The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
By Frances Fitzgerald
Readers who are not evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, who are not religious at all, or who merely pay lip service to the idea, will learn a lot from Frances Fitzgerald’s new, and at times numbingly detailed, history of these two groups, as well as their many splinters.
Perhaps the most intriguing and, when considered carefully in the light of reality, is the thorough infusion of religious mysticism into the world, as if God and the eternal were palpable participants in our physical world, or something like a parallel dimension separated by a most porous, frequently traversed membrane. Writing a sentence like the preceding, however, does little to capture how disturbing (yet also insightful) many will find the manifestations of an overarching, other worldly belief system, because whether or not you believe, it impacts your life. Fitzgerald illustrates how when she reaches “Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority” (just short of halfway) and proceeds through most of the high points of recent history, with particular concentration and insight into the theologizing, philosophizing, and politicizing not visible to non, marginal, and true believers. For this reason, for its practical value, many will find this an invaluable history and resource.
While readers will find it tempting, given the length and density of this history, to sprint or just leap to current times, spending time with the first half of the history will help you frame current times. After all, the belief systems, some of which feel simplistic, spring from some deep thinking, particularly in the era when religion dominated the landscape. Thus, Fitzgerald takes readers through the First (1730-40s) and Second (1800 through the 1830s) Great Awakenings, the days of Calvinist Jonathan Edwards and the personalization of the religious experience, and Charles Finney’s “burnt-over district,” a period marked by the rise of revivalism and the jettisoning of rationalism in favor of emotion. Then follows the Civil War and wrapped around it from antebellum to post reconstruction the splintering over slavery and other issues related to the experience of religion. Finally, in the run up to current days, readers walk through the preaching of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, from Dwight Moody to Billy Sunday, until they reach the days of the influential Falwell, the scandalous Jim and Tammy and Jimmy Swaggart, the monumentally influential Billy Graham, and, regardless of what you think of him, the immense influencer, the game changer extraordinaire, Pat Robertson.
The ground Fitzgerald tills here is a truck farm of religion, politics, business; of larger than life personalities; of theologies and philosophies that will strike nonbelievers as bizarre. You’ll learn much that may surprise you, too, such as the fact that before our days of politicalized religion, Protestants in their various manifestations agreed in steering clear of politics. How things have changed, indeed. w/c
Writer / Critic 