This book is ambitious. It is both a synthesis and a monograph, deeply researched in primary sources, and an attempt to distill a great deal of recent scholarship on the modern evangelical movement, that group of conservative Protestants who called themselves “fundamentalists” in the first half of the twentieth century some of whom sought to reclaim the older term “evangelical” during the Cold War, into a single volume. Along the way, Matthew Avery Sutton reintroduces us to familiar characters like Carl Henry, Billy Graham, or Billy Sunday, and introduces us to more individuals whom those casually interested in evangelical history may be unfamiliar with, including Philip Mauro, Mark Matthews, and John Roach Straton. Sutton constructs a new synthesis of American evangelicalism in the twentieth century, turning familiar arguments on their head and illustrating the relevance of understudied factors. He ranges over more than a hundred years of history, spends time with dozens of characters, and cites a dizzying array of archives and published sources. It is because the book is so big—in every sense—that readers might be more conscious of its limitations than they might otherwise, bumping up against walls that would seem distant in a less ambitious project. Nonetheless, this book will stand as one of the pivotal works on modern evangelicalism.

The through-line Sutton uses to bring order to this welter of chaos is the end of the world. For Sutton, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism—simply put, belief that the world would descend into disarray and turmoil before the second coming of Jesus Christ, and that the patterns of decay were prophesied in scripture, knowable for those who have eyes to see—is the lens through which twentieth-century evangelicals engaged with American life. As he puts it, “fundamentalists’ and evangelicals’ confidence that time was running out defined who they were, how they acted, and how they related to those around them” (xiv). This argument is noteworthy—it is perhaps too reductionist, but in Sutton's hands it gives undeniable force and focus to the narrative.

Some of what Sutton has to say has become familiar to scholars of modern evangelicalism. He affirms the emerging agreement that evangelicals were active and engaged with American politics throughout the twentieth century, rather than, as common consensus once had it, beating a bitter retreat from view after the Scopes trial of 1925 until they rose in frustration and revolt against the apostate Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. One of Sutton's great contributions is that he not only dismantles this sort of jack-in-the-box reading of evangelicalism (to paraphrase Jon Butler), but offers a new narrative to replace it, structured around his theme of apocalyptic premillennialism.

For instance, historians have long understood how pivotal World War I was for conservative evangelicals. It appeared to them the logical conclusion of decades of Western civilization's sin. Historians usually mark it as the beginning of the fundamentalist controversy, in which conservative Protestants engaged in theological warfare with liberal Protestants. Sutton, though, links World Wars I and II together to construct a broader narrative that demonstrates that the seeds of the Religious Right were evident as early as the 1910s and 1920s. He locates conservative Protestants complaining about birth control, gender roles, and depravity in the media as early as the 1910s, and demonstrates how such concerns about immorality made conservative evangelicals ambivalent about supporting such a corrupt society in the war that decade. By the time of World War II, however, as Sutton says, “the increasing intersections of fundamentalists’ theology with their political concerns, combined with the perception that World War II was preparing the world for Armageddon, made it easier for radical evangelicals to commit to the fight” (275). Fundamentalists emerged from World War II committed not only to their moral convictions, but also to the notion of the United States as a special, chosen, Christian nation. For the origins of the Religious Right, then, Sutton believes we have to go all the way back to the time of Billy Sunday.

This narrative of continuity rather than change requires us to discard, or at least downplay, sturdy old warhorses like the Scopes trial or Roe v. Wade. Instead, describing a series of key turning points, Sutton emphasizes persistence. For him, evangelicals of the 1920s and evangelicals of the Religious Right share more than not, and a figure like Jerry Falwell differed from Billy Graham or the radio broadcaster and educator Charles Fuller in no significant theological sense; Falwell was simply willing to organize evangelicals to vote.

The inexorable end of Sutton's narrative is Jerry Falwell doing just that, and spearheading the rise of evangelicalism as a major force in the modern Republican Party driven by preoccupation with the threat of civilizational decay. That is both a strength and weakness. This focus gives the book narrative force, but it also limits Sutton's reach. He is interested in that which makes modern evangelicalism political; he neglects that which does not. This means, then, that some major figures in contemporary evangelicalism—the conservative theologian J. Gresham Machen, for one—are largely ignored. The same can be said for some pietist traditions that did not engage with these movements, or for evangelical life, devotion, or practice, things Sutton is not interested in. It also means that he is fixed on the usual cast of characters. His evangelicals are overwhelmingly male theologians or activists, and he draws extensively upon the periodicals and publications of the dispensationalist movement; it is therefore little surprise that he produces the vision of evangelicalism that he does. Sutton periodically checks in with African American evangelicals, but their integration into the narrative is somewhat cursory. That said, Sutton earns his subtitle. He offers a powerful and sweeping narrative that must be reckoned with by every student of evangelical Christianity in America.