Reading evangelical history with one eye closed

One would think that the decision on the part of a distinguished author such as Frances FitzGerald to take on the sweep of evangelicalism in America would be cause for celebration. Fitz­Gerald wrote an acclaimed history of the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake, and a lively book about American visions of community, Cities on a Hill. But this hefty book’s coverage of a broad and internally diverse movement is curiously pinched and narrow—and not merely because the author elects to omit the rich tradition of African-American evangelicalism.

The Evangelicals suffers from the common disease of presentism: the author takes the current political manifestations of evangelicalism as the essential clue to its historical identity. Fitz­Gerald dispatches with two centuries of evangelical history—everything up to the time of the Scopes Trial of 1925—by page 142. Her approach also betrays a bias for the Reformed or Calvinist strain of evangelicalism, with its emphasis on theological orthodoxy, as opposed to the Wesleyan-holiness strain and its focus on personal and social reform. (Donald Dayton’s indispensable account of the latter tradition, Discovering an Evangeli­cal Heritage, which would have provided some balance, appears nowhere in her extensive bibliography.) The effect is somewhat akin to viewing a landscape with one eye closed. Yes, the other eye makes adjustments, but the depth and texture of the panorama is lost.

FitzGerald begins her narrative with the Great Awakening of the 18th century. She mentions the three Ps that came together in that colonies-wide revival—Pietism, Presbyterianism, and Puritan­ism—although the emphasis clearly is on theologian Jonathan Edwards and the vestiges of New England Puritanism. Dating the Awakening to Northampton in 1734, she ignores several precursors to evangelicalism who appeared decades prior (including Edwards’s grandfather Solomon Stoddard, the Dutch ministers Guilliam Bertholf and Theodorus Jaco­bus Frelinghuysen, and the Swedish pietist Lutheran Lars Tollstadius). She mistakenly locates the center of the Dutch Reformed revival in New York rather than New Jersey.