Author charts rise of evangelism
Published 11:00 am Thursday, September 30, 2004
On Sunday mornings, Northwesteners are more likely to be sipping lattes than singing hymns.
So posits “The None Zone,” the first in a nine-book “Religion by Region” series, a project of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., examining the ways politics, public policies and civil society relate – or fail to relate – to the religion that is on the ground.
The book found that in the Pacific Northwest, more people surveyed were not members of a religious institution – or checked the “none” box when asked their religious identity – than in any other region of the country.
But 25 percent of the respondents nevertheless identified themselves as evangelical Christians – the fastest-growing religious group in the Northwest, doubling in size between 1990 and 2000.
Islander James Wellman, who contributed a chapter about the region’s burgeoning evangelical movement, “The Churching of the Pacific Northwest: The Rise of Sectarian Entrepreneurs,” believes that it is the very diffuseness of spiritual practice here that helps make the Northwest and Alaska a fertile field for evangelical recruitment.
“They are growing for two reasons,” said Wellman, a University of Washington professor and Presbyterian minister who as a young person was pulled into evangelical culture for a time.
“They’re growing because they’ve learned to use media to market their message,” he said. “And they’re growing because there’s a national resonance, with people looking for a more conservative ‘purpose-driven’ life.
“You can argue that modern liberalism and the new ‘knowledge economy’ is fairly vacant. There aren’t a lot of normative values percolating up. But for a lot of people (liberalism) is the Trojan horse for all that’s wrong (with society).”
What’s right
The issues around which evangelicals rally are gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research, which they say epitomize the corruption of contemporary culture.
Wellman sees Evangelicalism as based on four principles: personal conversion; belief in Christ’s death as the road to salvation; the conviction that the Bible is the infallible, “inerrant” word of God; and the need to convert others.
Evangelicals embrace contemporary culture and media to spread the word, he found. Churchgoers tend to eschew hymnals for the words to contemporary, pop, Christian music in Power Point presentations on giant screens.
They are led in song by a line-up of self-assured vocalists crooning close harmonies into cordless mics, backed up by electric guitar, drums and keyboard.
Pastors use entrepreneurial terms to describe how they “grow” congregations, how they “fill market niches.”
And many Northwesterners are responding to the message, Wellman says.
“Somehow you have to take seriously a growing group of evangelical cultural workers – incredibly motivated and hardworking, up and out of bed at 5:30 a.m.,” Wellman said. “They motivate young families and young people with their clear moral message.”
“And many people say, ‘thank God somebody’s standing up for what’s right.’’’
The power of that message to attract must be acknowledged, Wellman believes, by liberals – particularly as the remnants of the Enlightenment vision of a rational, humanist world with no religion, no war are shredded in the culture clash between the West, led by evangelical Christians, and a Middle East, caught up in deep ideological and religious regional conflict.
“There’s an arrogance in liberalism that’s catching up to them,” Wellman said. “I think what liberals take for granted – the personal autonomy, the personal liberty, the value of critical thought – these are in dispute.”
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Island author James Wellman and editor Patricia O’Connell Killen discuss their new book, “Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone,” at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at Eagle Harbor Books. A question and answer session and book signing follow the free event. Call 842-5332 for information.
