The central thesis of Jesus and Justice is that American society is witnessing a moderation of white evangelical politics, away from the “warrior politics” of the Religious Right and into an amalgamation with the prophetic political tradition of black evangelicals. According to author Peter Goodwin Heltzel, race created the schism between these two strands of American evangelicalism, influencing both their theology and political worldviews. While both black and white evangelicalism have common origins in the Second Great Awakening, each community came to understand and interpret the Gospel according to its own experiences and priorities. White evangelicalism has focused on an otherworldly theology revolving around individual salvation and personal sin, whereas black evangelicalism, while not ignoring personal salvation, tends to highlight the Bible's messages about worldly oppression, injustice, and social sin.

Heltzel argues that the white evangelical conscience is slowly awakening to its “tragic past” regarding racism and the Gospel's demand for a more authentic application of the full evangelical faith. This white “evangelical spring” is partly a belated response to the most prominent prophetic voices of each general strand of evangelicalism from the last century: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carl F. H. Henry. Heltzel's identification of King as the key exemplar of the traditional social conscience of African-American evangelicalism is not surprising, as most researchers place most black denominations within the general evangelical tradition. Despite these theological similarities, King and the civil rights movement shocked most white evangelicals and ultimately exposed their faith as a “half-Gospel.”

One of this book's major innovations is its pairing of King with the prophetic neo-evangelical voice of Henry. A founder of both Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary, Henry's seminal work The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism was a foundational statement helping neo-evangelicalism emerge from the shadows of the dominant separatist fundamentalism of the early twentieth century. Henry called on his fellow conservatives to develop a social ethic going beyond personal evangelicalism, producing a regenerated political engagement. Heltzel notes, “As humans are redeemed through evangelical conversion, Henry argued that their personal regeneration in Christ became the basis of their social action as individual moral agents” (79). Despite his repudiation of racism as sin, Henry's “theological vision did not prove fully adequate for the task” (83). Heltzel continues, “Without realizing it, Henry was ensnared in the logic of ‘half-Gospel’ that characterized twentieth-century white evangelicalism, focusing its primary energies on personal evangelicalism and relationships, never able to fully integrate ministries of social justice” (87). Yet, Heltzel argues, Henry's witness to a broader evangelicalism with a social dimension and the white evangelical community's embarrassment concerning its lack of response to King's “Call to Selma” planted a seed in the white evangelical mind that is producing today's “evangelical spring” in American politics.

To highlight this slow and uneven transformation taking place within the white evangelical subculture, Heltzel describes four contemporary organizational manifestations of evangelical politics in the second half of his work: James Dobson's Focus on the Family, the National Association of Evangelicals, John Perkins' Christian Community Development Association, and Jim Wallis' Sojourners. These organizations illustrate three general strains of evangelical politics in modern America: white conservative (Focus on the Family), white moderate (National Association of Evangelicals), and liberal (Christian Community Development Association and Sojourners).

This ambitious and well-written book provides a useful racial lens through which to understand some of the twentieth-century intersections between evangelicalism and politics. The author's sharply critical analysis of the role race played in separating black and white evangelical strains and the white evangelical community's delayed and minimal embrace of the civil rights movement are both significant contributions to religion and politics literature.

My concern with Heltzel's volume rests not with its historical analysis, but with its prediction. Its central thesis is that a new era is emerging in evangelical politics in which the conservative politics of white evangelicals is embracing many of the prophetic aspects of black evangelical politics. Throughout the work, Heltzel never provides any systematic evidence, but repeatedly reasserts this point. He writes: “We are witnessing a major paradigm shift in evangelical political life: the birth of a new prophetic evangelical politics” (4); “Young evangelicals have expanded their social concerns beyond the issues of traditional family and opposition to abortion” (125); and “we are witnessing a historical unfolding through the reconstitution of a prophetic evangelicalism in the post-civil rights era” (203).

However, Heltzel fails to mention that there always have been minority voices within the white evangelical community calling for a broadening of its social agenda and a liberalization of its politics. Henry's 1947 work was certainly an early voice, but Henry was by no means alone. He was joined by Leighton Ford's call for “revolutionary evangelicalism” in One Way to Change the World, Columbus Salley and Ronald Beham's blistering attack on evangelical racism in Your God Is Too White, David Moberg's more moderate call to “activism” in The Great Reversal, Richard Pierard's declaration against blasphemous Christian nationalism in The Unequal Yoke, and Richard Quebedeaux's eerily comparable predictions of a new era in evangelical politics to those of Heltzel in The Young Evangelicals.

Heltzel never adequately explains why the current generation of young evangelicals will act differently from previous generations of their spiritual heirs who refused to follow the examples of prominent liberal evangelicals such as Mark Hatfield, Jimmy Carter, or Paul B. Henry. Why did this “evangelical spring” not emerge following the signing of the historic 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern? Ultimately, modern white evangelical politics has never been chiefly about theology. This community's focus has been on maintaining the white, rural community's local status, privilege, and power in American society. They have molded their theology to fit that political agenda and there is little reason to think this pattern will change any time soon. It appears that if current demographic trends continue, the United States will grow increasingly racially and religiously diverse in the decades ahead. That suggests the traditional, white, rural American evangelical subculture might feel increasingly economically and culturally threatened, thus becoming more politically reactionary in coming years.