Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Vision for the Center--Elite Refashioning of American Evangelicalism

本文旨在探讨美国福音主义的变化轮廓，考察其作为当代社会运动的发展，并特别关注社会领袖在这一宗教运动的重塑中的作用。福音派是美国宗教景观的中心部分，在过去的三十年里发生了变化。虽然有一些研究探讨了基层的福音运动，但很少有学者关注精英在美国福音主义中的作用。这篇论文假设一群精英——他们将被称为“福音派领袖”——代表着福音派的“隐藏之手”，自1976年以来，他们在改变运动的方向、范围和策略方面发挥了重要的、往往被低估的影响。这个项目试图了解一群福音派领袖是如何将这场运动从一个局限于美国社会经济底层的运动转变为一场在白宫和其他具有社会影响力的职位上的运动。通过对主要福音派线人的半结构化访谈，对福音派组织文件的内容分析，以及在几个福音派聚会上的参与者观察，该项目将采用多种调查方法来研究美国社会这一重要的、不断变化的方面。这项研究将涉及五个主要问题：1)识别福音派领袖并分析他们的宗教生活；2)主要福音派网络的相对凝聚力和两极化；3)向更广泛的公众受众证明运动的合法性；4)为运动提供资金，审视权力、财富和慈善事业之间的紧张关系；5)社会运动领导能力。本研究的广泛影响如下：这项研究将对有兴趣了解当代美国福音主义、精英的宗教生活、当代宗教运动与更广泛的社会世界互动的方式（特别是在最高权力和影响力层面）、文化偶像与共同身份矩阵中的普通公众之间的关系、精英及其网络在重塑制度边界和文化曲目中的作用的研究人员非常有用。

This dissertation aims to explore the changing contours of American evangelicalism, examining its development as a contemporary social movement and paying particular attention to the role of societal leaders in the refashioning of this religious movement. Evangelicalism is a central part of the American religious landscape, and it has changed over the last thirty years. While some studies have explored the evangelical movement at the grassroots level, little scholarly attention has been directed to the role of elites within American evangelicalism. This dissertation hypothesizes that a cohort of elites-who will be called "leading evangelicals"-represent the "hidden hand" of evangelicalism and have exerted significant, often understated influence in changing the movement's direction, scope, and strategies since 1976. This project seeks to understand how a cohort of leading evangelicals have transformed the movement from one confined to the lower socio-economic strata of American life to a movement at home in the White House and among other positions of societal influence. Through semi-structured interviews with leading evangelical informants, content analysis of evangelical organizations' documents, and participant-observation at several evangelical gatherings, this project will bring to bear multiple methods of inquiry to examine this important, changing aspect of American society. The proposed research will address five primary issues: 1) identification of leading evangelicals and an analysis of their religious lives; 2) relative cohesion and polarization of leading evangelical networks; 3) legitimating the movement to a wider public audience; 4) financing the movement and examining the tensions among issues of power, wealth, and philanthropy; and 5) social movement leadership. The broader impacts of this research are as follows: This research will be of useful to researchers interested in understanding contemporary U.S. evangelicalism, elites' religious lives, ways in which contemporary religious movements interact with the wider social world, particularly at the highest levels of power and influence, the relationships between cultural icons and the general public within the matrix of a shared identity, and the role of elites and their networks in refashioning institutional boundaries and cultural repertoires.