* Winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award

* National Book Award Finalist

* Time newspaper Top 10 10 Nonfiction Publication of the entire year

* New York Times Notable Book

* Publishers Regular Best Books of 2017

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

The evangelical motion began in the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known in the us as the fantastic Awakenings. A populist rebellion against the set up churches, it became the dominating religious pressure in the united states.

During the nineteenth century white evangelicals split aside, initial North versus South, and then, modernist versus fundamentalist. After Globe Battle II, Billy Graham enticed tremendous crowds and attempted to gather all Protestants under his big tent, but the civil rights movement as well as the cultural revolution of the sixties drove them aside again. From the 1980s Jerry Falwell and various other southern televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, acquired formed the Christian best. Protesting abortion and gay rights, they led the South into the Republican Party, and for thirty-five years these were the sole voice of evangelicals to become heard nationally. Ultimately a younger generation proposed a broader agenda of issues, such as for example climate switch, gender equality, and immigration reform.

Evangelicals right now constitute twenty-five percent from the American populace, however they are no more monolithic in their politics. They range between Tea Party followers to interpersonal reformers. Still, using the decrease of religious trust generally, FitzGerald shows that evangelical churches must accept ethnic minorities if they are to survive. “A well-written, thought-provoking, and deeply investigated history that is impressive for its range and degree of details” (The Wall structure Road Journal). Her “excellent book could not have been even more timely, more well-researched, even more well-written, or more necessary” (The American Scholar).