Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism

When I picked up this book I expected to find insightful essays that cover some of the pivotal, well-known moments in American religious history: the Great Awakening, the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy, etc. At this, the book did not disappoint. The authors provided engaging and thought-provoking discussions of these big moments that shaped the American story. But the real treat was still to come. The greatest part about reading a book like this is all the things you are "forced" to read that may not normally catch your eye. Behind the well-worn stories of Great Awakenings lurk some truly fascinating moments that have shaped our world. For me these gems included "The Rise of the Domestic Ideal," "Urban Pentecostalism," "The Great Migration," and "Billy Graham's 1949 Los Angeles Revival." Each of these essays was worthy the price of the book alone. Reading this book is like going with a trusted friend to a new type of restaurant you've never visited before. There may be some strange new flavors, but you might just end up with a new favorite dish. One note of warning - these essays mostly assume that you already know the basic story of American religious history. In this way, it differs starkly from Noll's original Turning Points book. Don't expect a clear, simple narrative of the events. Instead, this book offers meaty analysis of the events insights into why these moments matter so much. If you are ready for that, jump in and enjoy! Otherwise, it would help to read a survey of the history of religion in America before you tackle Turning Points.

It was very well written and researched.As an ex evangelical l was both thrilled at its dynamic observations and horrified by its mindless simplistic assertions.

There is so much written about American evangelicalism, so much of it historically uninformed piffle. This book collects top notch essays on key moments in evangelical history and introduces readers to the best historical research and thinking. It's one-stop shopping that turns out to be a mega-mall of historical insights. Don't pass it up!

This is a great read. It offers excellent scholarship, interesting perspectives, and a comprehensive overview of major evangelical historical events. Readers will gain valuable insights from a remarkable group of scholars. The really great bonus is that the book is eminently readable, even for those of us who are not experts in the field. Each essay contains valuable historical perspective that truly enhances an understanding of the entire evangelical movement.

boring

Whenever I hear the term “Evangelical,” I tend to run to my room like a teenager, slam the door and sulk. Enough, enough. But then I always come out for dinner, or whenever I smell good food. This time I emerge to find a lively party in progress in the dining room. Over a dozen people are seated around the table. All of them are historians at prestigious institutions, and each, I am pretty sure, would not object to being called an Evangelical. At any rate, I know they have given their professional lives to everything that designation has meant across the years. Some of them are drinking wine, which I don’t think they would have done not very long ago. I want to ask about that, but it seems too trivial for the present conversation. They are talking about the Enlightenment, antebellum reform, disestablishment, historical moments in a long and complicated history. I try hard to take it all in, nodding my head vigorously as if I really do, when I hear a woman’s voice rise insistently above the others. There are four women present, half the number of the men. They’ve been holding their own nicely, but now this one takes over. Her name is Margaret Van Die, and she is talking to these brainy people like a mother. In fact, she is talking about mothers, a subject she claims is also a legitimate, academically important point. And what do you know, they are listening. They are even agreeing with her, enthusiastically, all these seasoned history professors around the table. And therein, if you please, we have the nature and structure of this book. The “turning points” of the title, say the editors, Heath Carter and Laura Porter, are not meant to identify a “unified, comprehensive” movement. As Martin Marty explains in the Afterword, they offer an overview of what “happened” as the movement was shaped by “its course within national life.” The pattern echoes (and specifically honors) Mark Noll’s widely received record, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. The important result of the book is to lift the Evangelical movement out of popular understanding—taking it worlds beyond Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, or Jerry Falwell, or the Left Behind series, or Joel Osteen. Beyond too, as the editors acknowledge, any of the recent faux pas, political and social, that have been offering fodder to the public media. In fact, it lifts it out of some of its own turning points, like the influence of militant Fundamentalism, which in George Marsden’s words “has left a host of legacies.” Put another way, the Evangelical movement did not start in post World War II with Billy Graham. Rather, to quote Grant Wacker, Graham was important to the “revival tradition,” which with him “entered the atomic age.” But in a real and practical sense, the larger movement was here long before that, if undefined and unnamed (or not with a capital E), sometimes shaped by events and sometimes the shaper. A devastating illustration of that dual role serves in Richard Carwardine’s essay, when during the Second Great Awakening views on slavery, both pro and con, fed the lethal argument between north and south that led to the Civil War. But back to mothers. Some readers will search the book with more of an interest in the people on the ground—not the policy makers but the listeners, not the leaders but the led, those who came home from lengthy revival meetings, say, and still got up at five A.M. to milk the cows, seeking answers to questions they could hardly even ask—those without whom, by golly, there would be no movement at all. Harry Stout’s section on the Great Awakening does confront this topic, with George Whitefield’s emphasis on personal, independent faith. It is stressed, too, in the war between heart and head in Catherine Brekus’s essay on the Enlightenment and Edith Blumhofer’s chapter on Pentecostalism. But for this reader, it is Margarite Van Die, who proposes what she calls the “Domestic Ideal,” a legitimate role for the influence of families in the historical record. “When home,” she says, “becomes the site of religious nurture, such constructs as…evangelicalism” and other “formulaic definitions…lose some of their interpretive force.” How an ideal has been lived can be more importantly expressive than what it has been named. There are missing points in this open-hearted coverage, of course. Readers will come up with their own lists. Some who are old enough may recall a moment in the late 1960s, when a group of students at a conservative Evangelical seminary—radicals, as they were called—opposed the Vietnam war and other forms of violence, and started a small publication called Post American. We know it today as Sojourners, a community officed in D.C., with distinct Evangelical ties, still “radicals” and still opposed to war and all other violent alternatives. The absence from this record of Sojourners, a true and lasting turning point, is disappointing, along with other organized efforts over the years to fill gaping holes in the Evangelical conscience. But maybe those, as the editors hope, will be covered by on-the-ground conversation “in classrooms, church basements, and around many a kitchen table.” So, before I run back to my room, here’s a motherly blessing on all those who choose to take a thoughtful, honest part in this far-reaching exploration, now and most surely, in the years to come. Shirley Nelson