The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.

Rather than seeking to distinguish “real” from “supposed” evangelicals, then, it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.

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.

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.

For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.

Roger Olson, a Baptist theologian who opposed the Calvinist insurgency, compared the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement to Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts seminar, observing that there was “a certain kind of personality that craves the comfort of absolute certainty as an escape from ambiguity and risk and they find it in religion or politics

Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

The most lasting influence of the Promise Keepers movement may well have been the market it spawned.

(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.)