This book is a tour de force. Imagine yourself as a graduate student. In the course of five years, you interviewed 157 leaders of evangelical institutions, traveling hither and yon across the country. But if that was not enough, these people put you in touch with 203 additional “public leaders” in government, business, education, and the arts. You interviewed two former presidents, countless elected and appointed officials, as well as many other Washington “insiders.” You also interviewed my former students at Wheaton College, faculty colleagues and administrators, members of the Wheaton Board of Trustees, my former pastors, and countless others I have known in a forty-year odyssey through the evangelical trenches. But you did more than interview these 360 powerful figures; you supplemented the interview data with “ethnographic observations and archival research at 110 evangelical institutions” (p. 259). You had the adventure of a scholarly lifetime. You could easily rest on your laurels. No wonder I call the book a tour de force.

The strength of the book is also its weakness. Readers are given what at times seems to be excruciating detail in the various sections on government, academe, the arts, and the world of business. Individuals and organizations run rampant through the pages; at times it simply boggles the mind. And yet this detail documents the most important finding of the book — the extraordinary number of parachurch organizations that dot the evangelical landscape and the equally extraordinary involvement of evangelical elites in these organizations.

The impetus for parachurch development began, of course, with the fundamentalist movement in the early twentieth century — a process well documented by historians George Marsden and Joel Carpenter. This movement created institutions distinct and separate from “mainstream” American culture. Later evangelicals learned from their fundamentalist forebears and built their own inter-denominational structures, beginning with the National Association of Evangelicals in the early 1940s but later including such institutions as the Billy Graham Crusades, Youth for Christ, Campus Crusade, and Christianity Today. Encouraged by the writings of Carl F. H. Henry, these institutions, and the evangelical movement more generally, sought to engage the culture, not separate from it. While fundamentalism is in serious decline in America today, evangelicalism is “embattled but thriving” (according to scholar Christian Smith). As elite members of a mass movement, Lindsay's power brokers strike me as only sometimes embattled, but thriving in almost every instance except perhaps the arts.

Lindsay's elites are also the products of sweeping changes in religion and education over the past fifty years. In the 1960s, few evangelicals were college graduates (about five percent), but this proportion increased fourfold by 2004. The percentage of evangelical graduates still did not match that of mainline Protestants or Anglo-Catholics, but the actual number almost did, as evangelicals have grown to about twenty-five percent of the population today, while mainline Protestants and white Roman Catholics each constitute no more than twenty percent. So a large number of evangelical college graduates have become available to fill leadership positions in parachurch organizations and to take elite roles in the larger society. And these numbers should continue to increase, as the author finds evangelicals, and evangelical student organizations, prospering at Ivy League and other elite institutions across the country.

The evangelical elites portrayed in Faith in the Halls of Power are products of both increased education and the networks established in the many parachurch organizations in which they now serve. The latter is particularly important: the dense networks of organizations that characterize evangelicalism are not found in other traditions. Lindsay documents these social networks in a way that should be instructive to every reader. At the same time, the author points out that those evangelical elites invariably find themselves more comfortable in parachurch settings than in the local church. This disconnect could have the ironic consequence of seeing elite resources go to the parachurch movement and not to the ultimate source of evangelical strength — the local church.

Lindsay raises another normative question in his documentation of the minimal role of women in the evangelical elite. The great bulk of his interviews were conducted with men, and very few of them noted the paucity of women in evangelical leadership roles. Lindsay argues that the overall conservatism of the evangelical movement probably accounts for this phenomenon, but he clearly laments the minimal role for women at the elite level and argues that the “elastic orthodoxy” of evangelical religion will slowly make more room for women.

Any reviewer of a volume like Faith in the Halls of Power might well prefer that the author had taken a somewhat different course. For one thing, Lindsay tends to argue, mostly in his extensive notes, that evangelicalism is best defined by movement identifications rather than denominational affiliations or broader religious traditions. Yet, the research that focuses on identifications like “fundamentalist,” “evangelical,” or “charismatic” shows that the mass public has difficulty with these labels. It is understandable that Lindsay's elites are much more comfortable with these terms, given their education and involvement in movement organizations. Still, it would have been helpful to see the denominational locations of his “faith elite.”

Second, it is unfortunate that Lindsay ignored interviews with currently elected officials. Congress now includes many evangelical members, some deeply enmeshed in Bible studies and other small group activities, and many would no doubt have cooperated with the author given his method of snowball and “leap-frog” sampling. In particular, this additional effort would have been enormously beneficial to political scientists who have been slow to grasp the significance of religion on Capitol Hill. Certainly, national legislators are “elites” by any definition and Congress is a “hall of power.”

Finally, despite the fact that this is a “trade book” intended for an audience well beyond academic readers, I would have preferred that the author's key analytic points be highlighted more at the beginning and end of his substantive chapters and not left to the conclusion. At times it seemed that I could not see the forest for all of the trees.

In conclusion, this volume is must reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of evangelical elites in American society. One might applaud that development or vehemently oppose it, but it is difficult to deny its existence. My hunch is that people will be talking about Faith in the Halls of Power for years to come.