Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture |
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Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture
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by Heather Hendershot
Sales Rank: 926718
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List Price: $27.50
$27.50
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on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 266 pages
Published by: University Of Chicago Press April 1, 2004
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0226326799
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226326795
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
Weighs: 1.1 pounds
Product Description
In 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell outed Tinky-Winky, the purple character from TV's Teletubbies. Events such as this reinforced in many quarters the common idea that evangelicals are reactionary, out of touch, and just plain paranoid. But reducing evangelicals to such caricatures does not help us understand their true spiritual and political agendas and the means they use to advance them. Shaking the World for Jesus moves beyond sensationalism to consider how the evangelical movement has effectively targeted Americans—as both converts and consumers—since the 1970s.
Thousands of products promoting the Christian faith are sold to millions of consumers each year through the Web, mail order catalogs, and even national chains such as Kmart and Wal-Mart. Heather Hendershot explores in this book the vast industry of film, video, magazines, and kitsch that evangelicals use to spread their message. Focusing on the center of conservative evangelical culture—the white, middle-class Americans who can afford to buy "Christian lifestyle" products—she looks at the industrial history of evangelist media, the curious subtleties of the products themselves, and their success in the religious and secular marketplace.
To garner a wider audience, Hendershot argues, evangelicals have had to carefully temper their message. But in so doing, they have painted themselves into a corner. In the postwar years, evangelical media wore the message of salvation on its sleeve, but as the evangelical media industry has grown, many of its most popular products have been those with heavily diluted Christian messages. In the eyes of many followers, the evangelicals who purvey such products are sellouts—hucksters more interested in making money than spreading the word of God.
Working to understand evangelicalism rather than pass judgment on it, Shaking the World for Jesus offers a penetrating glimpse into a thriving religious phenomenon.
From the Inside Flap
In 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell outed Tinky-Winky, the purple character from TV's Teletubbies. Events such as this reinforced in many quarters the common idea that evangelicals are reactionary, out of touch, and just plain paranoid. But reducing evangelicals to such caricatures does not help us understand their true spiritual and political agendas and the means they use to advance them. Shaking the World for Jesus moves beyond sensationalism to consider how the evangelical movement has effectively targeted Americans—as both converts and consumers—since the 1970s.
Thousands of products promoting the Christian faith are sold to millions of consumers each year through the Web, mail order catalogs, and even national chains such as Kmart and Wal-Mart. Heather Hendershot explores in this book the vast industry of film, video, magazines, and kitsch that evangelicals use to spread their message. Focusing on the center of conservative evangelical culture—the white, middle-class Americans who can afford to buy "Christian lifestyle" products—she looks at the industrial history of evangelist media, the curious subtleties of the products themselves, and their success in the religious and secular marketplace.
To garner a wider audience, Hendershot argues, evangelicals have had to carefully temper their message. But in so doing, they have painted themselves into a corner. In the postwar years, evangelical media wore the message of salvation on its sleeve, but as the evangelical media industry has grown, many of its most popular products have been those with heavily diluted Christian messages. In the eyes of many followers, the evangelicals who purvey such products are sellouts—hucksters more interested in making money than spreading the word of God.
Working to understand evangelicalism rather than pass judgment on it, Shaking the World for Jesus offers a penetrating glimpse into a thriving religious phenomenon.
Reader Reviews
This book gets off to a pretty interesting start as Hendershot defines the world of evangelicals, who are much more numerous and integrated than fundamentalists, and describes their use of media to spread the word, either to each other or "non-born-agains." Unfortunately, this initially informative discourse soon becomes lost under extremely typical and unrewarding academic methods, in a book that claims to have interest for the general reader but has merely been constructed by a professor for the approval of a few other professors. (I can say this as an academic myself, coming from the same discipline as Hendershot.) All of the worst academic tendencies are here - excessive introductions and summaries, anemic cultural observations, name-dropping other obscure academics under a guise of corroborating evidence, disjointed chapters that likely originated as separate research projects, grand conclusions based on limited specific examples, and the obligatory application of obtuse theory (especially outdated feminism and cultural studies) to real-world phenomena. The low point of the book is a suspiciously reference-deficient passage in chapter 3 in which Hendershot constructs the supposed inner thoughts of Christian teenage girls who have eating disorders, after personally interviewing not a single person in that demographic. This and the following chapter, dealing with gender and sexuality respectively, are loaded with preconceived notions that are propped up after the fact by a supposedly detached application of moribund and leaden bodies of theory, that would merely impress the limited number of other people who also write about those theories (a problem of epidemic proportions in academic writing). The final academic blunder here is the inability, or unwillingness, of a professor to write outside of the stiff but accepted structure - a few hundred pages of specific examples wrapped up in an obligatory conclusion that is merely yet another summary. This research by Hendershot takes an interesting topic and spends a lot of her time and yours summarizing the obvious but providing little of cultural or political value to the interested layperson. [~doomsdayer520~]
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