These lenses help frame the perspective for pursuing evangelical popular
religion (these terms are defined later). The central paradox may be stated as
this: Committed as evangelicals are to the full authority of the Bible, they
take with the greatest seriousness admonitions such as that of the apostle Paul
writing to the Philippians to reflect on the excellence of those things that are
true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable ( Phil. 4:8). An evangelical
critic of popular culture, Ken Myers, comments that this admonition means
commitment to those things that are "objectively true and noble and right."¹
Of equal centrality to evangelicals' commitment is the need to obey what
they know as the "Great Commission," that is, to convert every resident of
this planet to be a Christian. As evangelicals they are called to evangelize.²

The great paradox of such God-given mandates is that, to express them in
everyday life, this community of faith has utilized in the past and continues
to utilize a great deal of popular religion for their implementation. The
difficulty with this appears when it is realized that popular religion often
embraces and reflects thought processes, forms, styles, and genres of culture
that are deeply embedded in secular sources and that often do not stand out
as lovely, admirable, true, or noble.

Herein lies the paradox. Evangelical Christianity bases its truth claims on
the existence of knowable, permanent, absolute, unchanging, eternal God-
given teachings and salvific actions that make their faith unique among world
religions. These ingredients are the noble things for which to strive in life.
Yet their expression in everyday life is possible only by their practitioners'
participation in secular means and modes of expression.

Such a situation is hardly new to our age, those years explored in this study
spanning the 1970s and 1980s. Popular religious expression is as old as
recorded history itself, in all ages and on all continents. Its specific forms
reflect in everyday fashion the traditions, societal norms, and hopes for the
future of the people. It has been and continues to be paradoxically both
general and specific: general in that it reflects nothing less than the aspirations
of the human condition and specific in that it has been and continues to be
made manifest in earthen vessels, the ingredients of society that make social
life possible.

Searchers for the roads connecting such movements have been content to
categorize such ingredients into configurations such as "elite" versus "pop-
ular" or "high," "middle," and "low" taste cultures, reflecting clearly that
popular expressions in, say, the fine arts are understood as reflecting lower
aesthetic merit. Some expressions such as symphony music or classical
drama or formal theology are "higher" or more refined or more intellectually
sophisticated than other forms that are seen to rest on a middle or lower level
of cultural appreciation.³ Other observers make comparable distinctions

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