ON MY NIGHTSTAND

What I’m Reading: ‘The Evangelicals: The Struggle To Shape America’

Pulitzer winner Frances FitzGerald’s history of how evangelicals became power players in American politics

This is the second in a series of occasional posts about new or classic books I’m reading and why I chose them.

On my nightstand

The book: The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (first edition: Simon & Schuster, 2017)

The author: Frances FitzGerald, a journalist and historian who won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

What it is: A history of evangelicalism in America from the Puritan era through 2016 presidential election, in which Donald Trump won 81 percent of the evangelical vote. It was a finalist for a National Book Award and won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Why I’m reading it: My state, Alabama, the second highest percentage of evangelicals in America after Tennessee. As a non-evangelical, I arrived with a few expectations about the movement that my experiences have confounded, and I hope write about that.

But evangelicals often complain that others misunderstand them — for example, by using the words “evangelicals” and “fundamentalists” interchangeably when some of their views differ. I don’t want to add to the confusion by misrepresenting what they believe, and some critics see The Evangelicals as the gold standard among books about the history and influence of the conservative Protestant movement on American life.

Over 740 pages, FitzGerald covers more than the most influential religious leaders of yesteryear, such as Billy Graham and Jim Bakker. She also deals with recent trends such as the declining proportion of evangelicals among millennials and their growing numbers among Latinos who were born Catholic.

Sample quote: “No American revivalist before or since achieved the success that Billy Graham did in the middle years of the twentieth century. Indefatigable and constantly in motion, he evangelized on five continents and with the advantages of radio, television, and airplanes spoke to more people than any other preacher before in history….His lasting achievement was to bring the great variety of conservative white Protestants, North and South, into his capacious revival tent under the name ‘evangelicals.’ ”

You might like the first post in the “On My Nightstand” series: