The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond
In one of the best products of the current publishing passion for authoritative briefs on big subjects, religious historian Balmer summarizes American Evangelicalism. There are four great turning points in American Evangelical history, he says: the transition from Calvinist to Arminian soteriology (i.e., from regarding grace to regarding conversion as essential to salvation) during the two Great Awakenings, the nineteenth-century eschatological shift from postmillennialism to premillennialism (i.e., from believing the Second Coming will follow to believing it will precede the realization of a Christian world), the creation of an apolitical subculture in the wake of the 1925 Scopes trial, and the rise of the religious Right; he devotes a chapter to each. Evangelicalism’s arguably greatest distinction is its malleability, as seems certainly attested by the polar nature of the change involved in the first and second developments as well as from the third to the fourth. Trenchantly criticizing the religious Right, Balmer hopes that twenty-first-century Evangelicalism will revive the nineteenth-century postmillenarian concern for justice that animated abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage. --Ray Olson