Spiritual propositions: The American evangelical intelligentsia and the supernatural order

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3128; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4385/viewcontent/Spiritual_propositions_American_evangelical_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The spiritual geographies of the theological movement known as ‘evangelical Christianity’ are seldom taken seriously, especially among its intellectual elites and their critics. Typically conceived as a ‘conservative’ version of Protestant Christianity – the strand of Christian faith that historically broke with the Roman Catholic Church around the dawn of modernity – ‘evangelical’ Protestants tend to emphasize the literal interpretation of the Bible because its pages reveal the good news – the gospel, the evangel (the root of the word ‘evangelical’) – of salvation from an afterlife of damnation and a present experience of divine alienation through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, considered to be divinity in human form. Although such an understanding of the Christian Gospel emphasizes individual faith with few implications for institutional membership, what might be called ‘spiritual geographies’ are often taken in contrast to the ‘sacred archipelagos’ of evangelicalism’s seemingly organized structures, deep-pocketed networks, and scripted realities floating in a sea of secularity (Wilford 2012; Bartolini et al. 2017). However, I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that there are evangelical ways of unfolding spiritual geographies that transcend their institutional structures that have not yet been fully explored. In other words, there is a mismatch between the perceived institutional edifices of evangelical Protestantism and the individual spiritualities fostered by its doctrine, and my aim is to explore the spiritual geographies fostered by this disconnect.