The Evangelicals, Frances FitzGerald
The Evangelicals, Frances FitzGerald
7 Rating(s)
List: $39.99 | Sale: $28.00
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The Evangelicals
The Struggle to Shape America

Author: Frances FitzGerald

Narrator: Jacques Roy

Unabridged: 25 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/07/2017


Synopsis

* Winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award
* National Book Award Finalist
* Time magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year
* New York Times Notable Book
* Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017

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).

About Frances FitzGerald

Frances FitzGerald is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and a prize from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam; America Revised: History School Books in the Twentieth Century; Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures; Way Out in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War; and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on February 15, 2020

This book is an extraordinary history and analysis of the Evangelist movement since the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries up to the Christian Right of today’s American political landscape. In 2017, I read Joel Green's Devil's Bargain to understand how Bannon and Breitbart used propagand......more

Goodreads review by Austin on May 01, 2017

Finally I made myself take on a book that I didn't expect to enjoy (I am challenging myself to read 5, so had to get into it). And I took it on by the horns, in the topic I find perhaps the most obnoxious and perplexing in alternation: American Evangelicalism. This movement, or philosophy, is here d......more

Goodreads review by Steve on June 23, 2017

Evangelical reviewer here. A riveting overview of the major ideas and figures in Evangelical history from 1740 to present. The author is not an evangelical, but gives a comprehensive and factually accurate description of us, the good and the bad. A couple criticisms. First, the latter half of the bo......more

Goodreads review by Kimba on April 01, 2018

In this book, Frances FitzGerald offers a history of white evangelicalism from the first Great Awakening in the 1730s (Jonathan Edwards) until the present. However the vast majority of the book focuses on evangelicalism in the 20th century and the emergence of the religious right; the first two cent......more