Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:2 (Fall 2021)
Article: Sociology As Theology: The Deconstruction Of Power In (Post)Evangelical Scholarship
Author: Neil Shenvi

Eikon 3.2 (Fall 2021) p. 46

Sociology As Theology: The Deconstruction Of Power In (Post)Evangelical Scholarship

Neil Shenvi

Neil Shenvi has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry from UC Berkeley and an A.B. in Chemistry from Princeton. He has published at The Gospel Coalition, Themelios, Eikon, and the Journal of Christian Legal Thought and has been interviewed by Allie Beth Stuckey, Summer Jaeger, Greg Koukl, Frank Turek, Alisa Childers, Sean McDowell, and Mike Winger. He homeschools his four children through Classical Conversations and can be found on Twitter at @NeilShenvi. His writing on critical theory from a Christian worldview perspective can be found at www.shenviapologetics.com.

In the past few years, numerous Christian scholars have produced books garnering national attention. Kristen Kobes Du Mez was interviewed on NPR about her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and was featured in a story for The Washington Post. Beth Allison Barr, the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, was likewise the subject of an NPR interview and a New Yorker article. Andrew Whitehead and William Perry’s Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States earned a treatment in Time magazine. Robert Jones’s White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity was discussed in The New York Times and the author himself is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic. This list could be expanded to include Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, Willie James Jennings’s After Whiteness, Sechrest et al’s Can ‘White’ People Be Saved? and Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism.

These books share numerous common features: all of them were written by professing Christian scholars with advanced degrees from prestigious universities, all of them address hot-button issues in contemporary culture, and all of them reach conclusions that resonate with left-of-center perspectives. However, for the purposes of this article, I’ll expand on one other commonality: they all share a dangerous approach to theology via the disciplines of sociology and history. Even if we agree with their conclusions, we should recognize that they are sowing the seeds of a deconstruction that goes far deeper than race, gender, and politics.

Eikon 3.2 (Fall 2021) p. 47

The Structure Of Their Arguments

The books listed above share a similar rhetorical structure.

Step 1: the author identifies a problem, either in history or in contemporary politics. This problem involves power dynamics of one kind or a...