How Imagination Makes a Community
An interview with Karen Swallow Prior
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Karen Swallow Prior
Karen Swallow Prior; reader, award-winning writer, and professor, recently published another book, The Evangelical Imagination. This new text digs deep into the origins of the Evangelical movement, its transatlantic move, and its deep impact on the formation of America. As an Evangelical herself, Prior has a genuine interest in the history of this movement, and concern for helping form its future. In this interview, an old student and long-time friend, Lauren Lund, a professor and pastoral counselor, discusses the book, and life in general, with Dr. Karen Swallow Prior.
Lauren Lund: First of all, how are you!? What is something you are enjoying about life right now?
Karen Swallow Prior: I’m doing great. Though I’ve recently been through a rough patch, I have been doing a lot of traveling and speaking, and these speaking opportunities are becoming like my new classroom. I’m also enjoying writing my newsletter, it is rewarding.
LL: Even more importantly, how are your dogs?
KSP: The dogs are good. Since the pandemic, really, they have been spoiled with always having someone at home with them. They are happy to have me home more.
LL: I am feeling cautious about asking questions regarding your most recent work because it seems to me like a masterpiece. The Evangelical Imagination pulls together so much of your life (and life work). You even note within the pages that it’s your testimony of sorts. Can you expound?
KSP: Well, as I write in my chapter on Testimony, Evangelicalism usually views “testimony” as, simply, your “salvation story”—limiting it to that one specific moment. Though one’s testimony does (or can) begin there, it should be ongoing. So, this book and what I wrote is certainly about my ongoing growth and sanctification and awakening. I knew much of the history that is included in this book through my teaching and my work, but in writing this book, I went through a learning process concerning much that I didn’t know.
LL: One thing I noticed right away in this book is the tone which is truth spoken in love. You make a comparison between Evangelicalism to a house in need of (and worthy of repair). How present is both the compassion and the correction! I know this is characteristic of who you are as a person, because I have experienced your genuine, loving, correction as your student and your friend—so often not even knowing that I was being corrected while we were speaking or spending time together.
And in this text, you are not shy about approaching and pointing out the “rotten joists” lying within “the house of American Evangelicalism.” Was your loving tone organic?
KSP: Well, yes; I care deeply about the Evangelical movement because I am an Evangelical. And I care about loving correction because I have seen Evangelicalism’s failures that have been made manifest in many of my student’s lives, first of all, and increasingly in the broader culture, too. However, when I started thinking about this book in 2018, my intentions were to write a book that was more academic and historical. I didn’t know that it would end up being so personal.
LL: Did you have to revise to work on the tone at all? I know you were experiencing some of your own challenges within the Evangelical world while writing that may have made it more difficult?
KSP: Yes, you are right. There were certainly failures of the Evangelical house that were made manifest in my own life while I was writing this. It grew more challenging to keep this loving tone as the topics increased in personal application, and, at times, I did have to be deliberate about maintaining the balanced posture of loving correction I started with.
In her new newsletter mentioned above, Prior writes about the recent loss of a beloved job, new feelings about facing unemployment for the first time, and the harassment that got her to this place:
“Since 2015, I have been publicly slandered, harassed, and trolled by a handful of pastors in my denomination. One of these men has since been arrested for charges related to drug abuse and domestic violence. Another—who declaimed me by name from the floor of a national convention—was later arrested for domestic assault. Another is a self-admitted wife abuser who has merely changed the targets of his abuse and called it repentance. At this point, I’ve stopped counting. Abusers are going to abuse. No way around that. My abuse is so little compared to what too many have gone through. [...] As I meme I saw the other day put it, “God has removed you from a table where you used to sit … in order to save you from a host that was serving you poison.” I am going to work on getting a lot of things back. But, mainly, I am going to work on getting my attention back. On directing my devotion to things more worthy of it.”
LL: You’ve always cared about the vulnerable—people, animals, the abused—it’s one of the things I most admire about you. I sense that you’ve grown even more as a compassionate advocate since your accident. Is that the case?
KSP: I have grown in this area; I did not know about the bodily responses to trauma and triggers. I had read about this, but had not experienced it for myself. By the way, as a side note, it’s incredible to me, how I realize now, how many movies have scenes of people getting hit by cars! My body notices it in a new way. The accident helped me to understand what trauma is and what triggers are, including the types and the levels of trauma. My accident helped me to be more understanding in this area and made me see how trauma has to be processed emotionally, mentally, bodily. It’s difficult work. So, I certainly grew in understanding.
LL: I notice the noise around me on social media and in society in general, seems to include a new focus as of late: crises of the church (rather than crises of faith). Why stay [in the Evangelical church]?
KSP: It’s easier to run. It is always easier to tear down than it is to reconstruct. There is reason to stay in the faith and that is Jesus. We can cling to Jesus in all of the rubble. Some people still need to find Jesus underneath all of the rubble. When we find Jesus, we need to stay with Him and to abide in Him. We need to abide in Jesus, and everything else will follow as it should. And we can trust Him as we give people time and grace to figure out that the rubble will all fall into place.
LL: I’d like to highlight a theme in your book that was deeply impactful to me, and that is the idea woven throughout that Victorian does not always equal Biblical. Why is this equation so liberating to me?
KSP: [Much laughter comes from Dr. Prior, who knows of my benignly rebellious nature, and who also knows that I’m covered in garden-themed tattoos and have bright purple hair.] People often point to the 1950’s and the “Leave it to Beaver,” type of ideas and kind of camp out there, but even those ideals come from Victorianism. Before Victorianism, there were not these rigid gender roles or this obsession with sticking to ideal images of men and women that we saw in the 1950’s and see returning today. Let’s take Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example; they display more of an ease and delight with men and women and their differences, their strengths, their abilities. There was not so much anxiety about transgressing strict gender roles and rules that we see in Victorianism, and by extension, Evangelicalism.
LL: You say that “examination is an act of love.” We’ve come a long way since the book of Acts and the beginning of the church. Wouldn’t it be foolish to think the church hasn’t needed multiple revisions and corrections along the way? That is what Paul was engaging in in his letters: loving examination of his culture and the church. Yet many have weaponized his examinations. For example, many people who come to me for pastoral counseling bring church hurt and religious abuse that, much of the time, stems from someone who was upholding a Victorian+Evangelical ideal. What would you say to the people that have been hurt?
KSP: We interpret and apply in community, and our community is not complete. No community is. A perfect community doesn’t exist. We emphasize what we want to emphasize and we leave out what we want to leave out. As best we can, we need to understand the whole of scripture and in wider communities; talking to people who are different from us, from different backgrounds and life experiences, is important. We [white evangelicals] have been a majority power for a long time. From this place [of power] it’s easy to NOT understand that your assumptions are assumptions.People in power need to examine their assumptions in a way in which people on the margins don’t have that luxury/curse. However, it can be harder for people who are used to power to examine their assumptions and beliefs because theirs is the default position
LL: How does the church engage in the work you’ve implied in your new book?
KSP: How do we do the work? Well, the first step is to recognize that work needs to be done. Awareness is the first step to correcting the fact that we have a lot of assumptions. Second, we need to do this work in community! We need to have wider discussions. We also need to look for the gaps between our understandings and others' understandings and work to come to healthier conclusions. We should also note that this work [of revision in the Evangelical movement] is ongoing, and this work is going on! It’s going on. The ground is shifting beneath us and it’s hard, and painful, and disorienting, but it’s actually good. It’s necessary. It’s a mercy, really. God is helping us to see what we’ve needed to see; we are seeing what needs to be repaired.
LL: Yes, the ground is shifting, and it is hard! One thing I like to tell my care-receivers is that Jesus is bigger than our trauma.
KSP: Oh, yes; I like that. Well, that about sums it up. I’m going to hang on to that.
LL: I’ll hang on to it with you.
Lauren Lund
Professor & Pastoral Counselor
Lauren is a wife, a mother of three, and a dedicated Professor of English. She has been published in Patheos and Mothering Beyond Expectations, and also works as a pastoral counselor. What did you think of this interview? Share your thoughts with a comment!
New Releases: Things we’re excited about at Ekstasis
In this book, Karen Swallow Prior examines evangelical history, both good and bad. By analyzing the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded evangelicalism, she unpacks some of the movement's most deeply held concepts, ideas, values, and practices to consider what is Christian rather than merely cultural. The result is a clearer path forward for evangelicals amid their current identity crisis—and insight for others who want a deeper understanding of what the term "evangelical" means today.
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The work of Milena Kling, Designer Of Processes, Curator Of Atmospheres. Milena Kling‘s practice seamlessly blends the work of a designer, a researcher, a scientist, and a curator. Inspired by her memories, the beauty of nature, and the results of material-based research, she creates delicate objects made of glass. To learn more about Kling’s creations and her multi-layered process, Ignant visited her showroom in Berlin.
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John Mark Comer and Tyler Staton are two who are revisiting the ways of Jesus. Practicing the Way is a website that has come out of that. It clears a lot of the murkiness.
I am wondering if there are male commentators who also occupy the space the Karen has described - interrogating our assumptions. David Brooks certainly - but he writes about three women. So many articles I read in this venue are by women. The men appear either to be the bullies or are rather meekly residing in the background. Exactly what is the nature of the divide between men and women in white evangelical Christianity? Jack