Conversations, Reading Guides, VOLUME 12

Evangelicalism – Ten Books for Assessing its Present and Future

Evangelicalism Future Books

This week, Alan Jacobs published a provocative piece in The Atlantic, suggesting that perhaps we have reached the end of evangelicalism …

He concludes the piece:

Just before the past presidential election, I argued that the proper response to those who have stolen our religious identity is to “steal it back.” But since then, I have come to doubt whether that’s possible. This strange and inadvertent conspiracy of Trump supporters and journalists may have put an end to a useful term that once described a vital tradition in the Christian faith. The question of who is and who is not an evangelical should matter to everyone concerned with American politics and the American social order; it matters especially to those who wonder how we got here. But it might not matter much longer. (emphasis added).

In order to evaluate Jacobs’s proposal, we need to have a rich understanding of evangelicalism that draws upon history, theology, and sociology.  Here are ten recent (or soon-to-be-released) books that can help us to cultivate this broad sort of understanding, and to discern the future of evangelicalism (or the movement-formerly-known-as-evangelicalism).

Evangelicalism Future BooksThe Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

Frances FitzGerald

This “epic history” (The Boston Globe) from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America—from the Puritan era to the 2016 election. “We have long needed a fair-minded overview of this vitally important religious sensibility, and FitzGerald has now provided it” (The New York Times Book Review).

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 attracted enormous crowds and tried to gather all Protestants under his big tent, but the civil rights movement and the social revolution of the sixties 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 that is impressive for its scope and level of detail” (The Wall Street Journal). Her “brilliant book could not have been more timely, more well-researched, more well-written, or more necessary” (The American Scholar).



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