Critical histories of evangelicalism, or modern culture (or whatever else) are super illuminating and helpful. But these histories, themselves, need to be read critically. Be alert to:
- Assertions of causation where correlations are found;
- imputation of motivations;
- explaining the reason for theological beliefs largely by sociological/psychological concerns (mainly used of views the author is critiquing);
- lack of balancing considerations of various kinds;
- anachronisms that draws too close a connection between values/people/institutions of the past and present… or create too wooden a division between things of the past and present;
- too much dependence on the large explanatory frameworks (around class/social imaginary/sin/race/gender/the Enlightenment etc);
- what is and isn’t established by the evidence (sometimes a lazy look at the footnotes alone can be revealing).
