Karen Swallow Prior's "Evangelical Imagination" Describes a Culture in Crisis

The Long Game

Karen Swallow Prior is the author of multiple books, including On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books. Her new book is called The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It's out August 8 from Brazos Press.

She is a professor of English literature and a popular speaker and writer. Karen's new book argues that "so much ... that what evangelicals uncritically assume is 'biblical' turns out to be simply Victorian." She explains here why the Victorian age, in particular, has had such a formative impact on American Christianity.

The book unpacks how numerous major themes, ideas and emphases in American evangelicalism -- such as revival, conversion, rapture, improvement, sentimentality, and empire -- have their roots in the culture and the literature of 19th century Britain.

Karen is a spirited conversation partner and a really joyful champion of reading and writing and language, and she has been evolving herself over the past several years in her views of American evangelicalism and faith itself, and we talk about that as well here.

Karen really does come from inside evangelicalism. She's taught at Liberty University. She's tried extremely hard to be positive and affirming of as much as she can. But she talks here about how there is a tendency inside conservative Christianity to discourage difficult questions or criticism that breeds a "gullibility" that she says provides endless grist for the "evangelical industrial mill."

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