A Difficult Marriage: American Protestants and American Politics

In the course of writing a biography about William Jennings Bryan, I began to appreciate a reality that transcends his own story. This anti-Darwinist reformer was not the relic of a benighted past that many modernist intellectuals—whether of the right or left—assumed him to be in the years from the rise of the New Deal to the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s. In fact, evangelical Protestantism has always been an integral part of American political history.