Suburban Evangelical Individualism: Syncretism, (Harvie) Conn-textualization, or Something Else?

Abstract

Towards the end of his 1994 book The American City and the Evangelical Church: A Historical Overview, Harvie Conn laments certain features of suburbanized evangelical Christianity in the United States, most especially what he sees as a permeating individualism. What is striking about the following block of quotations is the somewhat sudden—and from what I can tell somewhat unique among Conn’s writings—appearance (three times) of the term syncretism, in adverbial and adjectival forms, in reference to the bulk of contemporary U.S. evangelicalism: