Sociology professor Lindsay wins award for work in religion

By Cindy Dinh     11/6/08 6:00pm

Assistant Sociology Professor Michael Lindsay won two coveted awards last month for his work in chronicling the rise of the religious evangelicals in American society. The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion annually selects one article as exemplary in advancing religious studies. This year the Distinguished Article recognition is awarded to Lindsay for his article entitled "Evangelicals in the Power Elite: Elite Cohesion Advancing in Movement," which was published in the academic journal American Sociological Review.

"It's a tremendous honor," Lindsay said. "It's tremendous confirmation that the work I'm doing matters, and it's incredibly gratifying to be recognized by your peers. I'm a young guy compared to my peers and to receive this so early in my career means an awful lot."

He received his doctorate in sociology from Princeton University two years ago.

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The article examines how American evangelicals have used their religious resources to become part of the American establishment, Lindsay said.

"They were able to move from the margins of society to the mainstream in a single generation," he said.

People are classified as evangelicals if they self-identify that way or fall under a set of characteristics, he said.

"One, the Bible is the supreme religious author in their life; two, the importance of having a born-again experience; and third, they are in conversation with Jesus Christ and have an activist approach to faith," Lindsay said.

Lindsay researched his article by conducting 362 interviews with leaders from the political, economic, intellectual and cultural sectors united by a common religious belief. He said the experience was time consuming and demanding and led him to log over 300,000 miles traveling across the United States in five years.

"I had to win the trust of the people to do the interview, and research the background of each person," Lindsay said. "It was a huge project, but it's been great to be able to write a book and several articles and hit upon something that strikes a chord with the scholar community."

Based on these interviews, Lindsay was able to map out 142 different organizations and their position in society based on their relation to four sectors: Politics, Government; Business, Corporate Life; Arts, Entertainment and Media; and Higher Education.

"If a social movement wants to change society, it has to do that by hitting people in different parts of their lives, who are also engaged in all four sectors," Lindsay said.

He also mapped out a blueprint for how individual leaders can bring about larger society change.

"Up until now, no one has really done this," Lindsay said. "I use the data from the evangelicals to show this system works, but it works for any kind of movement."

Lindsay's current research on evangelicals stemmed from his graduate dissertation at Princeton University, which covered the significance of faith in the lives of America's leaders such as former presidents, CEOs and celebrities. As a continuation of this topic, Lindsay investigated evangelicals in public life with his book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, which won the best book award last month from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, a leading scholarly society that deals with nonprofit research.

"Evangelicals have not necessarily grown in numbers, but they have grown in influence," Lindsay said.

His future research will focus on the networks, upbringing and motivation of the elites in different sectors of society, which coincides with his class next semester, Sociology 375: The Social Dynamics of Leadership.

Concurrently, he has also launched a survey of the White House Fellows, a leadership program that places people in the top levels of government.

"There are 620 alive who have served in senior positions with the president, vice president or cabinet secretaries," Lindsay said. "[The survey] is to understand the role this fellowship plays in the lives of America's top leaders like Colin Powell and Wesley Clark.

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