How to make sense of twenty-first-century white evangelicals in the United States? This question, of course, has been responded to by a plethora of historians and social scientists. That it remains contested attests to both its significance and its controversy. More pointedly, historian Christopher Cantwell encapsulates the pressing concern: How could white evangelicals, “America’s self-described moral stewards,” find their way to “support a twice-divorced casino operator who struggled to pronounce books of the Bible?” (215). In other words, how do eight out of ten of these supposedly religious conservatives come to unrelentingly embrace a political movement (MAGA) led by a serial adulterer (President Donald Trump) who has claimed to have never asked for forgiveness? Well, Cantwell persuasively complicates explanations by tracing the life of a nostalgic Sunday School teacher from the West Side of Chicago during the early twentieth century in The Gospel According to Frank Wood: Memory and the Making of White American Evangelicalism. Cantwell’s careful narrative creatively explores the life of a seemingly insignificant Frank Wood to help illuminate the historical foundations of contemporary American white evangelicals.

Wood, for those unfamiliar (everyone reading this) with the man, taught his way into becoming a minor celebrity in the neighborhood around and beyond his congregation, Western Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. Though he was a lawyer, judge, publisher, amateur historian, and ran for public office at different points in his life, Wood’s most consequential role proved to be that of renowned Sunday School and Bible class organizer and instructor. His teaching career began in 1880 and ended shortly before he died in 1945. Within a decade of initiating his Bible class teaching, Wood could boast over 500 “home” and “absent” (those whom Wood had introduced to the idea of Bible classes but had left to attend elsewhere) members. The classes offered both engaging curricula and intimate community. Wood became so sought-after as an orator and consultant that he traveled to help dedicate new Bible classes from Michigan to Pennsylvania to Alabama.

Wood functions as Cantwell’s vehicle for better understanding because, though he became a footnote in history, his social biography reveals the synthesis of longing, nostalgia, and race within the faith of white evangelicals. In short, Wood epitomized the two impulses that would come to shape much of contemporary white evangelicalism. First, having migrated from rural Illinois to Chicago with his family as a child, Wood fixated on a romanticized, idyllic rural America. As he navigated the cacophony of the burgeoning and diversifying city, Wood cast his small-town, Protestant experience as the singular mode of life to be both preserved and pursued. History and its interpretation, then, become the keys to hanging on to what is good in the maelstrom of demographic transformation. Cantwell explains that more than a hobby, history for Wood became a “primary means” by which he “articulated both his faith and his view of the world as he navigated the social and cultural implications of his physical move to the city” (xv). Second, Wood’s life as a fundamentalist Bible class teacher highlights a white evangelical commitment to a nostalgic and highly racialized understanding of US history that narrowly portrayed only white Protestants as the country’s spiritual ancestors. As teacher and eventual amateur historian (he founded the West Side Historical Society), Wood expended enormous energy in engineering a bulwark against the ethnic diversity and social disorder he experienced in Chicago. In order to navigate modern anxiety in the chaotic city, Wood and his ilk created a “manufactured heritage that celebrated the work of white Protestants of Anglo-European descent” (15). In other words, Wood crafted a theology dependent on a form of racial chauvinism that depicted whiteness – particularly that of white Protestants – as the “apex of America’s past, present, and future” (16). To help refine the contours of the Christianity that Wood was helping to build (along figures like Billy Sunday, Henry P. Crowell, William Hartshorn, and Billy Graham – to name a few), there needed to be a looming threat – in this instance, cities, saloons, and non-Protestant immigrants fulfilled that role. Utilizing the recent theological concoction of premillennialism, these conservative white Christians understood the rapture as the solution to the myriad social problems of the urbanizing world: “Heaven, in short, was everything Chicago was not. A place defined by a kind of white, Protestant, blessed uniformity” (187). That nostalgia for a comfortable uniformity, according to Cantwell, “continues to guide [Wood’s] religious and familial heirs today” (172).

Again, Cantwell’s contribution here is to clearly mine archives and the memories of Wood’s descendants to reveal the complexity of the scaffolding that helped to construct contemporary white evangelicalism. In the same manner in which Wood used sanitized and sacralized memories to create a Bible class movement on the West Side of Chicago at the turn of the century, a lineage of white evangelicals continues through today to curate a “genealogy of white religious ancestors” who model “proper faith” during perilous times (204). These have included R.J. Rushdoony, Jerry Falwell, and David Barton. Similar to how the otherwise meticulous Wood somehow managed to scrub his own archival papers regarding his dalliances with the Socialist Party of America, the aforementioned ministers and “historian” offered a cleansed and contrived version of American history that rests on the notion that the nation’s prominence should be solely attributed to the faithful leadership of white, Protestant patriots and pioneers.

The Gospel According to Frank Wood serves as surprisingly necessary reading for those wanting to better understand the present manifestation of white evangelicals in America and the production of religious identity.