That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century. By D. G. Hart. (Chicago: Dee, 2002. x, 246 pp. Cloth, $24.95, ISBN 1-56663-460-1. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 1-56663-459-8.)

Abstract

Modern evangelicalism is a curious blend of age-old belief and cutting-edge technology—a movement that advocates primitive biblical truth through the Internet, contemporary Christian music, and slickly designed, bestselling novels. In this insightful book, D. G. Hart explores how these tendencies developed as evangelicals became both outsiders and insiders in America, advocating an “old-time religion” in distinctively modern ways. Ironies abound in the story. Although evangelicals make up the membership of some of the nation's largest churches, they often perceive themselves as a persecuted minority in a progressively secular America. Hart traces evangelicals' sense of marginalized status to the early twentieth century. While evangelicals once flourished within mainline Protestant denominations, this evangelical dominance collapsed in the 1920s, when Protestantism divided in controversies between modernists and fundamentalists. While modernists prevailed in mainline denominations, advocating the need to modernize biblical interpretation and Christian doctrine, conservative evangelicals became religious and cultural outcasts, withdrawing into fundamentalist subcultures to protect biblical inerrancy and traditional doctrine. Beginning in the 1960s, evangelicals pressed back into mainstream society, increasing their political opposition to America's growing secularization and struggling to restore the nation's Christian heritage. But if the America of the latter twentieth century was different, so was evangelicalism. The traditional faith had developed progressive strategies.