Sociologist Lindsay wins award for work on evangelicals

Sociologist Lindsay wins award for work on evangelicals

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Rice University Assistant Professor of Sociology  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 the relatively short span of 30 years.

LINDSAY

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. ”Elites are often written about, but rarely studied,” he said.

”Michael Lindsay is one of the fastest-rising stars in the study of religion, and his study of elites is unprecedented,” said Michael Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and director of Rice’s Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life (CORRUL). ”This line of research will yield many fruitful outcomes, and it will be closely watched in the years ahead.”

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 might have made them more willing to devote money to the cause and spread the word, he added.

Lindsay developed three criteria for defining evangelicals: belief in the importance of the Bible; belief in a personal relationship with God through Jesus; and what he called ”an activist approach to faith,” meaning that faith makes a difference in how one runs one’s life.

Lindsay, who is assistant director of CORRUL, received 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.

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.”

Lindsay said in the process of studying evangelicals, he worked for a long time to build individual relationships with the people he interviewed. ”I feel confident I’ve done as much as possible to give a fair and balanced perspective” on evangelical elites, he said. ”It is neither an apology nor a polemic. I hope it sheds light on this important aspect of American life with the clarity that can come only from rigorous research.”