Frances FitzGerald's new history of the American Evangelicals is a massive one: 637 pages of text plus another hundred pages of a Glossary, extensive Notes, and a Bibliography. While it is a weighty history it is nevertheless an engaging one, well written and replete with short biographies of major figures and revelatory anecdotes that help to illuminate important points. You need not be a theologian or a historian to enjoy The Evangelicals, anyone interested in American history, American Christianity, and America's possible futures will find much rich material here.
A major theme of The Evangelicals is the recurring or cyclical nature of the history of American Evangelicalism. Beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries with the First and Second Great Awakenings evangelical religion developed out of dissatisfaction with the Established Churches and mainstream religion in general. In the early to mid nineteenth century evangelicalism had to deal with the same overwhelming issue as the rest of the nation: the debate over African slavery. As in the nation as a whole the debate eventually led to division, with many evangelical churches splitting into Northern and Southern halves. After the Civil War ended the evangelical divisions continued, with the result that much of the ferment for reform and the subsequent rise of new evangelical beliefs took place in the North since the South was smaller, poorer, and more uniformly minded. Conflict and controversy continued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the debate between Fundamentalists and Modernists that culminated in the 1920s with, among other events, the Scopes Monkey Trial and the rise of the Pentecostal and other movements that threatened to splinter Evangelicalism still further.
The summary I've supplied thus far takes readers through Chapter 5. The following 12 chapters and Epilogue concern the period from about the World War II era through the 2016 election. Here once again the history of Evangelicalism is one of conflict and controversy: how churches should deal with modern war and Cold War; Civil Rights and other movements for social change from the 1950s through the 1970s; and the reaction to these social changes that led to the rise of a harder line fundamentalism in the South, the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition's attempts to influence American politics, and the development of the Christian Right in the 1990s and early 2000s. Throughout this period FitzGerald documents another recurring theme in Evangelical history: the sad story of organized religion's attempts to influence secular politics, which inevitably result in religious belief becoming subordinate to and controlled by political ambition. Included in these chapters are the stories of the careers of Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other preachers; thinkers like Francis Sheaffer and Rousas Rushdoony and their influence; and the politicians like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who encouraged Evangelicals to believe they were on their side in order to obtain their support but then put their concerns at the bottom of their agenda. The final chapter and Epilogue describe the changes in American Evangelicalism, changes which parallel those in the nation as a whole: greater tolerance, more awareness of the threat of climate change, less interest in hardline political policies of either the left or the right, and overall a more multi-cultural society. FitzGerald ends her history by noting the heavy Evangelical influence in the election of Donald Trump, but maintains that the larger trends I've just mentioned might be delayed but not derailed.
I enjoyed The Evangelicals, though as an American Southerner with a lengthy family history intertwined with evangelical and fundamentalist history I could have wished for more details in the early chapters (but that would have made the book even longer). FitzGerald herself points out that she deliberately did not include African-American Evangelicalism since that is a long and rich history in itself deserving of more detail than she could provide in this volume. Even with these limitations The Evangelicals is an important study that non-specialists should not shy away from (FitzGerald's clear descriptions, as well as the Glossary, are very helpful). Whatever the future course of American Evangelicalism, those wishing a clear understanding of the movements' beginnings, conflicts, and continuing struggles will find FitzGerald's work to be a useful guide.
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Sylvia G.
Excellent, but it wiademic ckgrounf
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 18, 2021
Religiophile
A well-written scholarly account of evangelical Christianity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 21, 2017
