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    Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture
    Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture
    Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture
    Ebook250 pages6 hours

    Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture

    By Heather Hendershot

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    About this ebook

    In 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell outed Tinky-Winky, the purple character from TV's Teletubbies. Events such as this reinforced in many quarters the common idea that evangelicals are reactionary, out of touch, and just plain paranoid. But reducing evangelicals to such caricatures does not help us understand their true spiritual and political agendas and the means they use to advance them. Shaking the World for Jesus moves beyond sensationalism to consider how the evangelical movement has effectively targeted Americans—as both converts and consumers—since the 1970s.

    Thousands of products promoting the Christian faith are sold to millions of consumers each year through the Web, mail order catalogs, and even national chains such as Kmart and Wal-Mart. Heather Hendershot explores in this book the vast industry of film, video, magazines, and kitsch that evangelicals use to spread their message. Focusing on the center of conservative evangelical culture—the white, middle-class Americans who can afford to buy "Christian lifestyle" products—she examines the industrial history of evangelist media, the curious subtleties of the products themselves, and their success in the religious and secular marketplace.

    To garner a wider audience, Hendershot argues, evangelicals have had to carefully temper their message. But in so doing, they have painted themselves into a corner. In the postwar years, evangelical media wore the message of salvation on its sleeve, but as the evangelical media industry has grown, many of its most popular products have been those with heavily diluted Christian messages. In the eyes of many followers, the evangelicals who purvey such products are sellouts—hucksters more interested in making money than spreading the word of God.

    Working to understand evangelicalism rather than pass judgment on it, Shaking the World for Jesus offers a penetrating glimpse into a thriving religious phenomenon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226326801
    Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture
    Author

    Heather Hendershot

    Heather Hendershot is professor of film and media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She is the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest.

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    • 3/5
      The author takes a look at the ways in which the evangelical Christian culture has begun to take advantage of mass media and marketing to spread their message beyond the folks in the pews. Not quite my style of writing, but still interesting and relevant.
    • 3/5
      The author takes a look at the ways in which the evangelical Christian culture has begun to take advantage of mass media and marketing to spread their message beyond the folks in the pews. Not quite my style of writing, but still interesting and relevant.

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