Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation.

In Balmer's interpretation, authentic American Evangelicalism is politically progressive, with deeply-rooted concerns about poverty and women's rights. Balmer, in accordance with most other historians of Evangelicalism (including Fitzgerald), traces the roots of American Evangelicalism to the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, when evangelists such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield began to place a renewed emphasis on the necessity of individual conversion and a personal relationship with Christ to be right with God. These beliefs, Balmer argues, have often led Evangelicals to take progressive political positions, because Evangelicalism has traditionally combined a liberal suspicion of tradition and hierarchy with a commitment to social justice and an optimistic expectation of personal and social transformation. The foundations of American Evangelical theology may have developed in the First Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, but its political commitments were forged in the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, when northern Evangelicals who were influenced by the preaching of antebellum revivalists such as Charles Finney embarked on campaigns to eradicate slavery, help the poor and address the inequities of the market economy. They were critical of unregulated capitalism and the power of wealth, and they held views on human rights that were progressive for their time.

Sometime in the twentieth century, Balmer asserts, American Evangelicalism lost its way and was coopted by politically conservative forces that promoted a policy agenda distinctly at odds with the historic American Evangelical tradition. Evangelicals lost faith in the possibility of perfecting society, and exchanged their postmillennialism for premillennial apocalypticism. They made peace with business interests. And they exchanged their progressive views of women's rights for anti-feminist patriarchal traditions. In the end, a group of New Right activists allied with fundamentalist pastors who were concerned about federal interference in segregated Christian schools and created a political movement to bring their fellow white Evangelicals into the Republican Party in order to protect their institutions against federal civil rights legislation. The movement repudiated President Jimmy Carter – a fellow Evangelical who was a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher – and instead voted for the divorced former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan because they appreciated his very un-Baptist opposition to the separation of Church and State.

Balmer's book serves as both a lament and an exhortation. The alliance of American Evangelicals with political conservatism has been a betrayal of the best aspects of their tradition, he believes, but it is still not too late for American Evangelicalism to rediscover its politically progressive roots.

There is a certain amount of truth to the broad outlines of Balmer's narrative, because American Evangelicals did become more politically conservative over time. It is difficult to imagine, for instance, what one of the leading figures of antebellum American Evangelicalism – Charles Finney, the early nineteenth-century New York revivalist who was a strong antislavery advocate and an early president of Oberlin College – would have thought of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Yet Balmer's selective coverage exaggerates the magnitude of this shift. By focusing his discussion of early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism on the revivalists and social activists of the Second Great Awakening, he leaves readers with the impression that antebellum American Evangelicalism was more uniformly politically progressive than it was.

Frances Fitzgerald's richly detailed and wide-ranging historical narrative presents a more nuanced picture. While some of the reformers of the Second Great Awakening were indeed socially and economically progressive, there were also plenty of social conservatives among the millions of antebellum American Evangelicals. At the same time that Finney was speaking out against slavery, southern Calvinists such as James Henley Thornwell defended it. In recounting the history of the early nineteenth century, Balmer devotes far more attention to Methodists than to Calvinist Presbyterians, and he focuses more analysis on the North than the South. But Fitzgerald, in an echo of Christine Leigh Heyrman's Bancroft Award-winning Southern cross: the beginnings of the Bible belt, shows that in the South even the Methodists quickly made peace with slavery and patriarchy, so a history of southern Evangelicalism in the antebellum era would look very different from a history of the northern wing of the movement.

What happened to the socially progressive northern Evangelicals of the antebellum era? Balmer does not continue his coverage of Oberlin and the northern Evangelicals after the Civil War, leaving readers with the impression that this wing of the movement simply disappeared. Fitzgerald, by contrast, devotes extensive coverage to the late nineteenth-century phase of the story. In reality, the denominations and colleges associated with the Second Great Awakening revivalists did not disappear, nor, for the most part, did they abandon their progressive political vision. They did, however, eventually distance themselves from the Evangelical movement as their theology evolved into mainline or liberal Protestantism. Many of the socially progressive Protestant institutions of the twentieth century were direct descendants of the Evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening. The Christian Century, the nation's leading liberal Protestant periodical, was founded by a Disciples of Christ editor who was part of a denomination that could trace its founding to the early nineteenth-century Evangelical revivalist Barton Stone. Indeed, nearly all of the major denominations associated with northern Evangelicalism in the antebellum era evolved into mainline Protestant institutions sometime after the Civil War. The northern Methodists and Presbyterians who had been at the forefront of the antislavery campaign in the antebellum period retained their progressive political commitments in the twentieth century, even while abandoning their Evangelical roots. And a host of colleges founded in the Second Great Awakening – including Finney's Oberlin – retained their politically progressive heritage, even while exchanging their Evangelical theology for an ecumenical liberal Protestant vision. The political shift in twentieth-century American Evangelicalism was not so much an exchange of a progressive political vision for a conservative one, as Balmer suggests, but was rather a parting of the ways between two distinct wings of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism. The most politically progressive sectors of the nineteenth-century Evangelical tradition adopted a liberal Protestant theology in the early twentieth century, and eventually stopped using the ‘Evangelical’ label.

But while those who remained within Evangelicalism did become more politically conservative in the early twentieth century, their conservatism was not monolithic, as Fitzgerald notes. The fundamentalist movement of the 1920s included the politically libertarian J. Gresham Machen, a founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Theological Seminary, but it also included numerous fundamentalists who wanted to expand the state's regulatory power through Prohibition. And on the fringes of the movement, the ageing Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan mobilised his fellow cultural conservatives in an anti-evolution campaign, even while retaining his suspicion of unregulated wealth. The fundamentalist-modernist split of the early twentieth century may have purged most of the Social Gospel advocates from the ranks of the antimodernist Evangelicals, but this split alone was not sufficient to produce the Christian Right. In fact, during the 1940s, one of the leading conservative Evangelical theologians, the future Christianity Today editor Carl F. H. Henry, called for a socially conscious Evangelical political ethic that would champion racial equality and be sensitive to labour interests.

What, then, produced the Christian Right? According to Balmer, the Christian Right emerged as a backlash against racial integration in the 1970s, when conservative Evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell allied with New Right activists in order to protect their Christian schools from federal enforcement of civil rights statutes. But Fitzgerald presents a much more nuanced picture. The Christian Right was a populist movement that was far more broadly based than Balmer suggests, and it emerged because of a broad constellation of issues. It was, in essence, a reaction against the changes of the ‘long 1960s’, including the Supreme Court rulings on school prayer and Bible reading, the sexual revolution, the feminist movement and Roe v. Wade. As Fitzgerald notes, few Evangelicals were equally disturbed by all of these issues, at least at first. Many who continued to champion the historic Baptist position on Church-State separation endorsed the Supreme Court's prohibition on classroom prayer, and most in the early 1970s stopped short of an absolutist stance on abortion. But by the end of the 1970s a sizeable number of conservative Evangelicals had joined a political movement that would transform both Evangelicalism and the Republican Party.

Fitzgerald's narrative is a systematic, exhaustive, synthetic history that is based almost entirely on leading works of secondary scholarship in the field. As a result, her conclusions are generally more reflective of recent scholarly trends than Balmer's are. There are a few unfortunate omissions in her bibliography; for instance, recent ground-breaking works by Matthew Avery Sutton and Kevin Kruse, which would have augmented her discussion of twentieth-century Evangelicalism, do not appear. But for the most part Fitzgerald demonstrates extensive familiarity with the leading works in the field – especially the works of the senior historians of American Evangelicalism, such as George Marsden and Mark Noll – and her work constitutes an unprecedentedly thorough synthesis of the conclusions of the best scholarship in the field. Her nuanced treatment of contemporary Evangelical culture recognises both progressive and conservative trends in the movement, and is generally in accord with the balanced view of recent landmark works such as Steven P. Miller's The age of Evangelicalism: America's born-again years.

Balmer, by contrast, relies much more heavily on primary source materials, but his research is eclectic and his 170-page volume does not cover nearly the same range as Fitzgerald's six-hundred-page systematic survey. Its uneven treatment of the subject omits numerous important figures in American Evangelicalism and devotes extensive discussion to more obscure figures on the margins of the tradition. Barton Stone receives more coverage than Jonathan Edwards, and several of the leading figures and institutions of mid twentieth-century American Evangelicalism – including Carl Henry, Harold J. Ockenga, the National Association of Evangelicals and Wheaton College – do not appear in the index at all. On the other hand, Jerry Falwell receives extensive coverage (more than even Billy Graham), as does Bob Jones University. There is a pattern to this uneven coverage: revivalists associated with the Second Great Awakening (especially those in the North) dominate Balmer's treatment of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, while his discussion of the twentieth century focuses heavily on postwar fundamentalism and the rise of the Religious Right, with little discussion of the continued presence of political moderates and progressives in the tradition. This selective focus advances Balmer's central argument that the American Evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century was a socially conscious, politically progressive movement, while the Religious Right of the late twentieth century was a distortion of the tradition. As a result, his book is more useful for the questions that it raises than for the answers that it provides. He is correct to note that Evangelicalism is not intrinsically conservative, but when his book is read alongside Fitzgerald's history, it appears that Balmer's selective coverage has overstated both the political progressivism among nineteenth-century Evangelicals and the conservatism of their late twentieth-century theological descendants.

As Fitzgerald demonstrates, American Evangelicals have never been politically monolithic, just as they have never been theologically unified. In the late twentieth century the tradition did experience a shift to the political right due to a complex constellation of cultural factors and a reaction against the social changes of the 1960s, but the conservatism of the Christian Right has never characterised all white American Evangelicals. The political progressivism that Balmer wishes would reemerge among American Evangelicals is already present among a younger generation of Evangelicals, Fitzgerald asserts. And though it may be difficult to see in the era of the Christian Right and President Donald Trump, the American Evangelical political tradition is far more complex – and much more progressive – than recent American Evangelical voting patterns suggest.