Witnessing Suburbia is a lively cultural analysis of the conservative shift in national politics that transformed the United States during the Reagan-Bush era. Eileen Luhr focuses on two fundamental aspects of this shift: the suburbanization of evangelicalism and the rise of Christian popular culture, especially popular music. Taking us from the Jesus Freaks of the late 1960s to Christian heavy metal music to Christian rock festivals and beyond, she shows how evangelicals succeeded in "witnessing" to America's suburbs in a consumer idiom. Luhr argues that the emergence of a politicized evangelical youth culture in fact ranks as one of the major achievements of "third wave" conservatism in the late twentieth century.
Eileen Luhr is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at California State University, Long Beach.
"Down at the local God-mall there's a whole lot of shaking going on, and Eileen Luhr explains why we should all take notice. This is a highly original, witty, at times mind-boggling exploration of the strange interfaces between youth culture and suburban evangelicalism." —Mike Davis, author of In Praise of Barbarians
280 pp.6 x 9Illus: 13 b/w photographs
9780520255968$29.95|£25.00Paper
Feb 2009