Religion reporter Wicker (formerly of the Dallas Morning News
and author of Lily Dale
) proffers a tendentious, confused book about the alleged demise of conservative evangelicalism.She makes a few lucid points, as when she deftly takes apart the many competing statistics about how many Americans are evangelical.But overall the book has a shrill feel, thanks to the regular use of terms like “threat” and “death knell.”Some of the chapters, which seem like filler, are journalistic accounts of aspects of evangelical life—e.g., a portrait of a grieving widow who says she wouldn’t give up Jesus to have her husband back—and are not closely related to the overarching argument.Wicker argues that some of the “threats” to evangelicalism come from evangelical institutions themselves.For example, she asserts that megachurches carry a lot of debt—a fascinating claim that should be bolstered by more rigorous research and source citation. However, merely establishing that megachurches are “vulnerable” because they cater to the tastes of boomers and depend on the personality of their leaders doesn’t tell us that evangelicalism is dying; it just suggests that evangelicalism, ever protean, will once again change.(May)
