The issue of populism in the Evangelical ethos raises a concern for the need to differentiate between pop culture as folk culture and pop culture as mass culture. At its best, Evangelicalism seeks to preserve and foster folk culture and the critics of Evangelical piety need to recognize this strength, because it is through the ongoing propagation of folk culture that the disenchanting effects of modernity will be overcome ultimately. I say this knowing full well that the strong temptation within Evangelicalism is to traffic in the forms of mass culture, and it has succumbed to that temptation on more than one occasion.
By folk culture I mean to highlight what T. S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson understood to be the interrelated nature of family, region, and religion as elements that give rise to cultural forms. Folk culture stems from the people of a particular region and the familial and religious bonds that form the central threads of that region. Thus the songs, stories, festivals, and artistic expressions of the people in their particularity are at the roots of any folk culture. Folk culture is also the critical ground from which so much of the distinctive Evangelical contributions to life spring, including its tradition of hymn writing, preaching as story telling, the continuous use of testimony and biography from Edwards’ Life of David Brainerd to Amanda Berry Smith, and a variety of musical forms like gospel, blues, and even Jazz if one considers that the Wesleyan wing of evangelicalism has always encompassed African-American life in a way that the other wings have not. One cannot think of Evangelicalism apart from populism, and many criticisms of Evangelicalism by its loyal sons and daughters stem from their unease with populism.
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