James K. Wellman

Review: http://www.booksandculture.com/site/utilities/print.html?id=90935

"Who were these dangerous fundamentalists who smoked cigars, indulged in French cuisine, and who were apparently determined to take over downtown Moscow?" Haha!! I'll bet I have a good guess...

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I didn't find the book to live up quite to the B&C review's promise. As a presentation of the respective moral worldviews of liberal and evangelical Christians in the Pacific Northwest, and how the respective groups' views on Jesus Christ, the Bible, ritual, prayer, evangelism and missions, and political issues are logically consistent with those worldviews, it's pretty good. Wellman doesn't conceal his self-identity as a liberal Protestant, but he succeeds fairly well at letting his evangelical subjects express their views and appreciating the nuance therein. He also has some interesting ideas on why evangelical churches in the PNW are thriving and most liberal churches are not, and how this, too, is consistent with the respective moral worldviews -- basically, evangelicals have an unwaveringly "entrepreneurial" approach to the faith, by which he means a commitment to reproducing the faith in their children, their communities, and the world, whereas most of the liberals he interviewed were, at best, ambivalent about sharing their faith and growing their churches.

I felt the depth of analysis was a little lacking in places. I don't think Wellman considers himself a theologian or historian, but, especially given that he's an ordained Presbyterian minister, his few remarks on the Reformed subset of evangelicalism were confusing: "the Christian Reformed movement [sic?]...is theologically and socially less conservative" than the churches profiled in the book. Granted, it's a little bit out of the evangelical mainstream, but "less conservative"? Really?

Of course, readers of various backgrounds would probably have similar critiques and nuances to suggest. For the most part, I'd still recommend this, particularly to Christians who want to get a handle on how the "other side" thinks. I certainly found it reflective of my experience as an evangelical trained in predominantly liberal environments. Though I also found it depressing, as it confirmed that there's little common ground...it's so difficult to communicate with Christians whose presuppositions are so opposite your own, no matter how much you'd like to.… (más)

This book is a survey of Christian cultures as they have adapted themselves to the relatively unchurched and secularised Pacific north-western corner of the USA: it tries to be sympathetic to both 'evangelical' and 'liberal' expressions of Christianity, and takes seriously the self-interpretation of both tendencies as well as a careful analysis of them from outside: it examines morality, belief, organisation, outreach, and politics within a framework of a clearly articulated methodology; and it is gracious towards both tendencies in a way which is anti-polemical. To anyone familiar with the culture wars as they work themselves through the churches, the basic condensation of liberalism into 'inclusiveness', and of evangelicalism into something like 'family values' will be recognisable, as is the contradistinction between nuanced questioning of precepts, on the one hand, and a definite sense of unambiguous clarity, on the other. But this survey is far from platitudinous: it unpacks the genuinely theological basis of liberal Christianity, and the epistemology of even quite conservative evangelicalism which is far from merely 'fundamentalist'; and it is insightful in its articulation of the extent to which the whole tension between the two is not necessarily about 'Truth' so much as rhetorical effectiveness: whoever defines the terms of the debate has the greater chance of success.
What IS successful? James Wellman shows that, whether liberal or evangelical, success follows what is joyful, dynamic, and 'engaged'; it is likely to be inter-generational, and rather than 'relevant', to be distinctive, and 'real'. Liberal Christianity comes out of this survey as a place of refuge, maybe of safety, from religious 'bruisedness' - there are some nice images of the church as a place for 'recovering Christians', of a kind which I suspect most evangelicals can't even imagine: the book is clear, however, that a lot of successful evangelicalism is itself characterised by a recognition of the need to retract from bombast. Unsurprisingly, but dishearteningly, James Wellman diagnoses gay marriage as the single issue which defines the absolute distinction between the two, and he understands this to be irreconcileable. Maybe it is as well for us to have that spelt out so clearly and directly, rather than spend misplaced effort on a vision of conciliation which will not bear fruit. As a possibly unexpected side-note, he finds that neither party has any significantly greater success in recruiting from the unchurched than the other; and he is challenging in his observation that in so far as each is defined in terms of, or in response to the other, neither of them speaks a language which resonates very strongly beyond the confines of the church. It may hearten any Anglicans out there that it is in the Episcopal Church that he finds in some ways the most creative combination of institutional definition and openness to question; but it will not be lost on anyone that the Anglican consensus is perhaps the most fragile of all.… (más)