Since evangelicals emerged as a significant voting bloc in the late 1970s, both insiders and scholars have sought to define and explain the movement. Those attempts now represent an academic cottage industry, and at times heated disagreements have made a commonly accepted definition nearly impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, a standard narrative has emerged, one that tracks through the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early twentieth century to the post-World War II attempt of “neoevangelicals” to distance themselves from the angry and joyless demeanor of their fundamentalist ancestors to the political group that may have included Jimmy Carter but who broke for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Despite the efforts of some insiders to insist on an exclusively theological and historical understanding of their movement, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 highlighted the fact that many Americans viewed evangelical primarily as a political category.

Isaac B. Sharp's excellent monograph demonstrates that any generally accepted understanding of evangelical was the product of intentional efforts across the twentieth century to draw and enforce boundaries that were generic enough to include some conservative Protestants but specific enough to exclude others. According to Sharp, the appearance of a “rhetorical consensus . . . consistently belied the fragility of a coalition built upon an evangelical identity pragmatically constructed to allow for significant internal diversity” (27). In Sharp's narrative, “the evangelicals became the evangelicals” because a group of self-appointed leaders engaged in a series of internal power struggles against “a variety of upstart movements, minoritized groups, and dissenting voices that emerged from within the twentieth-century evangelical world” (29). These gatekeepers often defended their actions through appeals to theological orthodoxy and biblical fidelity, but they overlooked the fact that their opponents almost always claimed to share similar theological and biblical positions. That is, while the “others” often believed there was room to co-exist, “the evangelicals” – Sharp sometimes identifies them as “capital-E Evangelicals” – insisted on an increasingly narrow definition that left “the evangelical losers” in their wake (30).

Sharp devotes one chapter to each of the “other evangelicals” that found themselves on the wrong side of proper evangelical boundaries: “Liberals,” “Black Evangelicals,” “Progressives,” “Feminists,” and “Gay Evangelicals.” There is some chronological overlap between these groups. Nevertheless, each group enjoyed its own historical and political moment, and Sharp's narrative demonstrates how evangelical gatekeepers drew boundaries based on outside forces that reflected contemporary social, cultural, and political concerns rather than theology. The least politically fraught of Sharp's categories is the “Liberals,” modernist thinkers like Harry Emerson Fosdick, who demonstrated that “liberals” and conservatives could coexist under the evangelical label “far longer than is often remembered” (61). Eventually, Sharp argues, their falling out – or, more accurately, conservatives’ ability to force modernists out of the evangelical camp – occurred in ways that would inform later treatment of marginalized would-be evangelicals. That is, internal disputes over the inerrancy of the Bible and ecumenical movements prompted “the evangelicals” to circle their wagons.

With the marginalization of “liberals” and stubborn defense of inerrancy as the starting point, evangelical gatekeepers then expanded their criteria to include race, politics, gender, and sexual orientation. From within each of the “other” groups, activists challenged evangelicals to confront contemporary issues that could no longer be ignored, or their biblical position taken for granted. Despite many black conservative Protestant Christians’ presence in white spaces and their theological simpatico with whites, most white evangelicals refused to acknowledge their own complicity in the nation's racism. They questioned whether Martin Luther King, Jr. was even a “born again” Christian or believed the Bible was the Word of God. If they could challenge that, as black evangelist Tom Skinner explained their thinking, “then we think we can dismiss what he said” (105). Similarly, progressives like Ron Sider, feminists like the members of the Evangelical Women's Caucus, and LGBTQ activists like Ralph Blair and opponents of the “ex-gay movement” all ran afoul of evangelical caretakers, who challenged their reading of scripture and questioned their Christian bona fides. Despite their repeated claims to biblical truth and Christian orthodoxy, when the dust settled, they found themselves outside the proper evangelical fold.

Sharp's historical analysis lands squarely in the middle of a contemporary debate provoked by an overwhelming majority of self-described evangelicals’ support for Trump. Indeed, Sharp concludes his study with a discussion of the fallout among evangelicals in the wake of Trump's 2016 victory. A 2018 soul-searching gathering of evangelical leaders at Wheaton College gave Fuller Theological Seminary president Mark Labberton the opportunity to lament evangelicalism's unhealthy attraction to worldly power, racism, nationalism, and capitalism. Labberton acknowledged that the current divisions could not be attributed to theological disagreements. Instead, they were evidence that, in Sharp's words, different reactions to Trumpism “were being driven primarily by social, cultural, and ideological forces” (267). Sharp concedes the point, but the value of his book is that it demonstrates how current evangelical self-evaluations are “often historically myopic” (270). Instead, Sharp marshals compelling evidence from a diverse group of thinkers and activists that those non-theological forces have long been the driving factors in delineating evangelical identity.

This book represents a welcome attempt to synthesize and build on what other scholars have accomplished over the past two generations. Sharp has read widely both in the secondary literature and published primary and archival sources, and Sharp's insightful treatment of the historiography is excellent. It should be read both by graduate students who are looking to understand the history of the scholarly treatment of this movement and those who are simply looking for a model of what a historiographical essay should be. This book is not the final word, of course, but subsequent debates over the appropriate definition and nature of evangelicalism must contend with Sharp's argument.