What’s Cultural and What’s Truly Christian? The Evangelical Crisis: Karen Swallow Prior and Matthew Barrett
Many of us have benefitted from evangelicalism and had our faith formed by it. However, evangelicalism these days is in a crisis mode. It has fallen prey to the constant lust for power and dominion, both politically and culturally. Evangelicalism’s emphasis on conversion and winning souls has turned into an enterprise focused more on getting more people in rather than on the message of the Gospel itself. In this episode, Matthew Barrett and Karen Swallow Prior take a hard look at the current state of evangelicalism. Karen Swallow Prior traces back the weaknesses of evangelicalism to the Victorian England, where evangelicalism began to flourish. She shows that many of our evangelical assumptions on mission and evangelism are influenced by the imperialism and colonialism of Victorian British empire and are not necessarily biblical. Karen Swallow Prior also shows how this Victorian assumption in evangelicalism was deepened when the American evangelists took on a modern consumer capitalist mindset. Barrett and Prior call on evangelicals to devote what we have accomplished, the Gospel we proclaim, the institutions we create, and the wealth we accumulate, completely to the Lord.
Karen Swallow Prior
Karen Swallow Prior, Ph.D., writes frequently on literature, culture, ethics, and ideas. Her writing appears at Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, Books and Culture and other places. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012), Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014), and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Literature (Brazos, 2018). Her academic focus is British literature, with a specialty in the eighteenth century.
Matthew Barrett
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