92 - Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory:
A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America
By Randall Balmer
New York, Oxford University Press, 1989. 246 pp. $19.95.

This is a wonderful book. Balmer, who teaches in the Religion Department at Columbia University, is a product of American evangelicalism. Fresh off a Princeton University Ph.D. with a published dissertation on Dutch religion and English culture in the middle colonies, Balmer turned his attention to the ferment and fragmentation in contemporary American evangelicalism.

Convinced that the popular conceptions of evangelicalism were distorted by a focus on electronic church preachers and highly public evangelical leaders, Balmer set out on a cross-country trip to discover the heart of American evangelicalism. He did so as a participant observer, and his book is a beautifully-written portrait of the genius and limitations of American evangelicalism. After reading the book, one knows that this is about religion, and it is religion as it is lived and felt. The description comes from a person of faith, who has a sympathetic ear and a discerning mind.

Balmer weaves what he calls "the patchwork quilt of American evangelicalism" in a series of chapters limning evangelicals in their own settings. The range is fascinating-Jesus people in California, classes at Dallas Theological Seminary, evangelical filmmaker Donald Thompson, Brother Max-"the Phoenix prophet," teenagers at a fundamentalist church camp in the Adirondacks, campaign workers for Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp in Iowa and New Hampshire, John Perkins' Mississippi mission, the stupendous Christian Booksellers Association meeting, Episcopal Indians in North Dakota, a Florida camp meeting, and an Oregon evangelical commune.

Balmer knows how to listen and knows what to record. His own judgments are rarely intrusive. Even when it is clear that he finds something repulsive, for example, the commercialism of the Christian Booksellers Association or the sham of faith-healer Brother Max, his judgments are mixed with an empathy for those whose lives are both liberated and trapped by a piety he cannot fully share.

Because Balmer was nurtured by this evangelical subculture and now stands both within and outside it, he captures in himself the double-bind of evangelical piety. On the one hand, this vibrant expression of Protestantism with its emphasis on individual sin and redemption has been and remains a powerful way for people to deal with the emptiness of modern life. On the other hand, that same emphasis upon sin all too frequently carries with it a moralism and legalism that impose another awesome burden. Balmer is also sharply critical of the consumer and

93 - Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America

success mentality that runs through so much of American evangelicalism; here is a spiritual subculture that fervently feeds on the materialism of the larger culture.

But that may be snide and unfair. From Mencken on, we have heard artfully-crafted condescending critiques of an evangelicalism that is easy to censure and less easy to explain and understand. For the many who have been nurtured by its piety and for those who find it incomprehensible, Balmer's book is a travelogue that will bring new experience and new insight into an enduring part of religious America.

John M. Mulder
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky