Note: From The Evangelical Imagination (Baker 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
“New and Improved!”
You can’t walk down the aisle of the grocery store without the words “new and improved!” jumping out at you from one product or twenty.
There’s hardly a sport or a team that doesn’t honor the player who is most improved. The home improvement retail industry in the US brings in over $500 billion per year. Across America, government entities, organizations and committees devote themselves to neighborhood improvement projects. And the already gargantuan category of self-help books (a genre in previous centuries referred to as “improving literature”) continues to grow steadily each year.
Improvement is good! It’s also such a ubiquitous idea that it can be difficult to distinguish real, good advances from clever marketing and feel-goodism.
Evangelicals are not immune to improvement fever. Not by a long shot. “Christian living,” as it’s called in the publishing industry, is big business. So, too, are the Christian conferences, Instagram accounts, TikToks, Bible studies, marriage manuals, television shows, workshops, classes and webinars that promise to bring improvement to whatever area of life in which you need it – and plenty of areas where you don’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of Christian living! And improvement in general. Who isn’t?
Christians especially believe in improvement. After all, the Christian life doesn’t end with conversion. Being born again begins a new life, one that ought to be marked by ongoing growth and maturity, a diet of meat rather than milk, increasing Christlikeness and the ongoing display of the fruit of the Spirit. The Christian is to “improve,” in a way, of course. But there’s a reason this process in the Christian life is more accurately called by another name: sanctification. Sanctification – literally, the process of becoming holy – is a religious, not a consumerist, experience.
The steady beat to improve, improve, improve resounds loudly everywhere. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a world in which improvement isn’t valued for its own sake, as a constant, never-ending pursuit.
Yet, improvement wasn’t always assumed to be something we should always be pursuing like hamsters on the wheel. The fact is that the idea of improvement is, well, new. That is, it’s new relative to all of human history. Improvement might even be considered one of the key characteristics that makes the modern age modern, a fact echoed in the familiar phrase “modern progress” (although, as we will see, improvement and progress aren’t exactly the same). Like most things that characterize modernity, the idea of improvement is part of the evangelical social imaginary.
The Invention of Improvement
Like the evangelical movement itself, the notion of improvement began in England. According to Paul Slack in The Invention of Improvement, the word appeared there in the early sixteenth century, right around the time of the Reformation. It was first used in the context of making land more profitable through improvements, and it had no exact synonym in other European languages at the time. Unlike existing words such as “reformation” and “revolution,” “improvement” suggested “gradual, piecemeal but cumulative betterment” rather than a change that was sudden or dramatic. [p. 1] Eventually, the word was applied metaphorically to betterment in other areas of life and society until its meaning gradually broadened into the many contexts in which it is used today.
Because the concept of improvement developed in England, it became “one of the things which made the English different from everyone else.” [Slack, p. vii] The end of the seventeenth century is often considered the beginning of the “great age of improvement,” and by the early eighteenth century,
improvement was more than an everyday idiom of expression; it was a word essential to political discussion of national affairs and an integral part of English culture. It privileged certain kinds of public and private behavior above others, encouraging innovative, industrious and in every sense profitable activities, while discouraging their opposites. It sustained a story about England’s progress and helped to bring it into being. [Slack, pp. 7-8]
Improvement became a distinctive component of the English social imaginary, and, eventually, by extension, the early American social imaginary – and evangelicalism itself.
The idea of improvement included a number of accompanying activities and contexts that made articulation of the concept possible. These included “the use of calculation and measurement as instruments of understanding and control” within what was quickly becoming an “information-rich” culture. Measurement itself, and the increased reliance on it, produced the idea of progress (now that it could be measured) and the “conviction that moral and material progress” were both possible and desirable. [Slack, pp. 1-6] Indeed, like the sound of a tree falling in a forest, improvement wasn’t really improvement if no one recognized it as such. Rather, improvement as a concept “depended on knowledge that it was happening.” [Slack, p. 15]
Perhaps no monument to such knowledge – knowledge that improvement was indeed happening – serves as a better symbol than the Crystal Palace, a gargantuan edifice of steel and glass of nearly one million square feet that held England’s Great Exhibition in 1851. Essentially the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition showcased tens of thousands of objects, inventions and technological improvements from thousands of contributors from around the world. When the event ended, the massive Crystal Palace – a miracle of technology and design, the crown jewel of the industrial revolution – was dismantled and reassembled in South London, where it was destroyed by fire less than a century later, proving Shakespeare’s wisdom true: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” [Sonnet 55, Oxford Shakespeare, 2008, p. 491]
The Price of Progress
Improvement requires a willingness to break from the tradition and the past, which is part of the idea of progress. This posture is not unrelated to evangelicalism’s emphasis on conversion as a sudden turning or break from the past. Conversion is, after all, the ultimate improvement.
Progress, while connected to the idea of improvement, differs from it. The concept of progress gained traction after improvement did, arising in the eighteenth century and manifesting in a number of ways. As with improvement, “people have not always thought that progress was a fact.” [Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, p. 26] Progress – the belief that history is “moving inexorably toward a more peaceful, intelligent and commodious life” for humankind – is a product of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, one widely embraced by the start of the eighteenth century. Once such a notion gained widespread acceptance, it became “self-generating,” cultivating “rising expectations” of ongoing improvements across societies. [Postman, p. 28]
Yet not everyone was so hopeful about the human condition. Traditional thinkers and radicals alike contested the idea of true human progress.
Throughout his body of work, for example, famous English satirist Jonathan Swift roundly mocks the idea that human beings can “progress” in any meaningful way. For Swift, the notion that “moderns” are better or even could be better than the “ancients” is rooted in the deadly sin of pride. In many of his works, but most directly and devastatingly in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift casts aspersions on excessive pride in human progress and its by-products: projects, methods, experiments, inventions and any science that dehumanizes. It’s notable that Swift was an Anglican clergyman through and through – grounded in orthodox theology and church tradition. He predicted (and satirized) the sort of individualized religious experience that evangelicalism birthed as “enthusiasm” – defined by his contemporary Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of the English Language as “a vain belief of private revelation.” [1828, p. 342] (During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics would more and more associate “enthusiasm” with evangelicals.)
Another prominent critic of progress in the eighteenth century was painter William Hogarth, who satirized the notion of progress through several series of paintings using that term ironically, including A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, which depicted the decline (not improvement) of the two subjects. Hogarth’s paintings offered harsh social critiques of the conditions that would facilitate the fall of a young woman of poverty and a young man of means into moral decay.
Swift and Hogarth were not so much against progress as a possibility but rather against the that the human condition could change, let alone improve. A more radical opposition to belief in progress came in the nineteenth century, most notably from Romantic poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley (and numerous others). The Romantics rightly understood that there could be no progress based on reason alone. They knew that our full humanity encompassed not just our rational nature but our emotional, imaginative and spiritual nature too. Any moral calculus based on reason alone leads inevitably to inhumanity – whether that of the “new and improved” efficiency of the guillotine, the free labor of the slave trade or the “final solution” of the concentration camp.
Somewhere between the two anti-rationalist camps – the traditional Anglicanism of Swift and radical Romanticism of Shelley – the first evangelicals landed.
Evangelicalism was (and is) inherently not conservative, not traditional, but rather innovative and therefore progressive (in a social and cultural sense, not necessarily politically or theologically). Recall the definition of evangelicalism given by John Stackhouse in chapter 1: evangelicals appropriate from tradition selectively and innovate as necessary in order to fulfill their mission. [Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 24]
Similarly, the founding of America was an exercise in newly emerging concepts of liberty, democracy and self-rule – a “new and improved” version of government and nationhood. The American Dream itself is a vision of successive, generational improvement; its essence is that no matter where you start, you can build a better life, one that will be even better for your children and their children.
One of the most famous advocates of self-improvement in nineteenth-century America was Horatio Alger, author of numerous juvenile novels (precursors to today’s young adult genre). These stories typically depicted impoverished boys who improved their material conditions through pluck and virtues of character that usually led to the notice and support of wealthy patrons, who gave the boys a leg up in the world. The most famous of these novels is Ragged Dick. Published in 1868 after being printed serially, Ragged Dick exemplifies the pattern of Alger’s stories by portraying a young ruffian with enough good qualities to eventually achieve financial and social improvement. Alger was one of the key promoters of a dominant metaphor of America’s Gilded Age (the last decades of the nineteenth century, so called for ushering in an explosion of wealth and prosperity). That metaphor, one that persists today, attributes material success to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Martin Luther King Jr. famously pointed out later that “it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” [Interview by Sander Vanocur, NBC News, May 8, 1967]
But there is another reason, besides King’s pointed critique, to question Alger’s vision for self-improvement. In 1866, Alger, who was an ordained Unitarian minister, was expelled from the ministry for sexual abuse of boys. These abuses were documented at the time but not widely known until a century later.
There are times when a message should be rightly understood apart from the messenger. But sometimes the agenda in the message cannot be separated from that of the messenger. Horatio Alger’s work is an example of the latter.
Content taken from The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
Karen Swallow Prior, senior fellow, Trinity Forum
