In this book of essays, adapted mostly from lectures, Randall Balmer follows in a long tradition of those who write about places they cannot easily inhabit and yet cannot quite escape. Approaching the subject of American evangelicalism with an exile's sense of liminality, Balmer's position pays dividends to the reader and also infuses the book with a submerged sense of longing for something that is lost or, perhaps, never quite existed in the first place.

In the book's preface, Balmer calls himself a “lover's quarrel evangelical,” whose career has been devoted to “reminding evangelicals of their heritage as agents for change.” Summarizing the book's main audience and argument, Balmer writes, “If you look carefully at both the New Testament and the actions of nineteenth-century evangelicals, I argue, you might find it a tad difficult to march in the ranks of the Religious Right.” He expresses his hope that the Religious Right will soon be seen as a “tragic aberration” in the history of evangelicalism (xvi).

Dutifully fulfilling the scholarly ritual of trying to define evangelicalism, Balmer observes in the preface that evangelicalism derives historically from “the three P's . . . New England Puritanism, Scots-Irish Presbyterianism, and Continental Pietism” (ix), and he utilizes the metaphor of General Motors, an umbrella corporation with many subsidiaries, to describe modern evangelicalism, which for him includes “fundamentalism, neoevangelicalism, the holiness movement, and pentecostalism—as well as other strains defined in racial or ethnic terms” (xii). The essays in the book are organized in loose chronological order and range from the founding era to the present. They are not intended to be a comprehensive history of evangelicalism, but Balmer's remarkable range as a religious historian means that the book covers more ground than might be expected in a collection of topical essays.

Balmer's aerial view of American evangelicalism is the book's main attraction. Although some of his observations will be familiar to scholars, Balmer's lively style and the broad scope of his thinking make for an engaging and thought-provoking book. In his essay on the influence of the First Amendment, for instance, he argues that disestablishment and the separation of church and state have produced a remarkable variety of religious options that have “contributed to America's political stability by siphoning dissent away from politics into the realm of religion” (8). In an essay on the longstanding evangelical impulse towards primitivism, he singles out The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, written by Barton Stone in 1804, as the moment when evangelicalism in America turned away “from a dependence on European forms steeped in tradition and toward the western frontier, which offered a kind of tabula rasa” (19). The essay, “A Pentecost of Politics,” in which Balmer ranges over the whole of American history to show how evangelicalism has often prefigured or mirrored developments in politics, showcases Balmer's reach and his virtuosic ability to make connections. Throughout, Balmer's writing sparkles, as when he describes the Second Great Awakening as “a veritable rampage of theological innovation” (29).

The thread connecting all these essays is Balmer's lament over the state of evangelicalism in America today and his exhortation to contemporary evangelicals to cast their eyes back to the nineteenth century, especially the antebellum period, when evangelicals stood at the forefront of nearly every progressive cause, including abolitionism, temperance, prison reform, and the movement for women's rights. Balmer writes wistfully, “The vision of nineteenth-century evangelicalism stands in marked contrast to the political agenda of the majority of evangelicals at the turn of the twenty-first century . . . the dominant nineteenth-century agenda was reformist, directed toward the benefit of those on the margins” (59). This often repeated assertion is at the center of Balmer's jeremiad to his fellow evangelicals.

But jeremiads are a dangerous form for the historian, involving, as they must, claims of past faithfulness and present waywardness, and Balmer sometimes seems to ignore the parts of the past that do not fit the demands of his genre. Most striking in the essays on the nineteenth century is the nearly complete omission of the Southern evangelicals who provided the main intellectual and theological firepower to defend slavery, and who almost certainly outnumbered the evangelical abolitionists he lifts up. Ignoring this inconvenient fact, Balmer writes, “Even Southern evangelicals understood the enormity of slavery, although they differed from Northern evangelicals on how to end it,” a statement that threatens to sink under the weight of the qualifications required to salvage it (57). In the essays on the twentieth century, Balmer easily pokes holes in the myth of Roe v. Wade as the origin point of the Religious Right, but does so at the expense of really reckoning with the beliefs of many fervent grassroots abortion opponents who explicitly copy the tactics and claim the heritage of the abolitionist movement.

In the book's last essay, on the future of Protestantism, Balmer skewers both the banality of contemporary mainline ecumenism as well as the political machinations of the Religious Right, concluding that America today needs more Baptists of the historical variety, steeped in their own distinctive theological tradition and devoted to the separation of church and state. One can heartily agree with Balmer on this point, while also observing that his vision would preclude much of the activism that he applauds in the nineteenth century. But then, lovers and prophets have their own purposes.