Download Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism AudioBook Free
Evangelical Christianity is a paradox. Evangelicals are radically individualist, but specialized in community and family. They believe in the transformative electricity of a personal romance with God, but are cautious with religious enthusiasm. These are deeply skeptical of secular reason, but wanting to find scientific substantiation that the Bible is true. On this groundbreaking history of modern American evangelicalism, Molly Worthen argues that these contradictions will be the products of a crisis of authority that lies in the centre of the faith. Evangelicals have never had an individual authority to guide them through these dilemmas or settle the problematic question of what the Bible actually means. Worthen chronicles the ideological warfare, institutional discord, and clashes between modern experts and maverick disciples that lurk behind the more familiar narrative of the climb of the Christian Right. The result is an ambitious intellectual history that weaves along reports from all corners of the evangelical world to make clear the ideas and personalities - the scholarly ambitions and anti-intellectual impulses - which have made evangelicalism a cultural and political power. In Apostles of Reason, Worthen recasts American evangelicalism as a movement defined not by distributed doctrines or politics, but by the problem of reconciling mind knowledge and heart and soul religion in an progressively more secular America. She implies that understanding the climb of the Christian Right in simply political terms, because so many scholars have done, misses the heart and soul of the story. The culture wars of the later 20th century surfaced not only from the struggle between spiritual conservatives and secular liberals, but also from the civil conflict within evangelicalism itself - a challenge over how to uphold the instructions of both faith and reason, and how finally to lead the nation back onto the path of righteousness.
