Archive - Mar 11, 2008

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Conversation about "Faith in the Halls of Power" with Michael Lindsay - Part 2

Posted March 11, 2008 - 5:55pm by Will Hinton

Here is Part 2 of the conversation between Glenn Lucke and Michael Lindsay. Part 1 can be found here.

GL: In Chapter 1, Presidents and Politics, you write that Bill Clinton and Al Gore are Southern Baptist evangelicals. They beat incumbent President George H. W. Bush in 1992, but you also state that 63% of evangelicals voted for the mainline Episcopalian Bush against these two Southern Baptists.

Conversation about "Faith in the Halls of Power" with Michael Lindsay - Part 1

Posted March 11, 2008 - 3:09pm by Will Hinton

My good friend Glenn Lucke sent me this excellent interview that he has conducted over the past few months with noted sociologist Michael Lindsay (for the record, Glenn recently attained his Ph.D in Sociology from University of Virginia while working with James Davison Hunter; Glenn is also wicked smart). I read Michael's book back in the fall and while I wasn't blown away, the depth of research in the book is very impressive.

Below is Glenn's introduction along with the first half of the interview. I will post the second half of the interview tomorrow. I welcome all comments especially those from readers of Glenn's blog, Common Grounds Online.

Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University, recently published Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined America’s Elite. The endorsements for this book demonstrate that historians and sociologists of American religion are taking Lindsay and his work seriously.

For this project, Lindsay interviewed 360 evangelical elites in business, politics, academia and entertainment/media. While his labors in this regard are impressive (it is difficult to get access to many of these leaders), and have garnered most of the publicity that I’ve seen, a greater strength of the book in my estimation is the vast amount of history, sociology and political science scholarship that Lindsay read and synthesized. The breadth and depth of Lindsay’s work commend it to specialists.