This book is vintage Balmer. Breezily written, captivating, full of sociological insight, it scores political points by telling stories from the past. It is the latest shot in a lengthy lover's quarrel with the conservative, white, American Evangelicals of Balmer's Iowan youth – people much like Balmer's parents – who continue to populate the nearly dead Religious Right. It is not a scholarly book, despite its Baylor imprimatur. It has no footnotes, little patience with the complexity of its subject, no arguments directed at other students in the field. It oversimplifies and distorts most of the history that it relates. It does not represent the vast array of Evangelicals, but only their conservative, white, American constituents. Balmer tells his story by limning ‘four turning points’ (p. 6) that shaped the destiny of his Evangelical subjects: their alleged move from Calvinist to Arminian theology in service of revival; their shift from postmillennialism to premillennialism (mainly dispensationalism) at the time of the Civil War; their retreat into a subculture after the Scopes trial; and the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. It is the last of these four turning-points that Balmer handles best, even challenging the way in which many specialists depict it by attributing its rise, not to outrage over Roe v. Wade, but interest in ‘defending … the sanctity of the evangelical subculture from outside interference’ (p. 64). This is a very good read. It may not ever change the minds of many academic experts, but one hopes that some of its moral pleading will make a positive difference in the realm of Christian cultural engagement.