The Evangelicals

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Frances FitzGerald reveals the “epic history” (The Boston Globe) of the Evangelical movement in America—from the Puritan era to the 2016 election. The evangelical movement began in the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known in America as the Great Awakenings. A populist rebellion against the established churches, it became the dominant religious force in the country. During the nineteenth century white evangelicals split apart, first North versus South, and then, modernist versus fundamentalist. After World War II, Billy Graham—a prominent evangelist preacher—attracted enormous crowds and tried to gather all Protestants under his big tent, but the civil rights movement and the social revolution of the 1960s drove them apart again. By the 1980s, Jerry Falwell and other southern televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, had formed the Christian right. Protesting abortion and gay rights, they led the South into the Republican Party, and for thirty-five years they were the sole voice of evangelicals to be heard nationally. Eventually a younger generation proposed a broader agenda of issues, such as climate change, gender equality, and immigration reform. Evangelicals now constitute twenty-five percent of the American population, but they are no longer monolithic in their politics. They range from Tea Party supporters to social reformers. Still, with the decline of religious faith generally, FitzGerald suggests that evangelical churches must embrace ethnic minorities if they are to survive. “A well-written, thought-provoking, and deeply researched history” (The Wall Street Journal), Evangelicals “could not have been more timely, more well-researched, more well-written, or more necessary” (The American Scholar).