John Woods in conversation with Karen Swallow Prior
Karen is a reader, writer, and professor. She is a popular speaker and author. She has written several books and is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019). Her writing has appeared on the Gospel Coalition website, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the First Things website and many other places.
John Woods spoke to her about her latest book The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis.
en: Karen, thank you for speaking to en. What prompted you to write this book?
KSP: First, as I write in the book, teaching Victorian literature in an evangelical context means that so many of my students would recognise literature, culture and ideas from that age and they would seem similar to the ideas, concepts, and values that they were raised with in the 20th century. The question arises – are these values concerning women, home, and the workplace Biblical or are they Victorian?
Secondly, I’m someone who is deeply committed to a Biblical worldview but has come to see that teaching the rational basis of our faith is just one part of what it means to have a robust faith. Just having the right answers and making the right applications does not change the heart and does not change the imagination. The formation that we need must be deeper and more holistic than simply the analysis and application we make through our Biblical worldview.
en: Your book has been compared to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind – do you see the comparisons? How does your book differ from Noll’s book?
KSP: Yes. Obviously, I am very influenced by his book and indebted to him, but I am attempting to go past that and say: ‘What is even deeper than this problem of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in evangelicalism?’
en: You use the image of a house that is in a poor state of repair … decay and decline has alarmed some evangelicals into action. Is there a danger of doing too little, too late – or to take superficial panic measures that do not really help?
KSP: I think that is a real danger. The question that I am being asked is: ‘If there is rottenness in the foundation or in other parts of the structure, can it be salvaged or is it too late?’
I am writing a book that is trying to take the good and separate it from the bad; throw out the bath water and not the baby! But I also know that history is long, and that there are movements that come along every few hundred years, and maybe a historian will come along and write that what follows this time period is a period in which something new emerged. I think that in the middle of this it is hard to tell but, as I say in the book, perhaps we need a new reformation.
en: How do you manage to move beyond these topics being discussed by high-minded people? How do we get to the roots of evangelicalism?
KSP: That is a good question. No one else has asked me that. I have been a teacher for decades and my solution to everything is to teach, but even my own teaching has been limited to the college and seminary classroom, which doesn’t hit everyone.
Yet I think that this is the long-term effort that does bear fruit. It needs to be all hands on deck; it needs to be pastors in the churches who are discipling and forming people better. It needs to be writers and thinkers in the public sphere who are offering different models, and neighbours talking to neighbours. I do think that the cracks and the fault lines are more and more obvious even to those who have been slow to see them, and I include myself in that. We need to speak up and stop being blind to the things that are in front of us. Things like sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, or cover-up of abuse, need to be addressed. There is the old Hollywood hashtag: ‘The time is up’. More of us are seeing that the time is up for some of these broken and rotten elements in the evangelical house.
en: You talk about evangelicalism being blindfolded, spun and disorientated. What practical steps can we take to reverse that trend?
KSP: I guess that offering practical steps is my weakness. I am good at diagnosis, but it is harder to offer the solution. I don’t think the solution is just one thing, or that change will happen overnight.
Whatever context we are in there are steps we can take. In our role on social media, we can refuse to participate in the passing on of disinformation, misinformation, and polarisation, and gently encourage those who participate in that to not do so.
It is speaking up in our churches and asking questions. There are respectful and loving ways to ask questions. Many of us have been silent, made assumptions and been too trusting. Accountability, whether on an individual or an institutional level, can begin with asking those questions and putting policies in place in our churches. We need to listen to others, especially those who might see what we do not see, and then speak up and be heard.
en: You are interested in teaching people to read. How can we do it?
KSP: Even the word ‘reading’ can mean so many things. In what some call a post-literate age, we can read, but we don’t read well. I like to draw a parallel between the onset of print culture and the invention of the printing press that brought about widespread literacy, but also brought about a lot of confusion and chaos.
Wrong ideas, heretical ideas and untruths were being circulated. There was a nervousness about getting the wrong ideas into the hands of the wrong people, so some people were burnt at the stake for those ideas.
In the digital age there is a parallel situation because we have so much information and we can read it, but we don’t know how to judge, analyse, and evaluate it well. So, it seems that we have reached a stage where we need to teach one another to interpret things better.
I love to model that by asking questions, like ‘What do you mean by this?’, because we use words in different ways. Being surrounded by so much information puts us in another form of the Dark Ages because we are trapped in it. We need to teach people to read and interpret well and model how to show grace when misunderstandings arise.
en: I was interested in your chapter on awaking and the connection with wokeness. How do you assist people to make connections where they might previously have not made them?
KSP: One of the premises of the book is that all language is metaphorical, and that is something that people either don’t realise or don’t think about the implication of. So, if we have a starting point that all language is metaphorical, then we can say ‘This word has a history’.
Making these connections with words like ‘awaking’ and ‘woke’ helps us to see how all connections work. Taking the history of the word ‘awakening’ in the Bible, in the history of evangelical awakenings, and then wokeness, shows us the importance of having a raised consciousness.
We may disagree with how it is applied, but it is a human experience that connects all of us in various ways. Yet we sever that connection when we turn the word into an insult. Making connections is reflecting the image of God in us, because that is what He has done; He has bridged the gap for us. We as Christians are called to the ministry of reconciliation. It is all about reconnecting what is broken with one another through Christ, but also in our thoughts and actions.
en: You suggest that a major part of the crisis of evangelicalism is a failure to listen carefully to the very Scriptures that are so revered by evangelicals; what practical steps can be taken to help remedy this situation?
KSP: One of the most practical steps is applying the way we read literature well to reading the Bible well. I think that a lot of Christians don’t appreciate how all literary texts reflect the way that the Bible works.
Of course, the Bible is God’s authoritative word and is inspired, but being skilful in reading and writing texts can help us read the Bible.
For example, reading Huckleberry Finn we encounter a character like Huck, who echoes the racist reflections of his society, but that does not make the whole book racist. We know that we do not interpret a part of the book away from the whole; we know that you are not supposed to do that with any text. Yet many people do this with the Bible, which is a huge text, longer than the longest novels in the English language. To read the Bible well we need to read each part in its entirety.
We need to understand each part in regard to its proportion and its repetition; all the things we apply when we are reading literary text. We can apply how we read the text of people’s lives. When people emphasise things, we know that it is important to them. We also know that people might say things earlier on in a conversation and then later in the conversation express it differently. Likewise, we understand the Old Testament in connection with the New Testament in a story that takes place over time.
en: How do we widen the discourse to help evangelicals who operate in different circles to listen to each other?
KSP: People must want to do that. There must be an awareness that we can benefit from that. Evangelicalism is a movement within Protestantism; this is part of what it means to be Protestant; we are all little popes. This is a great freedom but also a great responsibility.
We do not have one infallible person telling us what to believe, or how to interpret Scripture. We do that within our local communities and congregations. So there will be disagreements; but this is the beauty of what it means to be the church. We are aware that we do not have it 100% correct and have a desire to get as close to that as we can. The only way we can do that is listen to others in history, in different parts of the global context, and weigh all these things against Scripture under the direction of the Holy Spirit.
en: You make extensive use of Tolkien and Lewis, as did Fleming Routledge and Timothy Keller. Are there people writing today who are heirs of these giants?
KSP: The first person that comes to mind is Malcolm Guite, who is a poet in his own right, but also writes wonderful books of theology and imagination that are applied to life.
There is the visual artist Mako Fujimura, who is a world-renowned artist, but also writes wonderful books that explain his understanding of the Christian imagination in culture and the church context. Those are the first two that come to mind.
There is also a wonderful film coming out based on Carolyn Weber’s book Surprised by Oxford. Terrence Malick is a film maker (Tree of Life, A Hidden Life, etc.) who is deeply informed by Christian theology and produces beautiful films that are thoughtful and inviting. They are examples of people telling the Christian story well and with imagination.
en: What would you like your book to achieve?
KSP: I am hoping it will be a model for people to ask questions that they didn’t even know needed to be asked. Not just the ones in the book, but others that explore other metaphors, stories, and images. I want to urge people to explore other unexamined assumptions they have. We need to continue to examine the structures that are underneath our thoughts and beliefs, keeping the ones that are sound and removing and repairing the ones that are not.
en: If this book had a soundtrack, what would it be?
KSP: Johnny Cash’s rendition of Hurt, which I reference in the chapter on empire. That is the song I listened to over and over again as I was writing the book. It sealed, encouraged, and directed me because there is so much that we can lose, at least at a human level doing this interrogation and asking these questions, but there is so much more that we can gain. That’s kind of the message of this song.
en: I guess that is what your book is about; it is about seeing?
KSP: Being able to see and to recognise that there is a lot we are not seeing that we are blind to is very important. Eugene Peterson uses the metaphor of people living in a warehouse, the windows are dirty, so they are looking up at the ceiling, not even knowing there is a sky. That captures evangelicalism in this moment. We are in the warehouse and are not even aware of it. We need to have people who can clean the windows and point out to the sky.
en: Thank you, Karen, for speaking to en.
Here is a selection of extracts from Karen’s book, The Evangelical Imagination. I hope that this plate of nibbles whets your appetite for the whole feast:
A Rose by Any Other Name: Because of the way in which the word ‘evangelical’ has become connected with partisan politics in recent years, some are questioning whether the label has reached the end of its usefulness in the church, while others are choosing to reject the label altogether (p.39).
Evangelicalism, like America, is a product of the modern age, in addition to being a movement of the Spirit. It is, perhaps, a paradox that this ‘religion of the heart’ was born from the age of reason. Indeed, it reflected the spirit of the modern age, which, like evangelicalism itself, emphasized the ‘new and improved,’ individual experience, the authority of the written word, and the promise of progress (p.41).
Gaining our bearings requires us to first recognise that we have been oriented – much the way that the one who is ‘it’ is blindfolded, spun around, and left flailing. Only when the blindfold is removed will we see what direction we are facing, and only then can we decide which turns to take as we move forward. The metaphors, images, and stories we live by orient us. To recognise these metaphors, images, and stories – and to understand their power as part of the imagination we share – is to remove the blindfold and to see (p.44).
