Henry played an important role in this development, though FitzGerald emphasizes Billy Graham as a central figure and a bridge to later developments. Mid-century intellectuals like Harold Ockenga and Carl F.
Thereafter, FitzGerald charts the rise of the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and beyond. More telling in her account is the reformist energy unleashed by the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, which gave evangelicalism an activist cast and helped it become culturally dominant.Įvangelicalism splintered along theological lines in the postbellum era and into the twentieth century, a bifurcation symbolized by the famous Scopes Trial of 1925. She begins with the First Great Awakening of the 1740s, covering figures ranging from the stalwart Jonathan Edwards to the erratic James Davenport. FitzGerald’s goal is to make sense of the right-wing Christian political and social activism of recent decades, so she focuses on a limited segment of the broad evangelical world, politically charged and largely southern, white fundamentalists.įitzGerald is a skilled narrator who draws upon the copious scholarship of American evangelicalism to tell an accessible story.
This leaves out many self-identified evangelicals, among them African Americans, Anabaptists, Latinos and Asian Americans, as well as Anglicans and others from more traditionally mainline churches. Writing from a secular, liberal perspective, FitzGerald offers what appears to be a history of American evangelicalism but really amounts to a telescoped effort to understand the rise and impact of the “Christian Right” of the late 1970s and beyond. Even so, as Rick Warren noted in 2005, every five years journalists feel the need to reintroduce evangelicals to the American public.Ī recent contribution to this enterprise is The Evangelicals, a weighty volume from the political journalist and popular historian Frances FitzGerald, winner of the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes for her prior work on the Vietnam War. $35.00ĭepending on the survey, evangelical Christians represent something like 15 to 25 percent of the American population, no small portion (albeit one in decline). The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.
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