Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration, Conservative Christianity, and Religion's Presence of the Past

Abstract

“Exhibiting Evangelicalism” is a history of evangelical historical museums in the United States. It argues that conservative Protestant Christians in the United States developed practices for preserving and interpreting the past in public and deployed those practices toward varying theological, cultural, and political ends—an approach I term “evangelical heritage.” It further contends that evangelical heritage performed important work for its purveyors. Amid the boom in church attendance and religious affiliation after World War II, conservative Protestants deployed evangelical heritage to forge what they termed “neo-evangelicalism,” a rebranding of the old-time religion for postwar society. They also engaged evangelical heritage in their crusade to “win America for Christ,” convinced that an encounter with their tradition’s proud past could entice outsiders to convert to Christian faith. These elements never fully disappeared from the function of evangelical heritage. Even so, evangelical heritage did change over time. During the national bicentennial, for instance, evangelical heritage became a means by which neo-evangelicals, internally divided over matters of faith and politics, could project a united front by mapping their proud past onto the nation’s history. Such optimism did not last long. As the national consensus about the past shattered in the 1970s and 1980s, evangelical heritage morphed yet again. By the twenty-first century it had become a vehicle for nostalgia, immersing visitors in a mythic past that offered an imagined sense of comfort and reassurance amid conservative Protestants’ perceived loss of political and social influence. Evangelical heritage did not develop and evolve in a vacuum, however. From the start, it existed within and contributed to broader patterns of historical commemoration. In the postwar era, for instance, experiments in evangelical heritage intersected and overlapped with discourses and practices among bureaucrats, business leaders, social reformers, heritage professionals, and others regarding historic preservation, urban renewal, and the political purposes of civic memory. In the 1970s, neo-evangelical museum-makers helped to invent public history’s turn toward emotion, immersion, and experience as techniques through which to build visitors’ historical knowledge. As that trend became subject to intense internecine debate among public history professionals in the 1980s and 1990s, some conservative Protestant commemorators turned away from the mainstream of public history discourse. Instead, they embraced the theme park as a means of conveying ideological authority while retaining the trappings of the traditional museum as a way of courting intellectual authority—a trend that reached its apex at the turn of the twenty-first century.