The white Evangelical brand has received strong criticism in the last year. Well-known evangelist and author Beth Moore declared in March 2021 that she was “no longer a Southern Baptist,” a decision prompted by the denomination's refusal to criticize Donald Trump's abusive behavior toward women. Beth Allison Barr's recent work, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos, 2021), deconstructs and challenges the validity of the dominant model of women and a woman's proper place within conservative Christianity. Scholars of American religion such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation [Liveright, 2020]) and Anthea Butler (White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America [University of North Carolina Press, 2021]) argue that the recent overt call to racism and misogyny has come from inside the house of white Evangelicalism, not from some outside source activated by the election of the forty-fifth president. In a recent addition to the Library of Religious Biography series produced by Wm. B. Eerdmans Press, historian Arlin Migliazzo offers what he calls “a refreshing counternarrative” to the contemporary view of white Evangelicalism in his biography of the marvelous Henrietta Mears (10). Naming contemporary white Evangelicals as often judgmental and “graceless,” Migliazzo wants his biography to act as a reminder of what a “gracious orthodoxy” looks like (182). In addition to highlighting Mears's often overlooked comprehensive influence over neo-Evangelicalism, Migliazzo uses her story as a model of a “needed charity” in an era like our own. Her biography, Migliazzo argues, demonstrates a replicable pattern for “uncommon grace in troubling and rancorous times” (275).

Henrietta Mears shaped a generation of young leaders through her work in Christian education, including innovation in Sunday School curricula and methods as well as a prodigious retreat ministry, contributing significantly to the emergence and eventual dominance of neo-Evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century. This form of neo-Evangelicalism is most often associated with figures such as Billy Graham and Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright. Migliazzo argues with unimpeachable research that Henrietta Mears is the true root stock of modern Evangelicalism, which he defines as a culturally engaged, ecumenical in scope, theologically conservative, and intellectually curious Christian faith. The Billy Grahams did not just appear out of nowhere, Migliazzo reminds us. Mears and those who were trained by her put in hard work to establish the groundwork for the post–World War II expansion of an Evangelicalism that was no longer strictly fundamentalist. In her life as an educator, she championed Evangelical orthodoxy while defending the necessity of intellectual vitality (276).

The biography moves in a generally chronological arc, with pauses in the later chapters to take in the wide scope of Mears's ministry and influence. To cover Mears's life and legacy requires expansive knowledge of her work in a plethora of areas and with countless people. Migliazzo ably undertakes this effort by digging into archives of institutions that bear Mears's mark, such as the Hollywood Presbyterian Church and Fuller Seminary. Migliazzo adds to the record of Mears's life by drawing upon an expansive interview that has not been accessed at length in prior studies. He also gives the reader insight into the formation of the formidable Mears by introducing new research into her childhood and early life, including the influence of Mears's somewhat-dubious father and exacting mother. Mears learned from an early age from her mother that everything she did must be the absolute best for God (225). Striving for perfection was expected of the young Mears, a duty that Migliazzo admits “limited her exercise of grace” (222). The inheritance of her mother's grace-less nature produced one of the paradoxes of Mears's life, in which Mears's perfectionism became an unappeasable idol. Grace and judgment, always at odds in Evangelicalism, teetered on a “narrow ridge” for Mears (226). In the chapter “Paradoxes and Limitations,” Migliazzo confronts Mears's particular weaknesses in judgment concerning race and gender equality. Mears refused to “politicize” her teaching, revealing her blindness to systemic injustice and the reality that her silence was itself political. Chapter 5, “A Faith of Her Own,” is the heart of Migliazzo's argument that Mears's nuanced fundamentalism is what led to her outsize influence. In particular, it was her willingness to engage the culture—as opposed to fundamentalist isolation—that in many ways gave birth to the neo-Evangelicalism of the 1950s. In a somewhat common tendency in studies of white Evangelicalism, Migliazzo lumps all Protestants into the Evangelical camp when he gives Mears the title of “a foremost architect of the twentieth-century reformation of Protestant Christianity” (263). It is clearer to say that she was an architect of modern white Evangelicalism and its rise from the subterranean existence it took on after Scopes. A chapter on Mears and her popularity within the entertainment industry in Hollywood is as informative as it is surprising. In this chapter, as well as others, the biography gives intriguing hints that Mears was great fun, a charismatic teacher who drew crowds of hundreds to eventually thousands of young people during her lifetime. She was adventurous, loved to travel, and kept a youthful spirit, aspects of her personality that soften what can sometimes be a daunting portrait.

Mother of Modern Evangelicalism: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Mears is an engaging biography of a crucially important woman who must take her place alongside the men who are credited with the creation of neo-Evangelicalism. Migliazzo succeeds in presenting Mears as a boundary crosser and an influencer. It is important always to keep in mind as well what she could have accomplished without the constraints placed on her by her own tradition. Her life highlights the foundational importance of Sunday School teachers, the often-underestimated influence of Sunday School curriculum, Christian publishing, camping and retreat programs, and college ministries. The innovations Mears popularized in Christian education became so predominant in American Christianity in the twentieth century that most observers of congregational life, including this reader, were likely unaware that Christian education was ever done differently. Mears's Sunday School simply was Sunday School. Giving Mears her due will add to an appreciation of Christian education as an area of influence equal or even superior to the post–World War II revival in the creation of neo-Evangelicalism in the twentieth century. Arlin Migliazzo has written a sympathetic and clear-eyed account of the key female figure in the development of twentieth-century white Evangelicalism. At the same time, he has utilized this important biography in a noble effort to rally renewed graciousness in Evangelicalism.