What is an evangelical? This question has animated the field of American religious history for at least four decades but returned to the forefront of both scholarly and public conversation after Donald Trump's success among white evangelical voters in the 2016 presidential election, despite the candidate's scant church attendance and apparent lack of biblical knowledge. Daniel Silliman, a historian trained in American Studies and the current news editor for Christianity Today, argues that despite the breadth of texts invested in defining “evangelicalism,” scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on “belief-based definitions” (6). Within the field, scholars debate whether theological beliefs or political beliefs take precedent. Yet, Silliman is deeply unhappy with both approaches. The theological argument initiates a process of scholarly gerrymandering that is both static and ahistorical. The political argument has an inevitability to it that not only discounts the presence of progressive evangelicals but fails to acknowledge that politics does not take up all the space in adherents’ lives. For Silliman, singular narrow religious identities cannot encompass the scope of evangelicalism and do not show the processes by which evangelicals form as a group. In contrast to belief-based definitions, Silliman argues “evangelicalism is better conceived as an imagined community, a rolling conversation organized by real structures and institutions in the world that make that conversation possible” (218). In Reading Evangelicals, Silliman encourages scholars to look at “the ongoing conversation that is represented by Christian bookstores” as one critical space to locate this community (9).

Evangelical publishing is by no means new. In the late nineteenth century, it operated predominantly along denominational lines. However, Silliman points out that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy produced a “new transdenominational print culture” (18). In the following decades, several important evangelical publishing houses such as Eerdmans and Zondervan emerged that shed their denominational constraints. Evangelical publishing swelled in the postwar period and increasingly evangelical publishers started to market their materials to the lay population. By the 1970s, evangelical bookstores were one of the fastest growing segments of the publishing market.

Reading Evangelicals traces the history of evangelicalism over four decades through five bestselling evangelical novels that each mark a distinct shift in the history of evangelical publishing. Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly (1979) inspired a generation of evangelical romance fiction. Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness (1986), an evangelical horror novel deeply influenced by theologian Francis Schaeffer's concept of clashing worldviews, encouraged evangelicals to engage in the broader culture. Silliman treats Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's Left Behind (1995) less as an explicitly political novel but as one that emerged out of a series of apologetics and intended to both extend evangelical cultural engagement and to convert unbelievers. Beverly Lewis's The Shunning (1998), which marked the rise of Amish fiction as a distinct category of evangelical publishing, embodied a broader late twentieth century focus among evangelicals on authenticity. William Paul Young's The Shack (2008) represented a post-modern turn in evangelical literature that not only shifted genres throughout the novel but challenged hegemonic evangelical ideas by reimagining God as a Black woman.

One of the real strengths of Reading Evangelicals is its discussion of evangelical fiction beyond the text. These novels struggled to either find a publisher or to become immediate successes. Love Comes Softly was rejected by both secular and evangelical presses before being given a chance by Bethany House, one of the few evangelical presses with a female editor. Despite its obvious resonance with the Religious Right, This Present Darkness did not sell well until Christian singer Amy Grant started to promote it. Left Behind was not an immediate crossover success. The Shack was published outside of evangelical publishing networks and was met with hostility from many evangelical leaders. Silliman never takes for granted the inevitability of any of these texts nor engages in reductive analysis of audience reception. He utilizes each novel to show what evangelicalism was at a given point, its mechanisms of structuring, and its internal tensions.

While pushing back against the simple equation of evangelicalism with political conservatism, Silliman concedes that there remained a political resonance in much evangelical fiction. Beyond the obvious political elements of This Present Darkness and Left Behind, Silliman writes that all five novels “prepared readers to imagine the world in certain ways and to embrace certain values” (211). Most prominent was a stress on individualism, nostalgia for a particular imagined American past, and opposition to pluralism. While none of the authors studied actively supported Trump (LaHaye died in July 2016), many of the themes present across the novels resonated with those of the Trump campaign.

Reading Evangelicals is wonderfully written. It provides both close textual readings and a deep historicization of each novel and the evangelical publishing industry. It engages with theorists, particularly Jürgen Habermas, but actively writes for a broad audience and dispels the complexity of theory. It importantly shifts thinking about what evangelicalism is away from belief-based definitions and to the development of a series of networks that shift over time. Silliman has followed up Reading Evangelicals with an insightful article on the founding of Christianity Today which further demonstrates the importance of networks rather than theological definitions as the key to understanding evangelical history (“An Evangelical is Anyone who Likes Billy Graham,” Church History, 2021). In this way, Silliman's scholarship allows for us to see the changes, contingencies, and histories embedded within evangelicalism.