Since 2017 the study of American evangelicalism has featured a barrage of books that seemingly prove this religious group’s bad manners and uncivil politics. This perspective circulated even before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, to be sure. But with the election of Trump and the four-year, almost daily reminder of evangelical hypocrisy—headlines regularly repeated that “Eighty-One Percent of White Evangelicals Voted for Donald Trump”—the study of evangelicalism took an abrupt U-turn. Tim Alberta’s, The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory is the most recent book to evaluate evangelicals from the perspective of shock if not horror. For readers familiar with Christian reflection on politics, which begins at least with Augustine and extends to the likes of John Witherspoon or William Gladstone, Alberta’s sensitivity will be annoying.

Until 2015, the dominant scholarly approach to white evangelicalism was shedding light on a group of Protestants outside the mainline denominations whom scholars had ignored. This scholarship began in earnest around 1980 with the work of George M. Marsden, then at Calvin College, Mark A. Noll at Wheaton College, and Nathan O. Hatch, then academic dean at University of Notre Dame. They had a hand in producing a body of work that accounted for the rise of evangelicals after World War II with Billy Graham as their celebrity figurehead. The narrative that explained the Protestants who formed new institutions, such as the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), Fuller Seminary (1947), and Christianity Today magazine (1956), traced their roots back to Puritans in colonial North America, spiritual awakenings led by the likes of George Whitefield (1740s) and Charles Finney (1820s), down to the so-called fundamentalist controversy (1920s) when conservative Protestants began to leave the historic and largest Protestant denominations over theological liberalism. Though evangelicals were Protestant, they qualified for fresh examination because they were outsiders (along with the black church, Roman Catholics, women, and more) in a field that assumed American religion was mainline Protestantism.

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D. G. Hart | “What’s Left to Say About Evangelicals?” | April 3, 2024

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Post authored by:

• Darryl Hart

  

  D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College. He is has written biographies of J. Gresham Machen, John Williamson Nevin, H. L. Mencken, and Benjamin Franklin. He is an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann.

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