Evangelicals Revisited

My department chair warned me against writing the book. He said it would be professional suicide. I was an assistant professor at Columbia University in the mid-1980s, just a couple of years out of graduate school. As I was completing revisions on my dissertation, preparing it for publication, the televangelist scandals broke. It was great fun, I confess. Jim Bakker, founder of the PTL network (for “Praise the Lord” or, as the wags said, “Pass the Loot”), had a sexual tryst with — you can’t make this up — a church secretary from Long Island and then used contributions from the faithful to cover up the affair. Jimmy Swaggart, another televangelist, who had criticized Bakker as a “pretty boy preacher,” was visiting Louisiana motel rooms for voyeuristic liaisons with a prostitute. And Oral Roberts declared that God had, in effect, taken him hostage and would “call me home” unless God’s people ponied up several million dollars.

Americans were transfixed by these glimpses into the world of evangelicalism. Time and Newsweek did cover stories, and Ted Koppel’s interview of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on Nightline attracted the program’s largest audience ever. But as the scandals wore on, I became increasingly impatient with the tone of the media coverage. The media seemed to assume that all evangelicals in America were either gullible or the moral equivalent of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart — or both.

As someone who grew up evangelical and who was also a student of American religious history, I felt I could offer a different, more textured perspective from the one peddled on television and in the press. I’d long been enamored of the genre of American travel literature — Travels with Charley, Blue Highways — so I cooked up this crazy idea that I would travel across the country and write about evangelicalism at the grass roots, far away from the megachurches and the studios of the televangelists.

This was the idea that my department chair warned would jettison my professorial career. In fairness, I had little to lose. Columbia in the 1980s had a cynical policy of hiring assistant professors on a tenure track and then simultaneously informing them that they stood no chance whatsoever of winning tenure. I was part of that cohort. I was assured over and over that I would never — never!—be tenured at Columbia University. As they say in the Bronx, fuggedabboutit.

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