Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America

What is the relationship between evangelical Christianity and democracy in America? In Good News for Common Goods, sociologist Wes Markofski explores how multicultural evangelicals across the United States are addressing race, poverty, inequality, politics, and religious and cultural difference in America's increasingly plural and polarized public arena. Based on extensive original research on multicultural evangelicals active in faith-based community organizing, community development, political advocacy, and public service organizations across the country-including over 90 in-depth interviews with racially diverse evangelical and non-evangelical activists, community leaders, and neighborhood residents-Markofski shows how the varieties of public religion practiced by evangelical Christians are not always bad news for non-evangelicals, people of color, and those advancing ethical democracy in the United States.

Markofski argues that multicultural evangelicals can and do work with others across race, class, religious, and political lines to achieve common good solutions to public problems, and that they can do so without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities or demanding that others do so. Just as ethical democracy calls for a more reflexive evangelicalism, it also calls for a more reflexive secularism and progressivism.

Author: Wes Markofski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 03/17/2023
Pages: 408
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.32lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.13w x 0.95d
ISBN: 9780197659700

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2024

About the Author
Wes Markofski is Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton College and received his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism.