Corwin E. Smidt's American Evangelicals Today draws upon the Pew Forum's Religious Landscape Survey (2007) and the Paul B. Henry Institute's National Survey on Religion (2008), among other polls, to sketch a contemporary portrait of American evangelicals that covers their social profile, religious beliefs and behaviors, and politics. Smidt's portrait emerges in a series of comparisons to other religious groups in the United States (Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, and unaffiliated Americans), to American evangelicals of previous generations, and within the evangelical community along such axes as race, educational level, and age. The result is a glimpse at a much-discussed community that often, but not always, conforms to what Smidt calls the “common wisdom about evangelicals” (1). As one might expect, evangelicals are concentrated in the South, attend church more regularly than other Americans, defer to the Bible with greater emphasis, and show the least propensity to believe in the science of evolution — trends, moreover, that have only strengthened in recent decades, even surviving among younger and college-educated believers. However, American evangelicals exhibit far less unity on social and political issues than the Christian Right leaders with whom they are commonly associated in the press. While they are, for instance, the least likely among the groups surveyed to agree with the statement, “Government should do more to help needy Americans,” a solid majority (57%) of evangelicals nevertheless affirms this statement, and that proportion falls within 10% of all other groups except for Black Protestants (133–134). Smidt also isolates several issues on which millennial evangelicals (those born after 1980) differ from the older generation, including attitudes toward homosexuals and environmental protection. In a daring epilogue, Smidt extrapolates the data on millennials to project that evangelicalism will continue to grow over the next four decades even as other Americans drift from their religious moorings, but that evangelicals will exhibit less and less cohesion in national elections as their ranks diversify and their politics expand.

The contributions and drawbacks of Smidt's analysis come fully encased in the surveys on which it is based. Smidt offers the study as a “rank-and-file” corrective over depictions of American evangelicals that rely on “elite” texts and speeches (213). For such a project, there is no better starting place than the Religious Landscape Survey — with over 60 questions and 35,000 interviews, it is the most comprehensive poll on religion ever conducted. The Henry Institute Survey, which Smidt directed, came as an election year follow-up to the RLS, and largely confirms the Pew findings. What Smidt achieves in his painstaking analysis of the data constitutes a major step forward for understanding evangelical laity in America; his work advances the best research of Wuthnow, Greeley, and Hout.

American Evangelicals Today, however, also showcases the challenges of survey research and its limitations for achieving a rich comprehension of a religious community. The ambiguities begin with the demarcation of the evangelical church itself. Smidt adopts (and defends) the Religious Landscape's methodology, which is to treat evangelicals as a social group rather than as a self-classifying category. Thus, instead of including all survey respondents who call themselves evangelical, or who affirm certain doctrines — or who report having a “born again” experience — the RLS counts as evangelical those who affiliate with particular denominations and autonomous churches. This approach has the advantage of observing evangelicals as an interactive community and not just as isolated bearers of certain characteristics. However, Smidt leaves the reader guessing as to which churches meet the evangelical criteria, or even what those criteria might be (the RLS provides a list of evangelical denominations in its appendix without describing the qualifications). Thus the precise border between evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism remains something of a mystery throughout the study. Also, while this mode of identification allows for interesting variations within the evangelical community — on everything from religious beliefs to social ethics — it largely fails to account for these variations. Smidt does control for race, education, and age on most questions, but not for denomination, geography, socioeconomic status, or gender — all factors which might well affect someone's response.

Even bracketing these concerns, there are gaps in the portrait worth noting. For instance, the exclusive focus on American respondents raises the question as to how deeply the national culture shapes their social, political, and even religious views. Data on Brazilian, Kenyan, Canadian, and South Korean evangelicals would sharpen our understanding of American evangelical idiosyncrasies even more than comparisons to Catholics and mainline Protestants in the United States. Smidt suggests as much when he observes that evangelicals “hold positions on most political issues that are largely reflective of those expressed by other Americans” (192). Also, the study does not measure religious migration; knowing how many current evangelicals have left behind other faith traditions (and vice versa) is a vital compositional statistic for a community that historically emphasizes the conversion experience. Smidt's determination, finally, to focus on “non-elite” survey data, removes him from conversations concerning the influence of semi-elites — local pastors and ministry leaders — on the evangelical world, a world that is gripped by serious divisions on preaching and musical styles, allocations of tithes, and strategies of evangelism. Even as Smidt opts to study evangelicals as a social group, he leaves the internal dynamics of that community largely unexplored. These are all fertile subjects for other projects, however. Smidt more than achieves what he sets out to achieve, and the wealth of data he unearths will prove useful to a vast array of scholars.