Evangelicalism ≠ The Christian Right

It's not every day that a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist-historian like Frances FitzGerald publishes a 752-page tome on the history of evangelicalism in America with a press like Simon & Schuster. The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is not a book filled with primary archival research and original interviews. Rather, it is a narrative synthesis of most of the major works (up until a few years ago) published on American evangelical history.

Its title, though, is misleading. The history is all aimed toward the purpose of understanding the “Christian right.”