- Genre:religion
- Sub-genre:Religion, Politics & State
- Language:English
- Pages:464
- Paperback ISBN:9798350981742
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Book details
Overview
Who’d have thunk that Seattle Pacific University, a conservative Free Methodist chartered school, was actually a radical progressive community and institution early on in its history?
SPU began as a fledgling Seminary in 1891. A local Norwegian immigrant seething with pre-millenarian zeal donated five acres of his own land for a site. This followed by an additional gift from an odd character named Hiram Pease, a local junk collector and real estate investor. Migrating west to get away from a wealthy beer magnate father, he brought with him various dietary and other ascetic concerns and obsessions that he’d gleaned from matriculation at the notorious Battle Creek Sanitarium and college in Michigan, one of whose directors, John Harvey Kellogg, went on to Corn Flakes fame. An enthusiastic convert, Pease galvanized fellow board of trustees members of the budding Seattle Seminary into institutionalizing his often esoteric vision and program. Upon his death in 1919, he had contributed nearly $65,000 to the school, an enormous sum.
To the surprise of most, although SPU began as a training ground for Free Methodist ministers and missionaries and later evolved into a sectarian college, populism and progressivism thrived on campus. Throughout the first few decades a radical socialist feminist served as its most dominant faculty member, gaining a national reputation. The Seminary’s first graduate railed against the upper classes, decrying “palaces of luxury.” Articles extolling progressive causes and celebrating the passage of Washington State suffrage and labor legislation laws appeared routinely in the campus newspaper and yearbooks. What is more, along with support for the usual temperance issues and campaigns (aimed primarily at severing the liquor/poverty connection), they sought replacing the “disorder” of capitalism with “a Christian economic order.” “Egalitarianism and prohibitionism, social reform and personal piety” went hand in hand during this period of Anna Louise Strong and the Seattle General Strike.
How things have changed. The greater bulk of the study takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of this transformation. What eventually emerges over the last half-century or so can best be characterized as “evangelical apartheid,” a cultural logic examined at great length in the larger ethnography portion of the study. Readers familiar only with media accounts of the “Religious Right” need hold on to their hats as we explore the alternative universe of today’s American evangelicalism.
All told, what has this small evangelical college community got to tell us about evangelicalism and American life and politics? What’s it got to do with so-called American exceptionalism. Luigi Barzini once wrote of his fellow Italians that they were “alone in the world” and later that Americans were also similarly set apart. But he had no idea about these evangelicals, for they’re an altogether different breed of animal—uniquely American, found nowhere else in the modern world.
And here’s why.
Description
In Paradise Joe's a rogue cultural sociologist demonstrates how evangelicalism came to occupy such a large portion of the ideological heart of American society and politics. He transforms what might have been a conventional academic case study into an entertaining, jargon-free tale of one small Christian college community, an historical and contemporary ethnographic account filled with memorable local and national characters, all the while gleaning from it the larger meaning and significance of evangelicalism in American life.
Why has evangelicalism made a progressive, European-style social democracy—and universal healthcare—a virtual impossibility? Why the corrosive distrust of government and science, the malingering legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the legal and economic inequality, the persistent urban/rural antagonisms? In sum, why are we so different from our closest European ancestors and kin? Paradise Joe's takes these and other daunting questions head on. Observe here the crazy old aunt of evangelicalism dragged down from the attic and cast out into the open, exposed to the light of day for the first time.
