Lindsay wins Jablin Award for Work on Evangelicals and Public Leaders

Franz Brotzen
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Lindsay wins Jablin Award for Work on Evangelicals and Public Leaders

Rice University Assistant Professor of Sociology D. Michael Lindsay has won the Jablin Dissertation Award for his work on the rise of U.S. evangelicals within the nation’s corridors of power.

Lindsay has spent the last three years studying evangelical elites and their rise to power in the United States. He interviewed more than 350 evangelicals in politics, business and cultural fields in an effort to determine how this religious movement has been able to wield so much power in a relatively short span of time.

While many observers have written about the growing clout of evangelicals in the United States, Lindsay said no one has attempted a systematic study of the phenomenon.

Lindsay’s work is an effort to trace patterns across sectors. He found that two competing theories – that power in American society is united and that it is dispersed – both apply to evangelicals in the U.S. ”Religion provides cohesive power,” Lindsay said, citing ties between evangelicals in Hollywood and evangelicals in Washington. ”But there is no one unified plan among evangelicals,” he added. ”Power is widely dispersed, even in the White House.”

Still, the rise of evangelicals has been impressive. Forty percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelicals – roughly the same percentage as a generation ago. But the profile of evangelicals has risen dramatically over that time from a mainly rural, less-educated, lower middle-class part of the population to positions of economic and political leadership.

Lindsay’s research indicated evangelicals ”have marshaled their resources across institutional sectors” in a way that has helped them achieve power and status surprisingly quickly.

In addition, Lindsay found many evangelicals converted in midlife. ”Fifty-seven percent of the people interviewed had significant religious experiences after age 17,” he said. This coming to their faith during adulthood may have made them more willing to devote money to the cause and spread the word, he added.

Lindsay, who is also assistant director of Rice’s Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life (CORRUL), will receive the Jablin Award Nov. 4 in Chicago at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association. The award is sponsored by the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.

Dr. Joanne Ciulla, a professor at The University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies, said Lindsay’s work ”was distinctive because of the sheer amount of research done and because it lucidly documents how religious leaders gained power and transformed debate about social and public policies in this country.”

To find out more about the Jablin Award, please go to: http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/leadership/news/jablinaward06.htm.