguez puts it: “Where Billy Graham meets Dr. King, that’s where you will see the Hispanic Christian community emerge.”

Second, this movement represents a dynamically different process of connecting faith and social engagement. Instead of a checklist of correct stands on selected issues, many evangelicals seek a consistent ethical framework rooted in core beliefs. Conservative blogger Eric Teetsel comments, “Rather than valuing other issues alongside life, Millennial emphasis on life explains their interest in other social issues. Caring for the poor is born from a foundational valuation of life.” Indeed, while young evangelicals remain solidly against abortion, two-thirds (63 percent) agree that poverty, disease and torture are also pro-life issues.

Third, evangelicalism is revising its strategies of social influence. New evangelicals tend to hold progressive opinions on some issues and promote (private-sector) social justice initiatives while maintaining a conservative political identity and voting GOP. Their activism deemphasizes top-down political strategies in favor of incarnational engagement on the local level. This makes the political and cultural influence of evangelicals less centralized, less coordinated, and more unpredictable. Whether it is ultimately more effective remains to be seen.

While a significant change is undeniably underway, it should not be overestimated or overgeneralized. New evangelicals are not on a journey toward becoming liberals; they are not likely to swell the ranks of Democratic voters; they have not abandoned abortion as a core issue. As sociologist John Schmalzbauer cautions: “While dreaming of what evangelicals might become, we must take a hard look at who they are.” What is clear is that “who they are” can no longer be captured by old labels and simple polarizations.

As she suggests, the real surprise of the recent presidential election was a move back toward the Republican Party among evangelical voters. This perhaps suggests that many of them were morally ill-at-ease with Bush’s wars and culturally ill-at-ease with his anti-isolationism. At the same time they are not very persuaded by Obama’s lower-key perpetuation of the same, nor by attempted healthcare reforms that they may regard both as ineffective and insufficiently mutualist.

The remaining issue to my mind concerns whether the “new evangelicals” are simply reverting to type—since the entire political history of evangelicalism in the US has favored the left more than the right, as Pally points out. I would suggest, however, reasons why this may not be the case.

In the US, as to a degree in the UK, evangelical, like religiously dissenting (i,e., non-Catholic or Episcopalian, though Christian) opinion has largely aligned with liberalism, because of a shared focus on the individual actor. Now that contemporary “conservatism” has itself embraced liberalism, it may well appear more congenial to evangelical opinion, which from William Wilberforce onwards has tended to combine the capitalist market with voluntary—if very systematic—charity. The abortion issue is not the only explanatory factor here. It therefore follows that, if younger evangelicals are deserting “the right,” one has to ask whether they are also deserting traditional liberalism. My encounters with evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic suggest that this is indeed emphatically the case.

Evangelicals are deserting the right because they are deserting liberalism. And they are doing this because they are deserting, or at least redefining, evangelicalism as traditionally understood. This is witnessed by the modification or sometimes abandonment of the central defining feature of traditional evangelical doctrine, namely, the penal substitutionary theory of atonement. Historians such as Boyd Hilton have shown how this thoroughly economistic and contractualist account of Christ’s death have often aligned in modernity with an embrace of capitalist market economics. Equally, evangelicals have been influenced by the charismatic movement, which has accentuated a stress on the emotive and the communal. Again their scripturalism is leading them into a “post-protestant” questioning of the Reformation reading of the Bible and an increasing worry that the Reformation may itself be responsible for the secularization process. Finally, the making of common cause with Catholics over abortion and other issues has led to a steep decline in traditional anti-popery. Both the new opening to Rome and the charismatic influence involve a heightened sense that being a Christian involves being a member of the body of Christ or the Church: this is after all writ clear by St. Paul.

This new emphasis leads in turn to a heightened appreciation of the social as relational rather than as a mere field for individual pious heroism. It is here striking that the new evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, cites Catholic social teaching as the major influence on his thinking tout court, and has a Benedictine spiritual director. Within the British Labor party, young evangelicals are newly to the fore, attracted by the Catholic social teaching-driven agenda of Jon Cruddas, key policy adviser to Ed Miliband, current head of the Labor Party. This is, for evangelicals in the UK (though not for non-evangelical Methodists) a largely novel embrace of Christian socialism. Exactly parallel new leanings are evinced by many of the younger American evangelicals whom I have taught, who all witness a new sense that they are first and foremost Christians who see the formation of a spiritual and just community as an integrally religious task. In consequence, they are now much more bothered than any of their forebears by the modern dominance of the idol money that tends to subvert human relationality and reciprocity.

Thus while Pally is wholly right to say that evangelicals continue to be suspicious of the State as the main locus of social and economic justice, evangelicals are now tweaking this in a rather more associationist and rather less individualistic direction that makes it more and more converge with the Catholic outlook on these matters. As Pally points out, 65 percent of evangelicals ages 18-30 favor more governmental aid to the needy. Therefore, I submit that the “leftward” shift among some evangelicals is a new phenomenon both theologically and politically, and not simply a reversion to type or a different expression of a perennial American Protestant repertoire.

Back in the late 1970s, a group of ambitious Southern Baptist pastors launched a culture war on two fronts—against the moderates in their own Southern Baptist denomination and against the liberals they feared were contaminating America culture. Their goal was to take both back for God. As leaders of the largest Protestant group in the US and the dominant faith group in the South, those Southern Baptist leaders were one of the driving forces behind the rise of the religious right, which helped created the Republican dominance in the South.

Yet some of these Southern evangelicals are also among the “new evangelicals” described by Marcia Pally. And they are not easy to pigeonhole.

Younger Baptist leaders like Platt still vote Republican. They still want to restrict abortion and continue to believe that gay marriage is wrong. They believe their view of faith—that Jesus is the only way to salvation—is the only true way. But they have no interest in becoming the new leaders of Red America or in building denominational kingdoms. These pastors and their follower are less likely to aspire to political power and personal gain, because they’ve found those things wanting. Instead they really do aspire to change the world—by volunteering in orphanages overseas, starting charities, drilling wells, adopting orphans from overseas, establishing churches, and setting up Bible study groups to draw their peers closer to faith.

They are suspicious of government programs, preferring hands-on approaches to dealing with issues such as poverty, homelessness, and the lack of clean water. They are willing to support some unexpected programs—for example, pressure from evangelicals led former President George W. Bush to spend more money on fighting the AIDS epidemic than any of his predecessors. And while they do want people to have access to health care, they are uncompromising in their refusal to go along with policies that they feel violate their principles. A clear example of this was the legal challenge to the so-called contraceptive mandate. A number of evangelical colleges, which would otherwise support health care reform, have sued to block the Obama administration from enforcing that mandate.

How these new evangelicals fit into today’s red state blue state, culture war divide, remains to be seen.

Fundamentalists scorned him, calling him an apostate, but his assertion gave a new generation of evangelicals permission to scrutinize political platforms and move to the middle. The middle seemed to make more sense to younger followers of Jesus who were hearing and heeding calls to humanitarian causes at home and abroad.

Today, the majority of white evangelicals are still on the right, and the bulk of black evangelicals are still on the left. Leaders on both sides are doing their best to hold them there with dire warnings about the spiritual and social consequences of compromised ideology. In the middle, however, are a growing number of new evangelicals—people of all races who have sold their political birthrights and have become activists who address issues Jesus regularly raised.

But being in the middle can be problematic.

New evangelicals in the middle have had to accept isolation. In the middle, there is no “Hooray for our side.” Middle is not a side. (But maybe it will become one someday.)

The right is sure that those in the middle have “lost their salvation.” Followers of the fundamentals do not move toward a side that choses choice over life. The left is sure that those in the middle have allowed blind orthodoxy to recalibrate their compassion compass. Social justice champions do not forsake the hopes and dreams of the poor and powerless.

They ask the new evangelicals, “How do you decide for whom you will vote?”

Imagine a balance scale. Ideals are purified by Scripture and turned into principles. Depending on which side is advocating what position, the cradles are loaded with the precepts that matter most. In the end, the heaver side gets the vote. It’s not a party selection but a referendum based on principles.

People on the sides seem to forget that although Jesus was radical, he wasn’t a liberal; neither was he a conservative. What was he? Simply put, he was about his father’s business. A clear understanding of that business seems to drive more and more people toward the middle these days. And that migration is a riddle that the right and the left have yet to figure out.

Part of this transition is cultural. As Professor Pally pointed out, it is not only a generational shift that naturally declares independence from traditional religious reactions (especially paternalistic ones). The transition is for others a distancing from the institutionalism of the church and the inelasticity of a movement that began as personally charitable but has become dogmatically xenophobic.

The greater part of this change, however, is a generic return to the original agenda of Christ. As the world becomes more complex and less predictable, we are seeing a “back to basics” trend. It is an expansion beyond a preoccupation with the more recent monitoring of sexual matters, to a more ‘whole life’ helpfulness. It is the turn from accusation to compassion, and it is much in keeping with the priorities and example of Jesus. His focus on helping the most vulnerable is also our concern. Thus more and more evangelicals are expanding the definition of pro-life. They are including in a pro-life framework concern with poverty, environmental pollution, AIDS treatment, and more. And issues like abortion are being expanded from focusing on only “in utero” concerns—increasing numbers of evangelicals now see prevention of unwanted pregnancy and support for needy expectant mothers as pro-life.

More evangelicals simply want to live our lives according to our spiritual values—unselfishness, other-centeredness, non-presumptuousness—so that when people see “our good works, they will give glory to our Father in heaven.”

Lastly, practically all sustainable change is relationally based. In an increasingly connected world, an increasing number of evangelicals are developing a broader range of relationships, both interfaith and inter-lifestyle. These make us think twice before we declare those who have different values as adversaries. As we “love our neighbor,” we want to cooperate in ways that express our own values while allowing others to express their own.

Professor Pally has established a masterful and nuanced summary of the change in the evangelical political voice. I hope that we will continue the dialogue.