Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture by Eileen Luhr (review)

Eileen Luhr’s Witnessing Suburbia is a welcome study of evangelical popular culture and its relationship to religious politics in the post–World War II period. Throughout the book, Luhr weaves together evangelical concerns about popular culture and its supposed secularizing power with the historical development of post-war conservative fears about the decline of authority, lack of personal responsibility, and decaying of traditional gender roles to demonstrate how the family became a powerful symbol for counteracting these forces in suburban America. Her historical narrative helps us understand how contemporary evangelicals working through popular culture draw upon the prior efforts of Christians who struggled to legitimate popular culture as a mission field.

Witnessing Suburbia consists of four well-developed chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue with extensive endnotes and a bibliography. That said, Luhr sacrifices the breadth of evangelical popular culture for analytical depth; for example, her main focus—popular music—is limited to heavy metal and punk rock. This focus, however, serves Luhr’s intense cultural criticism. Chapter one’s extended discussion of different evangelical approaches to rock music is an invaluable map for those looking to do further research in the field, as she lays out the changes, conflicts, and struggles to understand the limits to accepting rock and roll and its culture among evangelicalism’s self-appointed leaders. Through these negotiations we also get a glimpse into the cultural labour involved in categorizing rock music as either dangerous or acceptable, especially as it is evaluated according to the aforementioned standards that the family is believed to uphold.

Chapters two and three mainly focus on how evangelicals adopted the rebellious attitudes and imagery of heavy metal and punk music in the 1980s, and subverted the images to reflect their core values. In doing so, Christian music became a missionary tool dedicated to saving souls and showing that Christians could be cultural insiders through adopting the music and fashions of these musical subcultures while espousing Christian values. One of Luhr’s major contributions is demonstrating how Christian bands subverted punk and heavy metal’s rebelliousness. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll became chastity, personal responsibility, and respect for authority, a shift that made these genres acceptable to the conservative Christian powers of the 1980s. Luhr’s careful cultural analysis is useful for illustrating the process of redeeming popular culture and the way that making popular music acceptable is fraught with intergenerational conflict; hierarchies within evangelicalism; and the tension of being in the world, but not of the world.

Luhr’s fourth chapter is the most important because it is here that she ties evangelical engagements with popular culture into the larger context of resurgent postwar evangelicalism. Covering major Christian revivals in Orange County, she explains how conservative values of “self-reliance, personal responsibility, and obedience to authority” (156) are broadcast and connected with major local politics against “interest groups” such as homosexuals and pro-choice advocates. In doing so, she ties in her larger story about how evangelical popular culture was part of the ongoing struggle to craft a suburban evangelical identity. Unfortunately, this aspect of her work could have been extended in greater detail throughout the previous chapters. There is a brief discussion of the links between the aforementioned punk and metal Christian subcultures and school prayer (101–10), but it would have been helpful to have the two stories of evangelical suburban life and evangelical popular culture running parallel throughout the book. Instead, Luhr submerges much of the suburban tale in favour of the popular culture narrative. For scholars who are familiar with the rise of evangelicalism in the postwar period, this is not a difficult problem to overcome; however, those who are unfamiliar with evangelicalism and its political ties may find that key elements of the larger evangelical story are assumed or submerged while Luhr discusses her new angle.

I recommend Witnessing Suburbia to scholars...