The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald (English)

Description: The Evangelicals by Frances FitzGerald Synopsis coming soon....... FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description * National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist * National Book Award Finalist * Time magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year * New York Times Notable Book * Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 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). Author Biography 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, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. Review * FINALIST * * NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS * * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD * * LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE * * J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE *"A page turner: FitzGerald is a great writer capable of keeping a sprawling narrative on point . . . Anyone curious about the state of conservative American Protestantism will have a trusted guide in this Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize winner . . . 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 *"A well-written, thought-provoking and deeply researched history that is impressive for its scope and level of detail." * The Wall Street Journal *"The waves of conservative Protestant influence that have swept American life at various points in history have often seemed to come out of nowhere. The emergence of the Christian rights political influence in the 1970s, for example, just as experts said religion was losing its place in U.S. culture, was shocking. But in her new major work on the subject, The Evangelicals, historian Frances FitzGerald shows how the origins of these booms are discernible from afar. Her book makes the case so well, it leaves readers with the feeling that we should all be paying closer attention." * TIME *"An epic history of white American evangelical Protestantism from Plymouth Rock to Trump Tower . . . Fitzgerald, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for "Fire in the Lake, an account of the Vietnam War, gracefully swoops over the decades of populist evangelicalism with Barbara Tuchman-like grace. This is a comprehensive, heavily footnoted, yet readable study of how the evangelical tradition has become seared into the fabric of American life and the key figures who made it happen. . . . Fitzgerald, always judicious and unbiased, nobly succeeds in analyzing the nuanced differences between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, Calvinism and postmillennialism, charismatics and Pentecostals." * The Boston Globe *"[A] capacious history of Evangelical American Protestantism. This rich narrative ranges across the various Evangelical denominations while illuminating the doctrines—especially personal conversion as spiritual rebirth, and adherence to the Bible as ultimate truth—that unite them. . . . A complex and fascinating epic." * Booklist, starred review *"FitzGeralds brilliant book could not have been more timely, more well-researched, more well-written, or more necessary." * The American Scholar *"Frances FitzGerald answers the recurrent question, "Where did these people [mainly right-wing zealots] come from?" She says there is no mystery involved. They were always here. We were just not looking at them. What repeatedly makes us look again is what she is here to tell us." * The New York Review of Books *"An excellent work that is certain to be a standard text for understanding contemporary evangelicalism and the American impulse to reform its society." * Library Journal *"Timely and enlightening" * The Economist *"Without a doubt the best book on the history and present status of American evangelicals. . . . ambitious, engaging, and nuanced." -- Harvey G. Cox, Jr., Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School"This is the book Ive been waiting for. Now we have in one volume the richly textured, often puzzling, and always engaging story of American evangelicalism from colonial days to the present. To understand evangelicalisms impact on our country, this is must reading." -- Robert Wuthnow, Professor of Sociology and Director of Princeton Universitys Center for the Study of Religion"Another superb work by renowned but long-absent political journalist FitzGerald . . . this one centering on the roiling conflict among American brands of Christianity. . . . Overflowing with historical anecdote and contemporary reportage and essential to interpreting the current political and cultural landscape." * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *"FitzGerald has crafted nothing less than a spiritual history of the nation whose truest believers have for four centuries constituted themselves a moral majority. This is an American story, objectively told and written from the inside out" -- Richard Norton Smith, author of On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller"A compelling narrative history of "the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents." . . . [FitzGerald] skillfully introduces readers to the terminology, key debates, watershed events, and personalities that have populated the history of white American evangelical Protestant culture in the last half-century. She explains issues such as fundamentalism, biblical inerrancy, Christian nationalism, civil religion and anticommunism, the charismatic movement, and abortion, and introduces such diverse figures as Karl Barth, Jerry Falwell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Pat Robertson . . . a timely and accessible contribution to the rapidly growing body of literature on Christianity in modern America." * Publishers Weekly *"This is an important book. FitzGerald has written a monumental history of how evangelicalism has shaped America. Few movements in our long story have had as significant an influence on American life and culture as conservative Christianity, and FitzGerald does full justice to the subjects scope and complexity." -- Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Destiny and Power and Thomas Jefferson"A rare and valuable book. Its admirable that Frances FitzGerald is able to tell the story of the American evangelical movement without judgment or bias—but its absolutely astonishing that shes able to tell it with such authority, clarity, and complete grasp of the historical context." -- Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition"The Evangelicals is a comprehensive history of white evangelical movements in the United States, geared to provide a deeper understanding of present-day evangelicals and their influence. Journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald presents nearly 300 years of complex ideologies, schisms, social reforms and energetically creative theology in a well-organized, eye-opening narrative. . . . This book is not only for those with a particular interest in religious history; it is for anyone with a serious interest in American social movements, politics and culture. It is a history that strongly re-emphasizes the evolution of a nation, and those who hope to shape the future are wise to study the past." * Shelf Awareness *"The Evangelicals explodes any notion of evangelicalism as a monolithic movement. FitzGerald also deftly captures the exotic cast of this pure product of America..." * San Francisco Chronicle *"A masterful narrative." * Gospel Coalition *"Essential reading on the conjoined nature of religion and politics today." * Barnes & Noble (BN.com) *"Massively learned and electrifying . . . the long, contradictory, and compelling history of American Evangelicals and the world they made. In the telling of this story, FitzGerald pulls off an admirable feat. She writes compassionately about generations of deeply held faith without seeming naive, even as she resists cynicism while noting the psychotics, charlatans, and con artists who have sometimes arisen to "deceive the very elect." The result is a quiet marvel of a book, well deserving of winning its author her second Pulitzer . . . magisterial . . . FitzGerald is adroit and gentle in noting how often Americas religious right wing seems to have been fighting rearguard actions." * The Christian Science Monitor *"This incisive history of white evangelical movements in America argues that their influence has been more pervasive and diverse than generally realized." * The New Yorker *"A formidable achievement that could become one of the definitive works on the subject." * Vox * Review Quote "Without a doubt the best book on the history and present status of American evangelicals. . . . ambitious, engaging, and nuanced." Excerpt from Book The Evangelicals 1 THE GREAT AWAKENINGS and the EVANGELICAL EMPIRE THE ORIGINS of evangelicalism as a distinct form of Protestantism lie in the revivals that swept back and forth across the English-speaking world and Northern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the American case, the revivals came in two waves. The earlier, known as the First Great Awakening, peaked in the 1740s but set off reverberations that continued to the time of the American Revolution. The later one, the Second Great Awakening, began just after the end of the War of Independence and continued intermittently in various parts of the country through the 1850s. Everywhere, the revivals involved a rebellion against the formalism of the established churches and an effort to recover an authentic spiritual experience: a religion of the heart, as opposed to the head. And everywhere, they introduced a new idea of conversion as a sudden, overwhelming experience of Gods grace. In Europe the established churches survived and incorporated the pietistic strain within their own traditions. But in America the revivals transformed Protestantism. They undermined the established churches, led to the separation of church and state, and created a marketplace of religious ideas in which new sects and denominations flourished. At the same time, they made evangelical Protestantism the dominant religious force in the country for most of the nineteenth century. In America the periods were, not incidentally, ones of rapid demographic growth, and social, as well as political, change. The expansion of settlement and commerce opened space for initiative and innovation, and small, integrated communities dissolved into an expansive, mobile society. The itinerant revivalists themselves embodied this mobility and this reach. In offering individuals the possibility of a direct relationship with God they helped adjust the society to its new circumstances and to transform the hierarchical colonial order into the more egalitarian society of the nineteenth century. After the Revolution many of them explicitly preached individual freedom, the separation of church and state, voluntary association as a primary means of social organization, and republicanism as the best form of government. Awakenings, as the scholar William McLoughlin tells us, "are periods of cultural revitalization . . . that extend over a period of a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation of beliefs and values takes place."1 The two Great Awakenings are not just a matter of historical interest. Some of the attitudes formed at the time, such as the spirit of voluntarism, have become a part of our common heritage. Others have had a particular and lasting effect on American Protestantism. Indeed, to ask what is religiously or culturally distinctive about either mainline or evangelical Protestants today is to find that most explanatory roads lead back to their particular inheritance from the Great Awakenings. On the evangelical side, for example, the revivalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pioneered mass evangelism and introduced new communications techniques that, with additions and modifications, have been used by evangelical preachers ever since. In their eagerness to save souls, the revivalists introduced vernacular preaching styles, de-emphasized religious instruction, and brought a populist, anti-intellectual strain into American Protestantism. Then, as most of them saw it, America was a Christian--read Protestant--nation. The First Great Awakening The First Great Awakening began among the Congregationalists, the direct heirs to the Puritans of New England, in the midst of what William McLoughlin and other historians have described as a crisis of religious authority. The Puritans had established close-knit communities, bound by covenant, where church and state cooperated in an effort to build a Holy Commonwealth. Calvinists, they believed that God, unreachable and unknowable, determined everything that went on in His creation and that human nature was totally corrupt ("utterly depraved") and had been since Adams fall. Life, therefore, was a constant struggle with Satan. God, in their view, had reason to condemn all mankind to hell, but because of Christs atoning sacrifice on the cross, He had arbitrarily decided to save an elect few "saints." Through piety and soul-searching, men might come to hope they were among the elect and might experience an infusion of His grace. But whatever God willed, all men had a duty to help each other, to respect the clergy and the magistrates, and to obey the law. As reformers, the Puritans believed that God might work among them to create a New Jerusalem, "a city upon a hill," if only men kept their covenant with God and submitted themselves to the will of the community. Ultimately, they believed, Christ would return, either to establish a millennial reign of peace on earth, or, as the emissary of a wrathful God, to destroy it.2 The Puritans were dissenters from the Church of England and from medieval aristocratic traditions, but their society, like most of those in Europe at the time, was stratified and patriarchal. In the preface to the covenant signed aboard the Arabella, John Winthrop wrote: "God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the conditions of mankind, as in all times some must be rich and some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection." After the early days of the settlement, clergymen and the civil governors, who came from the propertied elite, assumed authority for regulating the affairs of the community in much the same way that Puritan fathers regulated the affairs of their households. These Puritan rulers valued order above all other social virtues and saw themselves as responsible only to God. Family discipline, as well as the theology preached from the pulpit, taught that mans duty was submit to authority and to accept his station within the God-given hierarchy.3 By the eighteenth century, this Puritan order faced both social and ideological challenges. Congregationalism remained the established religion, its churches subsidized by taxpayers in all but one of the New England colonies. (Rhode Island, settled by Baptists, was the exception.) Yet the immigration of other Christians and nonbelievers had eroded the Puritan control of the polity. Then, too, the westward movement of the settlers and the growing wealth of landowners and merchants bred a new spirit of individualism. Economic controversies erupted, pitting settlers against the gentry who ran the colonial governments, and political factions emerged. At the same time, Enlightenment ideas about free will and the power of reason circulated among educated people, causing some to doubt fundamental Calvinist doctrines, such as predestination and human depravity. Congregationalist clergymen preached obedience to the God-given order, but many people could not fit their lives into the old patterns--though they were haunted by guilt for their apostasy. In the first two decades of the century, Increase Mather and other clergymen concluded from their reading of the biblical prophecies that human society was descending into such a state of sin and chaos that God would intervene cataclysmically and Christ would return to deliver His judgment on mankind. Such was their sense of crisis.4 The revivals in New England began in 1734 in a citadel of orthodox Calvinism: the church of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts. The son and grandson of Congregationalist ministers, Edwards had studied science, or natural philosophy, as it was then called, at Yale and had read the works of Isaac Newton and John Locke. In college, he had struggled with the idea of Gods total sovereignty, but one day, walking in his fathers pasture, he had a conversion experience. Looking up at the sky and the clouds, he had, he later wrote, a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, and as he looked around, this divinity appeared to him in everything, the trees, the grass, and the water. Later in his theological works, he used the methods of the Enlightenment thinkers to revitalize Calvinist theology and to defend it from the clergy swayed by Enlightenment humanism. In 1729, at the age of twenty-six, he assumed the pulpit of his grandfathers church in Northampton. Finding that many in the parish, in particular the young, had fallen away from the moral standards of the church--there was "tippling," "carousing," and "chambering"--he went to work, holding meetings and prayer sessions around the parish. Five years later, while he was giving a series of sermons on justification by faith, an outbreak of religious fervor occurred in his parish. People laughed and wept, some saw visions, and many were filled with hope and joy. In the space of six months three hundred people were converted, bringing the total membership of his church to six hundred--nearly the whole adult population of the town. Visitors came to his church, and the revivals spread to towns up and down the Connecticut River and from thence to other parts of New England. In his account of these events, Edwards attributed the revival to a sudden, surprising descent of the Holy Spirit.5 Edwards was not a highly dramatic or emotional preacher--he read his sermons from a manuscript or detailed notes--but he nonetheless had a powerful ef Details ISBN1439131341 Author Frances FitzGerald Publisher Simon & Schuster Year 2018 ISBN-10 1439131341 ISBN-13 9781439131343 Format Paperback Imprint Simon & Schuster Childrens Publishing Subtitle The Struggle to Shape America Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States DEWEY 277.308 Pages 752 Illustrations 1x16pg b&w inserts; Short Title The Evangelicals Language English Publication Date 2018-04-24 NZ Release Date 2018-04-24 US Release Date 2018-04-24 UK Release Date 2018-04-24 AU Release Date 2018-05-31 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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