American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement.By Barry Hankins. Critical Issues in History. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. xiv þ 209 pp. $34.95 cloth..

摘要

American evangelicalism has been the subject of scores of books and articlesnsince the 1970s. Most of these studies focus on doctrinal or theologicalnstandards, and denominational and ecclesiastical variations, with somenattention to the public resurgence of evangelicalism, developing trends inngrowth and expansion, and the evolving definitional and identity crisis.nBarry Hankins’s American Evangelicals breaks in some ways with thisnpattern, offering instead a more historical approach to evangelicalnChristianity in the United States. Hankins, a professor of history and church-nstate studies at Baylor University, reminds us that evangelicalism inncontemporary America is incomprehensible apart from a serious study of thenhistorical, cultural, and political forces and realities that gave rise to andnshaped it over the last three centuries.