Not long after I finished The Unlikely Disciple, a friend sent me the link to this book, In the Land of Believers. Here the author goes undercover to Falwell's church, Thomas Road Church. It sounds like an interesting book, but I bet that the author was rather bummed when The Unlikely Disciple came out first.
Maybe I'll down to Liberty/ Thomas Road and write a book about people writing undercover books there.
If nothing else, this book highlights that when people want to study Evangelicals, they often pick more culturally extreme expressions of it, such as Liberty U or the films Jesus Camp or Friend of Jesus.
2 comments:
Liberty U may be extreme, but it's Falwell, and Falwell is one of the best known Evangelicals. And he's big not just among outsiders looking for extremes; he's big among Evangelicals, no? It's not as though most of the people at Thomas Road are really undercover journalists (the way that half the people at communist meetings in the fifties were probably FBI agents).
Why don't write a book called Ordinary Evangelicals?
Hey Jay,
I can understand why Falwell is/was focused on, but it's worth realizing that it's an extreme case.
Good idea for the book, but it's already been done. Christian Smith's book: Christian America.
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