Since Michael Kazin's injunction, two decades ago, for Americanists to study the rise of the religious right, there has been a veritable deluge of scholarly work done on this subject. Unfortunately, the weight of so much scholarship can sometimes create an overly deterministic sense of inevitability about the ascendance of this movement. David Swartz's recently published first book provides a salutary corrective to this perception, filling a major lacuna in the previous literature on this period: in Moral Minority, he narrates for us the story of the postwar American evangelical left. In doing so, he reveals the vibrancy of the early to mid-1970s – a time when American religious denominations and political parties were both still very much in flux, and the ultimate outcome of neither was at all certain. In lucid and crisp prose, Swartz re-creates for us that brief but brilliant window of time, the idiosyncratic characters who populated it, and their expansive freedom of religious and political movement in an environment that was still plastic.

Moral Minority cleaves into three sections, divided chronologically, that, taken together, trace the arc of the movement's rise and fall – namely “An Emerging Evangelical Left,” “A Broadening Coalition,” and “Left Behind.” The first chapter is effectively a primer on the story of the politicization of American evangelicals. Grounding the narrative through an extended portrait of Carl Henry, founding editor of the flagship evangelical publication Christianity Today, Swartz fleshes out the shift over the 1950s and 1960s from isolationist dispensationalist eschatology to growing recognition of the importance of social engagement. The rough outlines will be well known to any reader familiar with the story of the emerging evangelical right. As Swartz correctly emphasizes in this chapter, American evangelicals' political commitments at this point were highly varied and did not easily identify with any one party, and the fact that evangelicals would eventually mobilize for the conservatives was a conclusion that was by no means foregone.

The next seven chapters consist of a series of imbricated portraits of key evangelical left figures and the issues they championed, through which Swartz attempts to piece together a coherent impression of the rise of the movement more broadly. Figures given major treatment include those of highly varying confessional and vocational persuasions – John Alexander, Jim Wallis, Mark Hatfield, Sharon Gallagher, Samuel Escobar, Richard Mouw, and Ron Sider – and these are used to explore, respectively, the emerging evangelical left's attitudes towards racial justice, Vietnam, electoral politics, spiritual community, the global reflex, the reforming of evangelical politics, and simple living. These chapters function best as stand-alone case studies that illumine particular corners of the evangelical fringes. One emerges from reading them with a very detailed and clear understanding of a handful of key individuals, and the specific progressive concerns that were preoccupying them and their close confrères. However, this comes at the expense of a sense of the evangelical left movement globally, and of how all of these characters and issues fit together within it as a whole.

Then again, perhaps that amorphous incoherence is in fact the overarching point of the book. As Swartz tells it, the evangelical left was less a united movement than a common religious and cultural sensibility – the melding of theological conservatism with political progressivism, and the belief in a theological mandate for social reform. Its ecumenical fluidity allowed its ethos partially to permeate even the most iconic bastions of American evangelical conservatism, Wheaton College and Christianity Today. Yet this multifarious nature would also become its undoing. In the final four chapters of Moral Minority, Swartz catalogues what ultimately proved to be abortive attempts to coalesce the disparate strands of the evangelical left into political movement. Focussing on the 1973 Chicago Declaration and the meeting a year later that succeeded it, the book argues that the nascent movement collapsed around differing social visions, especially involving the identity politics of race, gender, and denominational theological alignments. Additionally, the evangelical left found itself on the wrong side of rapidly hardening religio-political divides, and was met with hostility both by the broader left, which had begun to court secularists in earnest, and also by an increasingly politicized religious right. Although they eventually joined the antiabortion bandwagon in an effort to find common ground with conservative evangelicals, it proved to be too little, too late. The legacy of the evangelical left was not the victory of the progressive causes that they championed; rather, it was in inspiring the evangelical right to shift from an individual to a communal moral sensibility, and in their appropriation of the methods of the left for their own protest.

Swartz's thesis is compelling and generally well articulated, and the book represents an admirable starting point for discussion of the evangelical left. However, various loose ends remain. Not only would it be helpful to have a more integrated portrait of the rise of the movement, as mentioned above, but it would also be instructive to have a more fine-grained analysis of the ways in which it interacted with the growing evangelical right, especially regarding the issues around which the latter was increasingly mobilizing (pornography, abortion, sexual morality, etc.). Swartz seems to suggest that the evangelical left's late adoption of an antiabortion platform was largely the result of a last-gasp practical bid to unite their fragmenting movement in the shadow of an emerging right concerned about the issue. One wonders whether it can be reduced to such moral realpolitik, rather than seen as a natural outgrowth of their social ethic. In addition, it is unclear beyond this what sympathy or otherwise the evangelical left had for the right's so-called “family values” issues; given the former's generally conservative theological stance, it is at least conceivable that there was some common purpose. Similarly, Swartz suggests, but does not adequately demonstrate, that the evangelical right's growing social engagement and protest tactics were inspired by and borrowed from their counterparts on the left. Given that this is the first book on the subject, these qualifications function more as starting points for further research than as criticism of Swartz's work per se. Moral Minority covers important but heretofore untrodden ground, and its gripping story will prove a useful addition to the library of anyone interested in postwar American evangelicalism's political alignments.