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>> 1 1 Introduction Postdenominational Evangelicalism, Saddleback Church, and the Postsuburbs Orange County, California, has a contradictory reputation. It is known simultaneously as the home of insular, conservative retirees (Richard Nixon being the most famous) and also as the setting for the shallow, plastic libertines of the reality television series The Real Housewives of Orange County. It is considered to be a high-tech hub for computers, military technology , and industrial design while also a center for major global surf and skate retailers. It is as straight-laced and traditional as it is laid-back and iconoclastic. On many warm, sunny Sunday afternoons in south Orange County, this contradiction can be seen in the flesh when a heavyset, middle-aged man in a comfortable T-shirt and swim shorts wades into a fountain that would not be out of place in a new suburban, open-air mall. Surrounded by a crowd that sometimes numbers in the dozens and other times in the hundreds, he has an easy, jovial control over his audience. As the sun glistens off the water splashing around his considerable belly, others begin to line up near the edge of the fountain. On this Sunday, the first to join him is a ten-year-old named 2 > 3 In 2011 Saddleback held its highest attended Easter service in its history, bringing in over 50,000 churchgoers through the course of Easter weekend. Just weeks before the holiday, this south Orange County megachurch baptized more than 1,000 people in an afternoon after its introductory membership class (in 2008, they baptized some 2,600 before Easter). In the previous three years it planted three new satellite campuses, each drawing hundreds in their first weeks and now growing rapidly. And in the midst of the worst national financial turmoil since the Great Depression, it increased its revenue and operating budget to an all-time high of $47.9 million. All of this growth and burgeoning attendance has occurred despite that fact that contemporary America is seen by many to be a nation losing its religion.2 In a series of recent polls on religious attitudes and behaviors in the United States, the American religious landscape is shown to be quite fluid and fragmented, far from one nation under God. One of these polls, conducted by the Pew Research Center, showed a near majority of respondents switching denominations or faith traditions throughout their lives. It also showed that a strong majority of religious adherents in the United States are quite tolerant of other faiths and thought that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”3 In early 2009, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS, a large national survey of religious attitudes conducted previously in 1990 and 2001) showed a historical decrease in religious adherence over the previous decade and a half. Both the Pew and ARIS studies garnered quite a bit of attention. In the spring 2009 these surveys, alongside smaller post-election surveys, drove cover-page and above-the-fold headlines such as, “Losing Faith in Modern America,” “More People Say They Have No Religion,” “Almost All Denominations Losing Ground,” and “The End of Christian America.”4 The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr., exclaimed, “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.”5 If America has entered a secular, post-Christian era, evangelical churches like Saddleback have found a winning counterstrategy. This book looks at the ways churches like Saddleback are growing in size and influence while older, mainline churches and denominations continue a decades-long decline in membership. However, while there are many excellent studies of thriving contemporary evangelicalism, this book examines the particularly geographical strategies these churches employ in their quest for growth and relevance. This requires looking at and listening to not only what they say and do but 4 > 5 these new evangelical performances blend the sacred and secular so that the secular becomes only the potential for the sacred, not its opposite. From one perspective, the sacred in these performances invades every crevice of daily life, but it is this invasiveness that also makes them so fragile. The proximity of the secular and sacred in late modern societies means that invasion and corruption goes in both directions, with the sacred in peril as much as...

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