The goal of the book is to tell the whole Protestant story.
Some groups are liberal on some issues and practices and conservative on others.
For example, Trollinger says African-American Protestants generally embrace a conservative, evangelical interpretation of the Bible, yet in many ways they tend to be politically liberal. Reforming the Center evolved from discussions between Trollinger and a colleague, co-editor Douglas Jacobsen, while both were teaching at Messiah College in southwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1990s. It became clear to both of us that more and more historians and journalists were talking about American Protestantism in terms of 'conservative' and 'liberal' and 'right' and 'left,''' says Trollinger. And they were doing the same thing with American culture and politics. This just didn't make sense to us when we looked at the empirical facts.