Were evangelicals embracing an increasingly militant faith in response to a new threat from the Islamic world? Or were they creating the perception of threat to justify their own militancy and enhance their own power, individually and collectively?

Twenty years after the publication of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Josh Harris acknowledged that he hadn’t really known what he was talking about. He asked his publisher for the book to be withdrawn. “When we try to overly control our own lives or overly control other people’s lives, I think we end up harming people,” he conceded.15

Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply as a response to fearful times; for conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat.

(The nuclear family structured around a male breadwinner was in fact of recent invention, arising in the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s; before then, multigenerational families relying on multiple contributors to the family economy had been the norm.)

The notion of “servant leadership” had originated in the business world. With the decline of production in the 1970s and 1980s, service work took over a larger share of the labor market, and servant leadership helped redefine masculine authority in a way that didn’t conflict with men’s role in a service economy.

Among complementarians, other doctrinal commitments seemed to pale in comparison to beliefs about gender, and ideas about male authority and the subordination of women increasingly came to distinguish “true evangelicals from pseudo evangelicals.”

Borrowing from modern advertising techniques, evangelical innovators crafted a generic, nonsectarian faith that privileged individuals’ “plain reading of the Bible” and championed a commitment to the pure, unadulterated “fundamentals” of the faith.

With a broader Christian market replacing denominational distribution channels, authors and publishers needed to tone down theological distinctives and instead offer books pitched to a broadly evangelical readership.

In 1954, Congress added the words “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the following year Eisenhower signed into law the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s currency.