The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances Fitzgerald (review)

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. In the first class I taught on the New Testament I mentioned at the end of the professional introduction that I am a Catholic. Five students of about forty walked out. That was enough to drive me to attempt to enlighten my ignorance. I regret that Fitzgerald's book was not available at the time. It is simply the best book on evangelicalism and politics in the United States and certainly belongs in any library frequented by adults. It covers the period from the Great Awakening of 1740 to the role of the Christian right in President Barack Obama's two terms. 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.

The book is a serious history of the long and tangled interface between the American political culture and the culture of evangelicalism. It is about politics and a religion but also about politics in a religion. 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. She is sympathetic without partisanship and brings her own experience into play at critical points. The book is heavy on data (endnote section, 641–700) and expansive in narrative. Fitzgerald writes beautifully, and I am pleased by her 636 pages of narrative. I do believe that historians are storytellers and not scientists, and Fitzgerald is an outstanding example of that.

I would put her on the level of excellence of evangelical historians George Marsden and Mark Noll, and this book rivals their best. I would like to have seen more on Harold Ockenga and his coterie of young Harvard evangelical doctoral students but they might well have taken the author off course. She also might have made more of the evangelical-Roman Catholic relationship aside from the Roe v. Wade decision. After all, it was fear of the political influence of Catholic prelates that was prominent in the formation of the neo-evangelical union of 1942–1943, the birthday of the contemporary neo-evangelical movement, and is a connection which is still controversial among evangelicals. Among the most vigorous critics of any connection with Roman Catholicism were Reverends James Kennedy and R. C. Sproul. In contrast, Billy Graham moved evangelicals toward a decent relationship with Roman Catholics. Her discussion of James Kennedy and Graham are especially interesting. She deals with evangelical thinkers in a footnote to page 337, addressing J.G. Machen, F. Schaeffer and R. J. Rushdoony. The three had significant influence and she reveals their limitations nicely and kindly.