Randall Balmer

It’s a kind of parlor game in some circles. Rattle off various misperceptions about what the Bible says.

As Lawrence Wright nicely chronicles, Jimmy Carter faced a daunting task at Camp David in 1978. Carter, Menachem Begin, and Anwar el-Sadat each had much at stake.

Matthew McCullough argues that the Spanish-American War signaled a crucial turning point in American self-understanding and self-justification.

One of the reasons I was drawn to Jimmy Carter, first as an emerging national politician in the mid-1970s and then as a biographical subject decades later, was the similarity of our backgrounds. Both of us were reared in evangelical households, he in rural southwest Georgia and I in Nebraska, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa. We are both the oldest in our families: Carter had three younger siblings, and I have four younger brothers. We had “born-again” experiences at an early age, Carter at age 11 and me initially at, well, three years old—but that is another story.

Jimmy Carter rode to the White House in 1976 on the twin currents of his reputation as a “New South” governor and a resurgence of progressive evangelicalism in the early 1970s. Progressive evangelicalism, which traces its lineage to 19th-century evangelicals and to the commands of Jesus to care for “the least of these,” represented a very different version of evangelical activism from that of the religious right.

At the heart of evangelicals’ conflicted identity, Molly Worthen argues, is the “struggle to reconcile reason with revelation, heart with head, and private piety with the public square.”