Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis

Thomas S. Kidd's new book, Who Is an Evangelical? tackles a question that has long bedeviled American religious historians. Swimming against the current of much recent scholarship, Kidd argues that evangelicalism was, in its origins, and remains, at its core, “a spiritual movement” (p. 26). Insofar as historians and journalists alike have tended to emphasize believers' political activities, they have misapprehended the tradition's beating heart: “conversion, devotion to an infallible Bible, and God's discernible presence are what make an evangelical an evangelical,” Kidd declares (p. 156). If it is a common error, it is also an understandable one, he reasons, given the prominence of “Republican evangelical insiders,” who, over the course of the last generation, have dominated the headlines even as they have “abetted the politicization of the movement” (p. 1). But for Kidd and other “practicing evangelicals,” this politicization, not to mention the resulting association of evangelicalism with “white Republicans who consider themselves religious,” seems nothing short of a crisis (p. 2). He shares at the outset that his purpose in the book is to show wider publics how “historically peculiar” this way of thinking about the movement truly is (p. 1

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