The Anointed both continues and departs from a rich tradition of evangelical self-critique. As an exposé of evangelical narrow-mindedness that also contains elements of a jeremiad, it harkens back to Mark Noll's seminal The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), not to mention Carl F. H. Henry's near mythical The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1947). Stephens, a historian, and Giberson, a physicist, self-identify as evangelicals and spent several years as colleagues at an evangelical university. Like their predecessors, they clearly seek a more intellectually serious brand of evangelicalism.

In other respects, though, The Anointed is a different book for different times—much more scholarly intervention than sermon. The authors do not write as frustrated stewards or wounded lovers. If they preach at all, their choir takes its notes from The New York Times, not World. After more than three decades of national banter over the Christian Right and the culture wars, a diverse array of actors has a stake in their subject matter. The “parallel culture” of modern American evangelicalism, Stephens and Giberson argue, features an array of experts whose authority to discuss essentially secular matters derives from their claim of “speaking directly to and for God” (20). Fairly or not, these experts “project a public face for evangelicalism in America” (5).

Stephens and Giberson analyze the “anointed” experts who, they contend, hold hegemonic sway in the diverse but overwhelmingly illiberal world of popular American evangelicalism. Their ranks include Ken Ham, a professional young earth creationist and the force behind Kentucky's Creation Museum; David Barton, a God and country historian who doubles as a GOP insider; and Hal Lindsey, whose popularization of premillenialist eschatology paved the way for the Left Behind bestsellers. Along with many of the usual suspects on the evangelical right and several of their lesser-known progenitors and peers, they receive profiles that will prove informative for specialists and general readers alike. In less systematic fashion, the authors also explore Christian schools and other venues that link the anointed to vast audiences.

Stephens and Giberson brilliantly delineate the social location of these powerful mediators. Plenty of evangelicals do not much care for them; but Stephens and Giberson rightly suggest that they speak to and for the evangelical base. The experts are “anointed,” in the sense of being blessed and called to proclaim the truth to fellow believers. Only some of them are formally credentialed, even as ministers or theologians. Even family values mogul James Dobson, who did earn a Ph.D. in a relevant field, constantly reiterates his educational status. Honorary doctorates are much more common. Yet such distinctions are, by definition, academic. The authors label Barton an “amateur historian,” meaning that he is not part of the historians' guild (62). The anointed thrive by ignoring such categories. They are populists who combine declarations of moral clarity with a gift for changing the subject. While they rail on postmodern relativism, they are the ones who make no distinction between polemics and scholarship. An avowedly Christian “worldview,” not rigor, is what matters most.

This is an important book. Anyone with an interest in modern American evangelicalism (including an aversion to) should crack its pages. Smartly written and skillfully framed, The Anointed offers more of a phenomenological account than a historical narrative. Readers do get a general sense of change over swaths of time, learning, for example, that the original dons of fundamentalism did not fret much over evolution. No one will come away thinking that Ken Ham is one of a kind. Still, over three decades have passed since George Gallup, Jr., declared 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” and readers get only a partial understanding of how the “parallel culture” did or did not evolve during those eventful years.

The “parallel culture” thesis is compelling, but unduly limits the significance of Stephens and Giberson's subject matter. More than their metaphor will allow, the book often concerns intersections. The authors wisely avoid interpreting evangelical experts solely through the lens of contemporary politics. Without question, though, more than a few of the anointed have worked their way into the pantheon of popular conservatism (and in turn have received sustenance from it). The conservative movement, of course, likewise features a self-sustaining but hardly monolithic alternate universe of think tankers whose purported raison d'être is to one day became the culture. They are, in effect, tenured reactionaries. David Barton will not be invited to review in these pages anytime soon, yet he is faculty in good standing at (Glenn) Beck University.

On an obvious level, this book demonstrates the immense gap between self-styled evangelical experts and bona fide evangelical scholars. On a much more complex level, it is evidence of their unfriendly mutuality. A very different set of experts—more than a few of them evangelical academics—have dedicated their careers to telling the rest of America why evangelicals are important. They also repeatedly remind the larger public that evangelicals can successfully combine their personal faiths with serious commitments to science and learning. Many of them have cameos in The Anointed. Francis Collins, an outspoken believer best known as the past leader of the Human Genome Project and the current head of National Institutes of Health, is one of the book's heroes. These thoughtful evangelicals, as they might be called, are a vital component of Evangelicalism, Inc., too, not least because their constituency consists largely of non-evangelicals. For that very reason, they often face the wrath of the anointed and others in the conservative movement. Yet the persistence of thoughtful evangelicalism and the broader public's interest in its existence suggest that many lines cut across the evangelical parallel culture.