Despite its generic title, Randall Balmer's new book packs a wallop. Perhaps more accurately understood as “The Making and Un-Making of Evangelicalism,” Balmer's collection of essays on American evangelical leadership leads to one simple conclusion: the Christian Right has betrayed American evangelicals' values and heritage.
Professor of American Religious History at Barnard College, Randall Balmer is the renowned author or co-author of twelve other books, including the short narrative Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America (Boston: Beacon, 1999), and host of the 1989 PBS series on the same subject. His concern with evangelicals' entanglement in American electoral politics is not new. “Whatever happened to the scandal of the gospel,” he writes in the companion volume to the PBS series, “Jesus' invitation to forsake everything—family and fishing boats, beachhouses and BMWs—to follow Him?” (Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 231). “I write as a jilted lover,” he begins a more recent work, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Rights Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, An Evangelical's Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006). “The evangelical faith . . . has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who have distorted the gospel of Jesus Christ, defaulted on the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, and failed to appreciate the genius of the First Amendment” (ix).
Balmer's lament is one shared by other scholars, among them Mark Noll, whose The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994) similarly begins, “This book is an epistle from a wounded lover” (ix). And George Marsden concludes the new edition of Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): “A safe bet . . . is that the simplistic and polarizing proposals of alarmists on either the secular left or the Religious Right are more likely to inflame the social tension rather than to provide a cure” (257). But while Noll's and Marsden's scholarship has focused on evangelical intellectual—and anti-intellectual—traditions, Balmer's has engaged with the beliefs of everyday evangelical folk and their unfamiliarity with their own history: one that emerged from powerful countercultural forces; that flourished in the fresh air of religious freedom; and that spearheaded attacks on social and racial injustice from the beginnings of the new republic.
In his latest work, The Making of Evangelicalism, Balmer now turns to the leadership of America's “folk religion,” and how it has changed course four times in American history. “It won't surprise you,” he writes at the outset, addressing the evangelical reader, “that I believe evangelicals now . . . face another fork in the road. The election of Barack Obama . . . dealt a mortal blow to the Religious Right, although it will continue to thrash about for awhile.” The question remains: “Where do we go from here?” (7).
Balmer's four turning points begin with the new free will soteriology of the First and Second Awakeners, created out of the confluence of Puritanism, continental Pietism, and Scots-Irish Presbyterianism; to the postmillennial perfectionism of nineteenth-century reformers; the premillennial retreat of twentieth-century fundamentalists; and finally the emergence of the Radical Right in the election of 1980.
His theological innovators will be familiar: George Whitefield, Charles Finney, William Miller, John Nelson Darby, Lyman and Milton Stewart, Bob Jones, Carl F. H. Henry, Aimee Semple McPherson, J. Gresham Machen, and Billy Graham, among others; as well as the activists of the late twentieth century: Jerry Falwell, Ed Dobson, Pat Robertson, and briefly the American presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. Balmer's most striking assertions appear in chapter 4, where he describes how in 1971 the Radical Right emerged in reaction to a little known district court case, Green v. Connally, which barred tax-exempt status for institutions practicing racial discrimination: a judgment overwhelmingly supported by the Supreme Court in a challenge brought by Bob Jones University in 1982. As Balmer quotes conservative Paul Weyrich: “What caused the movement to surface . . . was the federal government's moves against Christian schools,” not, as is so often assumed, the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade (64–65).
The Making of Evangelicalism is elegantly written, precise, and cogent, with Balmer's trademark conversational style and easy connections between past and present throughout. He makes a strong argument, although some of his conclusions must be taken on faith, since the book provides a bibliography but no reference notes. One can quibble about the choice of turning points. Scholars of the American Revolution, for example, would make more of the shift in evangelical theology that liberation from Europe brought forth, not least of all the power of Wesleyan Methodism in the early republic: virtually obliterating orthodox Calvinism as a popular force in America, and parenting, at least distantly, Holiness and Pentecostal Churches that were to become important players in twentieth-century fundamentalism.
And despite the main point regarding evangelicalism's natural ties to liberalism, absent here is the role of evangelical Populists in the Gilded Age in creating some of the most important electoral and tax reforms that Americans still rely on for a functioning and equitable society; and the prominent place of liberal evangelicals in American politics. Given that all three Democratic presidents since 1976 have been born-again Christians, the question of how liberal evangelicals reconcile their faith with their political ideology is well worth a study of its own.
Balmer's prediction regarding the demise of the Religious Right is premature, although the movement is so dominated by “Know-Nothing” anti-intellectualism that its credibility as a national creed is certainly in question. It is encouraging that Baylor University Press has put Randall Balmer's manifesto on its list, perhaps marking a return to the rich diversity—as opposed to lockstep conformity—of doctrinal beliefs, social ideals, and reformist adaptability that evangelicalism once represented in the United States, before the challenges of the twentieth century sent it into long exile and powerful but belligerent re-emergence in the postmodern age.
