Evangelicalism found followers among non-Puritan immigrants and resonated with the frontier’s ethos of “individualism,” writes FitzGerald. Religious authorities were aghast at the vulgar theatrics of personal conversion and bowdlerized theology peddled by its preachers, but the barriers for entry to salvation had been collapsed. In the 18th century, the descendants of the Puritan settlers found their austere Calvinism outflanked by a new brand of faith that proclaimed the sovereignty of subjective personal religious experience.

It’s a story that traces the trajectory of the nation. If it’s resulted in surprisingly little by way of legislation, the ascendancy of the Christian right has shunted the nation’s political axis rightward, driven a reductive fixation on a narrow set of “moral” issues, affected the outcome of at least one general election and remade one of the two parties of state in the image of the religious movement comprising one in four Americans that dominates its ranks.Ī Gutenbergian slab, Frances FitzGerald’s “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America” is a meticulous history of this movement - retrograde and atavistic, ridiculed by secular elites, yet protean, hardy as a virus and, imbued with “the spirit of Jacksonian democracy,” all-American. Democrats have scarcely escaped their pull, taking pains to at least avoid actively alienating them. For three decades and change, we’ve grown accustomed to the quadrennial display of Republican presidential candidates genuflecting before the devout, whispering in code or pandering in plain sight.

The Evangelicals by Frances FitzGerald