Paradise Joe’s A Cultural Sociology of a Christian College Community: An Exploration into the Meaning and Significance of American Evangelicalism

The author argues that evangelical religion represents the ideological heart of American culture, in that the inherent logic of its religious ideas has underpinned (and/or buttressed) a good many aggressive promotions and defenses of American society, domestic and international, throughout our history. The evangelical worldview and ethos are grounded in two basic idioms: a dualistic vision cleaving the elements of society into neat, separate Christian and secular categories, and the "moral market" imperatives of an implicit individualistic system of eth-ics, the two merging to form a matrix of symbols and expectations--a cultural logic, if you will--which is then applied in the identification, apprehension, and evaluation of persons, objects, relationships, and societies. The first shares much with "natural" tribal or "pre-literate" religions and was present in the early Christian church and other Western religions; the second emerged from uniquely-American cultural developments. He then ranges beyond evangelicalism itself to claim that both occupy the centerpiece of a peculiarly American personality, that which most clearly distinguishes Americans and their society from our closest European social and cultural ancestors and kin; both reside at the heart of a slew of persistent internal "cultural contradictions."
These general observations emerged from the study of an actual evangelical academic community, Seattle Pacific University, located way out in the Pacific Northwest of America. The particular form and expression of these idioms in the day-to-day attitudes and behavior of its students and faculty offer valuable, highly-representative insights into the meaning and significance of evangelicalism in American life. Indeed, the subjects of the author's fieldwork prove as exotic at times to Western eyes as would the inhabitants of any tropical South Pacific island, and they receive as thoroughly anthropological an examination. All this captured and accounted for by an innovative, ground-breaking hybrid form of social science.
In a long appendix B, the author takes the sociology of religion to task for decades of bankrupt assumptions and research, decrying an apologetics that has corrupted traditional Weberian notions of value-free social science. Foremost among these biases is a seemingly universally-embraced guiding dogma which uncritically assumes that Christianity can only perform a positive role in any society; and that the so-called "godless" Scandinavian societies
—whose quality-of-life indicators put the war-of-all-against-all American social nightmare to shame—may be overlooked or dismissed as pseudo-socialistic sleights-of-hand. The author demonstrates that it is the decades- and centuries-long cultural vacuum of American society that has produced a plethora of existential social, economic, and cultural insecurities that evangelicalism thrives upon. In this regard, as Luigi Barzini once both lamented and celebrated about his fellow Italians, we Americans are very much "alone in the world."

Observe here the crazy old aunt of evangelicalism getting dragged down from the attic and cast out into the open, exposed to the light of day for the first time.

In a second extended bonus appendix for academicians, the author tacks his 95 theses of Paradise Joe's onto the Wittenberg door of a deeply compromised American sociology of religion.

Michael F. Sparks was a Searle Fellow at the University of Chicago, from which he received his phd. in sociology. Among his many mentors: Guenther Roth (at the University of Washington) and (due mainly to courses taken also in the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago) Edward Shils, Stephen Toulmin, and Marshall Sahlins. He spent years working at all levels of primary and secondary education, creating and contracting out his own version of Marie Clay's New Zealand Reading Recovery literacy program, co-creating a more diverse New Honor's Program for a Seattle middle school, and teaching college-level courses ("The Trial of Socrates," "Religion, Culture, & Society," and "Lincoln & The Civil War,") for senior citizens at the Lifetime Learning Center, classes attended by several retired local university professors, one of whom commented upon the "unusually high level" of discourse and instruction. The author competes in (and has won) local golf tournaments and performs covers, standards, and originals in a jazz/blues guitar duo.