I was an intern on my first overseas “mission” trip. To say I was a bit of an idealist, would be putting it…mildly? We were in Bangkok, Thailand, hosting English conversations in partnership with a local Thai Christian ministry. I didn’t know then that Stanley Hauerwas talks about Christian mission as something that tends to change those who “go” more than the people they are trying to “save”. What he means is that mission tends to expose us to the shock of God at work beyond our categories.
During the conversations, I would try to move towards the script for what we’d call a “gospel conversation”. Meaning: I’d try to move the conversation from American music or maybe Disney (both were popular topics) to Jesus. There were several variations of the script. I knew all the on-ramps. All the transfers between stations. Adapt, improvise, overcome, and—ideally but rarely—convert. Then a small interaction changed my life.
“My entire idea of Heaven was a metaphor drawn from the American dream, glossed with a few prooftexts from the book of Revelation.”
A generous Thai Christian pulled me aside, “you can’t say that.” Oh, say what? I asked. “Well, you keep talking about Heaven, about gold streets, and mansions” Sure, I said. (Any evangelism script always brought up the question “where are you going when you die?” — a question that assumed far too much of the other person. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Instead, I was getting ready to defend an evangelical vision of heaven as a suburban utopia.) “Well…” he paused “many Thai are Buddhist. Eternity is nothing but suffering. They aren’t convinced by gold streets or mansions. You are an American. You always believe eternity is something to look forward to. They don’t. You need to change your metaphors.” I was totally blindsided. Dr. Karen Swallow Prior’s latest book, Evangelical Imagination helps explain why.
Makato Fujimara, who also endorsed the book, has a phrase “change the metaphor, change the world.” His work is a witness to what is possible when we move from culture war to culture care. But this changing of the metaphor guard is a painful process. It requires dispossession of categories that give us certainty. When we lose or drop them, we open ourselves up to a profound sense of disorientation. But a diseased imagination is a terrible thing to live with too, as my experience with Thai Christians shows.
My whole picture of Heaven was a metaphor drawn from the American dream and glossed with a few prooftexts from the book of Revelation. It promised final fulfillment of the rampant American consumerism and materialism: an image of the kingdom of God that looked no different from American suburbs, just gated with gold.
But the thing is, I found this metaphor everywhere. I heard it in thousands of sermons from my childhood alongside countless evangelism training seminars. There are other metaphors too. “Culture war” comes to mind. It weaponizes the New Testament’s warfare language and reduces it to blind, self-righteous zeal. These and other metaphors, images, and the stories we tell are powerful. We assume them, which is dangerous. But where do they come from?
The Evangelical Imagination makes the case that much of what goes by “evangelical” values today originated some 200 odd years ago. What we call “evangelical” has its roots in what is “Victorian”.
The Evangelical Imagination makes the case that much of what goes by “evangelical” values today originated some 200 odd years ago. What we call “evangelical” has its roots in what is “Victorian”. That is, the metaphors, stories, and images that shape our imagination emerged under the rule of Queen Victoria. This is Prior’s primary claim, and one she can make as a respected literary scholar. To her credit, though it would be easy for her to attempt to speak as an authority across theology, history, and literature, she sticks to literary analysis and cites widely from adjacent fields.
Because of this, The Evangelical Imagination makes an excellent pairing with Historian Mark Noll’s classic The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. If Noll observes the scandal of the evangelical mind is a lack of intellectual rigor, Prior painstakingly traces how the evangelical imagination is overflowing with unexamined images, stories, and metaphors. Together, they make up an imagination which endlessly interprets and narrates the world around us.
Prior is not under the illusion that this imagination is healthy. She builds on and expands the work of Theologian Willie James Jennings who observed modern Christians in the West carry a “diseased social imagination.” Prior’s book is a survey of select metaphors (Empire, Rapture, and Conversion were some of my favorites) and examines them in the context of evangelical history set against the backdrop of modernity.
Novelist Graham Greene calls hate a “failure of imagination”. The white nationalist weaponization of “woke” in the culture wars is that sort of failure.
What Prior does—that is, where The Evangelical Imagination contributes to our moment—is put literary analysis in touch with the conversations of evangelical historiography, and holds out a hand for theologians who might want to engage.
One excellent specific example is Prior’s literary analysis of the word “woke” set in the context of the metaphor of white evangelical conversionism. What does it mean today that so many who claim to be “born again” are practicing an identity politics of white nationalism organized by their appropriation of “woke” to describe everything they oppose? The white nationalist appropriation and weaponization of “woke” for the political culture wars highlights the persistent racial tension that still determines much of American society and tragically the church in America.
Novelist Graham Greene calls hate a “failure of imagination”. The white nationalist weaponization of “woke” in the culture wars is that sort of failure. Prior reminds us the white nationalist appropriation of “woke” is actually devastation and destruction: “To destroy a metaphor is to destroy more than a word. It is to destroy a likeness seen and articulated by those made in God’s likeness. To allow a metaphor to dull is too dull, too, the perceptions that allow us to make, recognize, and weigh connections. Dulled perceptions create false intuitions, and flawed imaginations construct a distorted sense of reality.” I would use similar words to describe the form and function of conspiracy theory.
The Evangelical Imagination explores not just what evangelicals think but how. It pays attention not just to history, or doctrine, but to the images, stories, and metaphors which attend them. Prior helps us see that imagination is functioning even if we can’t describe it (or its distortion). This is actually a concept called “hypocognition” which Prior details in the first chapter, which also tackles the thorny question of “what is an evangelical?” That single chapter is worth the price of the book alone.
Prior’s main task, in her own words is to “tease out the elements of the evangelical social imaginary in such a way that those elements that are truly Christian can be better distinguished from those that are merely cultural.” Of course, this task of untangling will require more time and more pages than this book will allow. But it’s an important contribution.
I’ve just finished it, and I want to recommend it—widely—to anyone who—like me—grew up evangelical and have found yourself trading on empty metaphors to describe faith. Theology is human talk about God. But when human words fail, when metaphors mix or become diseased, we need books like this not to give us the answers but to guide us in the journey of learning how to speak of God again. In this way, we come to see ourselves a little better, along with the world in a way which reflects not just fact, but truth—particularly the truth of God’s love for us, and the world disclosed by the Word of Christ.
You can find the book at Brazos Press.
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