Shards Of Identity (The Origins Of The Evangelical Movement During The Cold War, 1945-1981)

This book is an exploration of the origins of the American evangelical movement in the United States during the Cold War, specifically between 1945 and 1981. Amongst numerous other theories that already exist regarding the emergence of this religious and social movement, we have carried out this exploration through the theory of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman maintains that religious fundamentalisms emerge in the context of problems and questions of identity and its formation in our contemporary world. In Bauman’s estimation, our contemporary age militates against the formation of a personal identity and that fundamentalist religious systems have emerged to fill this void. In order to historically explore Bauman’s ideas, to see how his hypothesis might manifest itself, as well as drawing insight from conceptual history, gender studies, and cultural history, we have broken up our inquiry thematically, examining vital aspects of identity: speech, ideology, the faculty of action, contemporary religious forms, and human relations. In this study we have given, among other things, special attention to the questions of evangelicalism and its involvement in American politics during the Cold War. We have shown that the social and cultural separatism that is said to have characterized the evangelical movement is no longer tenable. And, finally, we have demonstrated a marked reorientation within American evangelicalism: a turning away from the eternal and toward the world.