Sharlet: D. Michael Lindsay, a Rice University sociologist who’s the author of an interesting recent book called Faith in the Halls of Power: How American Evangelicals Entered the Elite, will be speaking tonight (Tuesday, April 29) with Craig Calhoun, NYU University Professor of Social Sciences, on religion and the 2008 election. 6:30, Jurow Lecture Hall (NYU), 100 Washington Square East.

Lindsay’s book may be becoming the foundation for a new mini-master narrative about evangelicalism and elite power. On the one hand, it’s incredibly valuable stuff — he’s talking about trends no one else in academe has paid attention to. On the other, as bedrock for new conventional wisdom, it’s dangerous. Lindsay is a sociologist, and he writes without much reference to history; he’s also sympathetic to his subjects, and he writes with no skepticism for any of their claims. As Alan Wolfe, himself a Boston University sociologist, wrote in the NYT book review, Lindsay

…views himself as a sociological dictation machine; they talk, he writes it down. And so you will find an interview with Ted Haggard in this book with no reference to gay sex, Ralph Reed described without mention of his work for Jack Abramoff and a disquisition on the importance of religion in the Bush White House without any substantive discussion of the cynicism found there by David Kuo, an evangelical who soured on President Bush. (Kuo is relegated to a footnote.) To its credit, “Faith in the Halls of Power” allows the new evangelical leaders of America to speak. But it also represents a lost opportunity to pose important questions to them. Here was a scholar with access to a potential treasure chest of information, and he only rarely opened it.

And yet and still — there’s that amazing access, and that one crucial insight, that evangelicals are not just banging on the doors of power, they’re also inside. That’s not his insight alone, and he errs in suggesting that this is really new — indeed, his sociological study is in some senses mainly a scholarly deepening of a 1975 book by two evangelicals called Washington: Christians in the Corridor of Power. Lindsay writes about Doug Coe, the “shadow Billy Graham” of Washington, as he’s known by some friends, and the leader of a group Lindsay refers to as “the Christian mafia”; the 1975 book deals with Coe’s predecessor, Abraham Vereide, who’d been walking those same halls of power by then for 30 years.

And yet and still — grudging but real respect for this book and for Lindsay, whom I’ll be debating — er, discussing — religion and politics with in October at the American Academy of Religion meeting (along with Randall Balmer of Columbia). Here are my two cents from when Lindsay’s book first came out last year:

Last year (2006), Lindsay published in the journal of the American Academy of Religion an academic article titled, “Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ‘Christian Mafia,'” in which he took on a group I’ve written quite a bit about, The Family, aka The Fellowship, an outfit that likes to think of itself, half-seriously, as a Christian Mafia. Lindsay’s approach (available as a pdf here)was radically different from mine: Whereas I started by inadvertently joining the group and then digging through seventy years of archives, Lindsay took a sociologist’s path to power, trading on connections to win access to the group’s most elite members and associates — former presidents (Bush, Carter), congressmen, and business executives. His account is somewhat sympathetic — maybe even euphemistic, framing what most reasonable observers would call the group’s penchant for secrecy in politics as simply a matter of “privacy.” Six of one, half dozen of the other? I don’t think so, but Lindsay’s work is stillvaluable, and in his book he has room to stretch out and add nuance to his ideas, which are well worth considering. Journalists who cover religion and politics should give this book enough time to absorb its many insights and to enter into a conversation — an argument, even — with its conclusions.