Evangelicalism: The Next Generation Book

This book contains a clarifying argument that the real division in American in not liberal-evangelical but pietist-confessionalist. Hart sees evangelicals and liberals as two sides of the same pietist coin. Evangelicals and liberals differ in their emphasis, in that the former focus on faith as informing personal morality and family life while the latter focus on faith as a pathway to a more just and generous society. But they both emphasize individual experience, seek a zealous and activist response to faith, and see true faith as being "useful", that is, it helps one live better and makes the world a better place to live.

With striking similarities established between the evangelical and liberal camps, Hart then demonstrates how real opposition to this pietist outlook in American history is the confessionalist one. He uses examples from Presbyterian & Reformed denominations as well as Lutheran (LCMS). Confessionalists have more of a pilgrim outlook, identify the dominion of the church in a spiritual sphere distinct from the secular shared sphere of the general nation/society, focus on sin as the central concern of religion, emphasize the institutional church and the service of the ministry in the daily lives of believers, and look at faith as something mostly transmitted generation to generation rather than discovered individually in a dramatic and punctuated conversion experience.

Hart defends confessionalism against a charge of balkanization. He shows how confessional trademarks - theological intolerance, irrelevant liturgy, and a sectarian attitude - actually help limit the operative scope of religion and preserve a common sphere of operation outside religion for people of other faiths. Ultimately it is pietism (both evangelical and liberal), because is sees faith informing every aspect of life, that causes division by aspiring to social control and the Christian-izing of the nation.

A helpful book for understanding the drawbacks of the evangelical movement and the distinctions between a confessionalist view of Christianity and a merely "conservative-evangelical" one.