Evangelicals – a new sociological study

Peter Berger, the famed sociologist of religion at Boston University, has initiated a new two-year study that aims to offer a more accurate picture of evangelicals. After so much bashing of evangelicals as unintellectual bumpkins (note the 1993 Washington Post article that called followers of two evangelists “poor, uneducated and easily led”), Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs will take this work on.

I know Berger best for his works, The Social Construction of Reality and The Sacred Canopy, that I encountered during seminary. It should be interesting to see how this project takes shape and what the output of it will be.

The article on CNN quotes Mark Noll, a former professor of mine at Wheaton, who is a foremost scholar on the history of evangelicalism and now teaches at Notre Dame. There is also passing references two other Notre Dame professors who could be considered broadly evangelical, Alvin Plantinga and George Marsden.