the evangelicals the struggle to shape america

Fitzgerald writes beautifully, and I am pleased by her 636 pages of narrative. The book is heavy on data (endnote section, 641–700) and expansive in narrative. She is sympathetic without partisanship and brings her own experience into play at critical points. She captures the many religious and theological fissures in evangelicalism (particularly informative on Pentecostal inclusion in the much larger evangelical pool) and notes the quite different religious and theological makeup of sub-groups in the camp. It is about politics and a religion but also about politics in a religion. The book is a serious history of the long and tangled interface between the American political culture and the culture of evangelicalism. She does mention the evangelical role in the election of Trump at the very end of the book in the last lines of her epilogue. It covers the period from the Great Awakening of 1740 to the role of the Christian right in President Barack Obama's two terms. It is simply the best book on evangelicalism and politics in the United States and certainly belongs in any library frequented by adults. I regret that Fitzgerald's book was not available at the time. That was enough to drive me to attempt to enlighten my ignorance. In the first class I taught on the New Testament I mentioned at the end of the professional introduction that I am a Catholic. I have been reading scholarly and popular books on American evangelicals for the past twenty-five years, chiefly because I taught for a decade in a state university in Florida and faced classrooms crowded with young evangelicals (usually Baptists, with some admixture of Methodists and Presbyterians) but also with Catholics who matched my ignorance of evangelicalism.

The evangelicals the struggle to shape america