THE OPENING SCENE IS the sinking of the Titanic, which evangelist Philip Mauro aboard the rescue ship Carpathia interpreted on the spot as “an epitome, a miniature, of the great shipwreck that is coming in the fast-approaching day when the Lord shall rise to shake terribly the earth” (2). The closing scene is Billy Graham, ninety-one years old in 2010 and more convinced than ever that in current events he can hear the hoof beats of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and that their sound is “closing in on the place you now sit reading” (373). In between, Matthew Sutton “draws on a lively cast of characters and extensive archival research” (ix) to deliver what has been hailed as the first major interpretation of evangelicalism since Marsden’s. Sutton has taken a deep dive into the archives and resurfaced with fistfuls of treasures and curiosities for us. I am an amateur historian with an abiding interest in many of these figures and movements, and I found the book delightfully instructive on page after page. Sutton shows his readers many new things, and views most of the old, familiar things from a new perspective.

That perspective is apocalypticism, a belief which Sutton claims “provided radical evangelicals with a framework through which to interpret their lives, their communities, and the future, which in turn often inspired, influenced, and justified the choices they made” (4). The thesis of American Apocalypse is that this ideology “filled in blanks, rationalized choices, and connected dots” for evangelicals, or, as Sutton calls them, “premillennialists-turned-fundamentalists-turned-evangelicals” (373), a five-word-four-hyphen-eighteen-syllable monster of a synthetic term, strange as anything seen by John the Revelator, that rises out of the abyss on this book’s penultimate page! Whether apocalypticism was what “filled in blanks, rationalized choices, and connected dots” for the book’s characters or not, there can be no doubt that it serves that purpose for the book’s author. Previous histories have indeed failed to register the pervasive influence of the sheer volume of premillennialist prophecy conferences, Scofield notes, eschatology charts, and endtimes journal reports. Sutton compensates, and it’s about time somebody did.

As the master explanatory category, apocalypticism is for Sutton much like what vocation was for Max Weber. It explains the forms of life adopted by vast groups of people during the formative time when a new system of intuitive associations was taking hold. At its most Weberian moments, American Apocalypse reads like it could have been titled The Premillennial Ethic and the “Spirit” of Political Conservatism. Weber’s genealogical method carefully sidestepped making direct claims of causation, instead focusing on “how to explain, from the economic point of view, those elective affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften] of the bourgeoisie with certain styles of life (affinities that reveal themselves repeatedly, in constantly varying but fundamentally similar manner).” Sutton’s elective affinities are eschatological. He documents how evangelicals developed their view of the endtimes and used it to read current events and make decisions about political involvement.

This explains a great deal about the early decades of the movement. Even those evangelicals (and there were many of them) who insistently refused to share the premillennial eschatology seemed to align more or less with a widespread pattern of social engagement and disengagement that was set by the prophecy conference people, those who explicitly argued that since Jesus is coming soon they ought to invest their time and energy more strategically for immediate effect. When conservative evangelicals differed from each other in their eschatologies during this period, they nevertheless shared the experience of losing their status and influence in the established denominations and in American culture. They were all scrambling to establish new institutions and find new avenues of influence.

Perhaps the premillennial eschatology equipped its adherents with enough expectations of apostasy, and enough pessimism about institutions, to make quick sense of this shared experience of exile. But the evangelicals who operated with different eschatologies couldn’t shelter under premillennial plausibility structures forever, and as the decades moved along, the various types of evangelicals shook apart from each other on these very issues. Perhaps this is why, as the story wends its way through the twentieth century, Sutton’s master category of apocalypticism begins to yield diminishing returns. The first three chapters are, pardon the term, revelatory. But chapter 4 floats free of the apocalyptic theme almost entirely. Even as Sutton continues his masterful narration (here about “the culture wars,” public morals, race, and gender), he has to settle for mere pessimism as a leitmotif, a temperament considerably less specific than an eschatology. In chapter 5, the apocalyptic lens delivers rather more, providing insights about public and private education, as well as debates about the merit of long-term cultural investment and institution-building. But the centerpiece of this chapter is Sutton’s brilliant reframing of the Scopes trial. Even in Sutton’s telling, which extricates it from the oversimplifications of a defeat-and-retreat narrative, the story of the Scopes trial tends in the opposite direction from the apocalyptic thesis: William Jennings Bryan “had no expectation of a coming apocalypse but was still the same reformer who had advocated woman suffrage, direct election of senators, and a graduated income tax.” In other words, his eschatological expectations were postmillennial. After the well-documented initial infusion of premillennial excitement, rival eschatologies were increasingly at play among fundamentalist and conservative evangelicals.

It is the absence of other eschatologies from American Apocalypse that limits its effectiveness as a general account of evangelical religion or social engagement in the twentieth century, and especially as it rounds the corner into the twenty-first. For decades, evangelicals have been acutely conscious of, even irritated by, eschatological diversity in their ranks: They are aware of a continuous stream of rather sober evangelical amillennialism, which generally obliges its adherents to seek political guidance in other doctrines. They are aware of major differences between historic premillennialism (which doesn’t envision a secret rapture) and dispensational premillennialism (which usually does). And they are aware of a resurgent postmillennialism, which does not passively await the kingdom descending from heaven but intends to build it here, with the stated goal of Christianizing the American government and the world order at all levels before Jesus returns. When Sutton’s tone of voice occasionally moves from the “aren’t evangelicals weird” register (perfectly captured by the satiric book cover) to the “aren’t evangelicals scary” register, it’s peculiar that the postmillennialists, the reconstructionists, the theonomists, and the Christian identity people fail to put in an appearance. If their absence is defensible on the grounds that Sutton isn’t telling their story, that’s fair enough. But then he’s patently not giving “the definitive general account of evangelicalism’s spectacular growth as a political and cultural force in the twentieth century,” as a blurb on the back cover promises. (I know, no author should have to defend blurbs. But still.)

Though they are a matter of some subtlety, the differences among these various eschatologies really do matter. Sutton’s thesis gives him a ringside seat on why, and no doubt the archives in which he spent so much time were full of eschatological debates extensive enough to weary the most committed historian. But as a narrator Sutton is so consistent in maintaining an observer’s point of view that he frequently settles for skimming over the details of how his subjects reached their conclusions. Here and there a telling phrase indicates his impatience with the exegetical and doctrinal reasoning involved. “More than simple debates over theology were at stake” (80), he reports; but no participant would consider these debates about theology to be “simple,” and for an observer to do so is to lapse in attentiveness. With a few lovely exceptions (a careful reading of the elusive eschatology of The Fundamentals; a deft account of how Pentecostals cut the Gordian knot of Joel 2’s partial fulfillment in Acts 2), Sutton hovers so far above the crucial hermeneutical maneuvers that the reader rarely gets a sense of what is at stake for dispensationalists in their Bible interpretation. Drawing attention to another point, Sutton inadvertently quotes Lewis Sperry Chafer praising J. N. Darby for being the first to recover “the Pauline doctrine of the Church.” That sounds interesting, because it is interesting: why does Chafer think of his system as specifically Pauline (in contrast to, say, a system driven by the book of Revelation)? But American Apocalypse leaves just off camera the crucial information a reader would need to reconstruct the exegetical pathway of premillennialism. As a result, we learn much about the end of the world but nearly nothing about the post-apocalyptic vision that would inspire these characters to think this way. The thin description of their scriptural reasoning is inadequate to account for the groups being observed, in much the way that today’s popular-level generalizations about Islam leave Americans without the relevant basic categories for understanding a text-and-interpretation-driven complex like the Muslim faith. This robs Sutton’s thesis of what might have developed into actual predictive power, because sustained attention to the character of evangelical arguments about eschatology since the 1970s would have indicated something new under the sun. For that story, readers should consult Russell Moore’s 2004 The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective. There Moore descends far enough into the arcana of evangelical eschatology to trace an emerging style of political and social engagement explicitly driven by a refined biblical eschatology. Since publishing that book, Moore has taken a prominent role as a spokesperson for evangelicals in the public square. Sutton’s apocalyptic focus should have been uniquely able to detect the transformation signaled by Moore’s work.

But somewhere around the halfway point of the book, Sutton becomes interested in why evangelicals vote Republican. Since this is also somewhere near where the explanatory power of the apocalyptic thesis begins to wane, the result is several relatively dull chapters with a familiar parade of Hal Lindseys and Reagans and Falwells. There is still plenty of good research here, but it gets buried under familiar tropes and conventional wisdom that could easily be culled from the weekly news magazines of the time period. Perhaps the ’80s were just that dull. Or perhaps the apocalyptic key simply doesn’t turn smoothly in the locks of that later period, threats of nuclear apocalypse notwithstanding.

As a bold attempt to read American evangelical history in a pervasively eschatological key, American Apocalypse succeeds on the whole, rising to the level of a truly fresh reading of patterns of thought and behavior that reach considerably beyond the sometimes fringe-dwelling, sometimes numerically small groups who drove the apocalyptic conversation. Sutton opens up a horizon of interpretation in which a range of rival eschatologies should also be examined. By failing to situate evangelical apocalypticism in the context of rival, secular eschatologies, Sutton misses the chance to make the most of his analysis. American Apocalypse, in other words, isn’t eschatological enough. Consider the rival eschatologies that vie with premillennialism. Many of the characters in the second half of this book took international communism at its word to be a counter-story about where the world was going, and what the final resolution of history would reveal the ultimate meaning of human life. What historian of the movement has taken it seriously precisely as eschatology? For that matter, before midcentury the denominational establishment that opposed fundamentalism and evangelicalism expressly colluded with old money, new capital, and American patriotism to secure the promise of Christian progress toward a managed utopia. The course of the century rendered it unfashionable to present this optimism as an eschatology, but the tools Sutton uses to track the subtle influence of eschatology could provide more light than the participants could provide for themselves. Much of the environmental movement has been animated by a characteristic eschatological schizophrenia, alternating between visions of doom and visions of rescue. The stubborn paradox of apocalyptic activism—that those who are most convinced of the irreversible nature of our decline are the same ones who do the most to bring about change—seems to hold in ecological eschatology as firmly as in evangelical. All these rival eschatologies, more or less present and active, more or less explicit and self-conscious, tend to operate according to the logic of futurist projection: reasoning forward from current signs and tendencies, they offer a portrayal of where we could be headed. The evangelical eschatologies of American Apocalypse also participate in this projectionist dynamic, no doubt, in spite of their stated intentions. But in, with and under those analogical modes of reasoning toward the future, eschatologies informed by ancient prophecies (and I would include here at least Jewish and Muslim eschatologies) also operate with modes of scriptural reasoning utterly lacking to other popular eschatological systems. In a marketplace of merely projectionist eschatologies, the scripturally reasoned ones hold out the hope of surprise, and surprise is the very thing projective futurism cannot deliver. Apparently in the modern world we can live without prophecy, but we can’t live without an eschatology. And who knows what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? Who indeed.

IN THE 1920s, FUNDAMENTALISTS spoke of alcohol, prostitution, and Broadway as absolute evils. In the 1930s, they spoke of communism and totalitarianism as prophesied elements of the end times. By the 1950s, this radical religious movement became mainstream. Fundamentalists now “positioned themselves as the legitimate guardians of the nation” (266) as they defended the American military and even the inevitability of nuclear warfare. While their Protestant ancestors may have understood their calling within a participatory democracy differently, premillennialists anticipated the imminent destruction of the world. They saw no need for Americans to compromise with declared enemies on either domestic or international affairs.

In his American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, Matthew Sutton shows that premillennialism, the idea that Christ will return to a predictable, war-torn world, is absolutely necessary to understanding American political history since the 1880s. For, in constructing certain ideas and figures as absolute enemies and absolute evils, Fundamentalists “challenged the democratic tradition of pragmatic governance by compromise and consensus” (6). Once a fringe movement within evangelicalism and later a significant but still “radical” element within evangelicalism, Fundamentalists eventually changed the political posture of the Grand Old Party. Fundamentalists flirted with free-market and pro-military elements of the Republican Party in the early and mid-twentieth century, but they stood strongly behind the presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan and have had significant influence within the party ever since (355).

Sutton’s term “politics of apocalypticism” is an important new lens through which American political historians will assess the twentieth century. It helps us understand Fundamentalist Americans’ unflagging support for American nationalism and their unwillingness to compromise with socialists and social democrats on both domestic and foreign policy objectives throughout the twentieth century. It also helps us understand Fundamentalist Americans’ political posture on certain elements of the culture wars. The term suggests a revision in the cause-effect relationship assumed by many narratives of conservative evangelicalism, which have only traced the movement back to the New Deal era. Instead of placing the genesis of radical, religious conservatism in the relationships built between Fundamentalist Southern pastors and politicians supporting “free enterprise” in the 1930s, Sutton shows that premillennialists had a much longer history of support for the Grand Old Party in both domestic and foreign policy objectives.1 Radical premillennialists were against the expansion of the federal government under Woodrow Wilson, against the League of Nations, and interested in the creation of a state of Israel from the 1910s. Moreover, their support for the expansion of the US military at nearly any cost can be traced at least back to the First World War.

The book is more of a political biography of premillennialists between 1880 and 1980 than it is a rigorous defense of its thesis. In fact, the book leaves out much context for determining whether the American “politics of apocalypticism” really did start in the 1880s, with premillennial dispensationalism. One is convinced that the apocalypticism of premillennial theologies influenced these particular Protestants’ posture toward their broader culture, but the author provides little evidence to suggest that non-premillennialists maintained any tradition of “pragmatic governance by compromise and consensus.” Moreover, little evidence is offered to suggest that this attitude was not also shared with American Protestant and Catholic conservatives as well. While there is no doubt that theological convictions about the impending apocalypse fanned the flames of doggedly nationalist, militarist, free-market, and anti-socialist political convictions, Sutton does not prove that this was the major cause of this political posture on the Right. Likewise, the fact that folks on Left and Right in the twentieth century each mobilized a rhetoric of absolute “evil” and personal conscience “until the Lord returns” suggests that perhaps premillennialism was only one of many causes of the politics of apocalypticism and the breakdown of governance by compromise during this period.

The breadth of Sutton’s project—surveying all of American political history between 1880 and 1980—means that his depth of sources within each particular era is limited, and thus many generalizations could be further qualified. Sutton argues, for example, that Dwight L. Moody and the Moody Bible Institute were on the religious fringe for their day, for they were premillennialists who emphasized the spirituality of the church and minimized involvement in party politics in an era predominated by the Social Gospel. Sutton writes that on the other hand,

Most American Protestants in the nineteenth century, liberals and conservatives, believed the world was growing more and more Christian and that the kingdom of God would soon appear on earth as a result of their faithful efforts. The return of Christ would follow after the establishment of this millennium. Many even believed that the United States, like ancient Israel, was the vehicle through which God would perfect the world. Such sentiments had animated American Christians since colonial times and had helped inspire the Social Gospel movement. (21)

However, do we know that most American Protestants “believed” in this perfectibility of the world in the nineteenth century, or do we simply know that many were told to believe this by prominent, middle-class pastors? There is a difference. Considering the initially strong opposition to US entry into the Great War, we also cannot be sure how many Christians expected that God would perfect the world through the United States. One might just as easily argue that the reason Social Gospel acolytes like Walter Rauschenbush needed to defend and elaborate on the possibilities of a Social Gospel at the start of the twentieth century was because most Protestants did not really want to see renewed social relationships between the rich and poor or reconstructed terms for industrial enterprise. One might argue that the reason the liberal Federal Council of Churches formed by the major Protestant denominations in 1908 was because of these clergy’s own sense of embattlement as the sole voices of social and economic renewal. Historians have shown that there were no direct connections between postmillennialism and interest in social work or social transformation. Premillennialists engaged in social work as vigorously as postmillennialists, just as members of both camps also rejected the need for substantial social “reconstruction.”2

If the rise of premillennialism did not significantly reorient the political and cultural objectives of American Protestants, then the argument that premillennialism is the cause of this new political posture is much less convincing. Complicating matters further, many Social Gospel leaders held similarly stalwart political views to their premillennial counterparts. Clergy like Charles Stelze were just as enthusiastic about the need for the church to stand outside and above politics, equally as dismissive of socialism, and just as hesitant to support military expansion during World War I. The only significant political difference between the two theological camps in the early twentieth century was their position on the League of Nations, and that was after considerable conferencing between the Woodrow Wilson administration, Andrew Carnegie’s peace endowment, and Social Gospel clergy. Sutton writes that Fundamentalists in the 1920s “did not expect to improve conditions around them but rather to battle the forces of evil as they prepared the world for the coming judgment” (93). However, after World War I, even many Social Gospel leaders were just as pessimistic about the possibility of reconstructing social and economic relationships in the US, just as supportive of business leaders, and just as engaged in battles against social vices as their premillennial counterparts.

Paul Carter and other historians of the Social Gospel revealed long ago that the postmillennialist, political optimism of the Social Gospel ended, or at least severely shifted, after the Great War.3 That is, the trend toward emphasizing the spirituality of the church was widespread across American Protestantism. While it is true that premillennial Fundamentalists took the lead in the wars against social vice and for Christian-identified public schools throughout the 1920s, so also did postmillennialists, as Gaines Foster showed in Moral Reconstruction.4 The “politics of apocalypticism,” or urgency about exterminating immediate social, economic, and political evils, did not even limit itself to distinctly religious movements. During and after the Great War, American socialists went on strike—risking incarceration and death—in the name of syndicalism, socialism, and collective bargaining rights. On the Left, the Fellowship of Reconciliation risked incarceration in the name of pacifism. Suffragettes took up civil disobedience instead of seeking compromise in their demands for women’s rights to vote. Cardinal Spellman, a Roman Catholic priest in New York City, refused to back down in his public opposition to birth control clinics. One might argue that an unwillingness to cower to “pragmatism” or compromise characterized the largest common denominator of politics in the early twentieth century. The “politics of apocalypticism” appears to be the dominant framework of political discourse from the 1880s forward. In the context of a wide range of conscience-driven political movements, one is not convinced that Protestant evangelical expectations of imminent apocalypse were a main instigator in the breakdown of consensus-driven democracy.

Yet, come to think about it, did pragmatism and consensus really animate American political history until the rise of premillennialism in the late nineteenth century? This suggestion is worth considering, but it, too, is not defended anywhere in the book. One wonders whether American evangelicals of the First or Second Great Awakening, while technically postmillennialists, were really motivated by pragmatism and consensus building, or whether they simply utilized the rhetoric of democracy because it served their immediate goals (of church building). After all, both abolitionists and Confederates of the early nineteenth century can be characterized as postmillennialists, but the fact of Civil War after years of aborted compromises suggests that early American Protestants did not see compromise as a route to the millennium Christ intended. While rhetoric in defense of consensus-building was certainly idealized by evangelicals in early America, we see little evidence—perhaps outside the Massachusetts Bay Colony and various experimentalist socialist colonies of the nineteenth century—of church leaders practicing it as an element of religious faith. We know that American Protestants, a majority faith, rarely felt the need to distinguish between American citizenship and subjecthood within a heavenly kingdom. Patrick Henry, Henry Ward Beecher, and Josiah Strong, all ardent postmillennialists and defenders of American democracy, had little regard for compromise or pragmatism on the political principles they treasured most.

Ultimately, despite its great length (374 pages plus notes), the book fails to convince readers that the theological orientation of premillennialists truly distinguished these American Protestants from any other group of politically engaged Americans. This suggestion is intriguing, but Sutton fails to provide sufficient context to prove that premillennialists were really any different from other organized political entities of their era, or of eras that had come before them.

Nevertheless, the book accomplishes a good deal. It serves as the first political biography of premillennialism which has tracked changing theological perspectives alongside changing perspectives on domestic and foreign policy. As a “long twentieth century” biography of the Religious Right, it provides historians of American politics and American religion with a firmer foundation of the ways pastors and political leaders influenced one another, especially with regard to support for entrance into world wars and subsequent arms races. The book expands on Andrew Preston’s excellent Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith by drawing the connections between American evangelicals’ attitudes on domestic and foreign policy. Aside from the length, the book is engaging and highly readable, and suitable to general audiences of all kinds. Even if historians discover a “politics of apocalypticism” much larger than that of premillennialism or evangelicalism in the twentieth century, they will need to credit Sutton for first recognizing the connections between obsessions about the real apocalypse and a widespread dismissal of pragmatic compromise and consensus-building. Sutton has started an important conversation that both political historians and religious historians will be smart to continue.

MATTHEW SUTTON’S AMERICAN APOCALYPSE is an important contribution to American religious history. The book performs a remarkable feat: it traces, year by year and issue by issue, the impact of belief in the soon second coming of Christ on the cultural and political outlook of three American evangelical subgroups: the predominantly white fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements and a variety of African American evangelicals. Because of the gifts of popular persuasion that each of these groups had, Sutton points to a number of ways in which their belief in an imminent, premillennial second coming of Christ—or “Bible Prophecy,” as they called it—has continued to shape American public life.

This book, like no other I have read in recent years, drew me back to the conversations and consternations of American fundamentalism that I tried to understand earlier in my career. Sutton delves deeply into the documentary sources of the fundamentalists, especially their more popular magazines: the Moody Monthly, the Sunday School Times, the Sword of the Lord, Revelation, the King’s Business, and Our Hope. This is not easy reading; most of these monthlies and weeklies are not indexed, so one must push through, page by page, for hours on end. Some are essentially the creation of one editorial writer, and these have a stream of consciousness quality that is not easily scanned. So I thought that no one else would ever do what I did for my research on fundamentalism: read through eighty years of the Moody Monthly! But Sutton has done that and more. I was particularly impressed with the archival research that he did, including work in some collections that did not exist when I was doing my work and finding other caches of letters that I did not know existed. As a result, this book has the authentic ring of the actors’ own words and in many cases their interaction with each other.

Sutton’s narrative centers on the fundamentalists and their conservative evangelical heirs, and he says that their anticipation of Christ’s second coming “made them who they are” (3). His coverage of white Pentecostals and black Baptists, Methodists and Pentecostals is less comprehensive, but their inclusion is another strong feature of this book. It is tempting for historians to tell the story of the white fundamentalists and their “neo-evangelical” heirs and consider that to be the central narrative of American evangelicalism. But Sutton has the sense to seek these second and third opinions at important junctures of the story. His work on black evangelicals is especially telling, for here we see something of the pliant potency of premillennialism. While white evangelicals were looking for signs of the coming Antichrist in fascist or communist Europe or even in the New Deal, black premillennialists taught that American racism was the mark of the Beast, and that God would surely single out America for the wrath of his end times judgment. In 2008 most white Americans were shocked to hear Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, thunder out “God Damn America” from his Chicago pulpit. Sutton shows that this rhetoric has a long history in the black Christian community, and it can come with a premillennial twist to it.

While Sutton claims that the impact of premillennialism was pervasive and profound in American fundamentalist evangelicalism, this book does not dwell much on its impact on believers’ churchly experience, personal spirituality, or daily social life. What did it truly mean to live “in the shadow of the Second Coming,” as historian Timothy Weber so memorably phrased it? If fundamentalists’ consciousness of the irretrievable decline of both church and society was so profound, then why were they as engaged in ordinary politics as Sutton shows they were? Why did they not become a more classic millenarian sect, say like David Koresh’s Branch Davidians or the Jehovah’s Witnesses? How was it that their meetings were so open to the public, their daily lives were so manifestly ordinary in most respects, and their political engagement, while tinged with suspicion and unwillingness to compromise, was so attuned to the American mainstream? To make an obvious comparison, American fundamentalists have not behaved nearly so radically as today’s apocalyptically charged Islamic militants. Scholars who have dealt with fundamentalists and other premillennialists have wrestled with this tension, if not outright contradiction in believers’ experience and behavior. And they have discovered that these millenarians hold opposing traits in tension, such as the combination of pragmatism and primitivism that Grant Wacker saw in early Pentecostalism.

But Sutton is much more interested in the movement’s political theology than its more religious and personal dynamics. This book’s main quest, it seems, is to uncover some long and deep roots of today’s Religious Right. That quest has driven Sutton to do some very valuable work, seeking out and highlighting lost episodes of political activity in the movement that others of us missed. But even this aim would be better served if he had spent more time on the spiritual and other personal dynamics of prophecy belief. He sells the study short, then, on explaining not only how the movement’s cultural and political outlook and engagement was driven by millenarianism but also how and why the movement modulated and accommodated its apocalyptic vision.

George Marsden, the maven of the historians’ movement to understand American fundamentalism and evangelicalism, has a very good sense of how to answer this question. Fundamentalism was an amalgam with a variety of sources, some of which seemed contradictory. Dispensational premillennialism, on the one hand, teaches that the church has a spiritual mission and destiny only. According to this school of Bible prophecy, the main one treated in this book, trying to save society is like trying to save a sinking ship while, as D. L. Moody once put it, God wants the church to be a lifeboat for rescuing the perishing. At the same time an older evangelical impulse seeks to restore a more Christian America by means of the next Great Awakening and ensuing social reform. This impulse lived on in fundamentalism too. These two outlooks created a “paradoxical tension” in fundamentalism, Marsden said, that wasn’t terribly consistent or ever fully resolved. One of these vectors or the other became more prominent in the rhetoric and actions of the movement over time.

Sutton argues that this tension was resolved in the form of a consistent ideology that called for a conserving rearguard action in society and politics, urging evangelicals to continue to “occupy until I come” (Luke 19:13). But despite many claims that such an ideology existed, Sutton never really spells it out. I think that is because no one among his main actors ever really spells it out. So is fundamentalists’ political vision a carryover of the old American Whig vision of a Christian society, where government actively cooperated with Christian agencies to uphold manners and morals, or is it a version of the old Democratic/Populist suspicion of central state authority and of centralized money power? Perhaps it is an unsteady amalgam of the two, or various leaders leaned toward different versions. But there is no saying in this book, really, other than to note that fundamentalists eventually linked up with conservative business leaders who resisted New Deal statism and promoted militant anti-communism.

Indeed, for a book that focuses on evangelicals’ public theologizing and moral crusading, this one does very little homework in either political thought or behavior. Not only does it not flesh out the political ideology that it claims to have found, it does not consult empirical political studies to back up its assertions. Citing the fundamentalist opinion leaders’ rhetoric and attempts at political organizing, Sutton insists that at least from the late 1920s forward, the movement has been very much in the camp of the Republican Party. Yet he cites no opinion or polling data to fortify that argument. Political behavior studies have shown that until perhaps the mid-1970s, most evangelicals (e.g., Baptists), even outside of the South, voted as Democrats. Class, ethnicity and economic interests dominated earlier patterns of voting and partisan identification. Back in the 1960s, to cite a personal anecdote, my father was at the same time a union steward, a Democrat, and a deacon in our Baptist church in Michigan. There were lots of blue-collar workers in our congregation, and evidently it was okay to be both a fundamentalist and a Democrat. The new religious right’s political mobilization and the great partisan realignment along religious lines since the late 1970s are significant changes, and they have brought new political realities that did not exist fifty or more years ago. So one cannot assume that all contemporary patterns in religion and politics carry far into the past. Sutton’s thesis is that continuity, more than change, characterizes American evangelicals’ cultural and political outlook, but repeatedly he pushes that argument beyond what the evidence will bear.

The heart of the matter, I think, is that fundamentalist evangelicals’ political preaching and editorializing and organizing has been much more sporadic than it appears in this account. As I stated earlier, I covered much of the same documentary territory that Sutton has. Looking at what he has amassed as evidence of fundamentalists’ social and political commentary, it all looks quite familiar to me and I treated much of it myself in my book. In regard to what he found out about their actual political organizing and issue advocacy, I have to admit that he found things that I missed. Sutton needs to be credited with showing recurring instances of public engagement on the part of the fundamentalists. And he is absolutely right that their public theologizing was deeply colored by millenarian visions of demonic agency, social declension and rising state tyranny. It injected millenarian evangelicals’ cultural and political outlook with urgency, impatience, suspicion and refusal to compromise. And their persuasive and pervasive communication efforts have spread that outlook far and wide across American popular culture. So I think that Sutton is bang-on right that there are millenarian anti-New Deal roots to the pervasive anti-statist views of today. He made that case brilliantly in his 2012 article in the Journal of American History.

Unlike that article, this book overreaches in its theses and its arguments. Fundamentalists certainly had the views he cites, but any fully orbed analysis of what his sources contained would show that most of this rhetoric was reactive and even seasonal, while in season and out, fundamentalist editors and their authors spent the much greater share of their energy discussing evangelism, personal devotion, doctrine, church affairs, and foreign missions. Indeed, I found that by the late 1930s and early 1940s, the hottest issue was not Bible prophecy, as Sutton suggests, but expectation of another great revival. Issue after issue of the Moody Monthly, especially, hammered home the need for, the signs pointing toward, and new, parachurch mobilizations for revival. But revival does not even merit an entry in this book’s index. Neither does foreign missions, another rapidly growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal preoccupation. Both of these, of course, can be located within a worldview that feeds certain strands of cultural politics, such as the revival of American civil religion that was emerging during World War II. But Sutton is so focused on finding political mobilization of a more direct sort that he does not make the effort to fold this all in to his argument and give it more purchase and nuance.

To cite one case, he makes the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals purely into an attempt to form a pan-evangelical political organization. Yet the NAE was first conceived by a mission executive looking for better access to government services and it was widely promoted by its organizers as a vehicle for starting united revival campaigns. Yes, NAE leaders tended to see revival as having political or social consequences. But to reduce their aims to politics is a distortion. Sutton is correct to see a political side, for example, to the rhetoric of Harold John Ockenga. But this pastor was consumed, first and foremost, by a yearning for another Great Awakening, to the point of agonized prayer and fasting, even prostrating himself under the rug to plead with God.

So it is important to learn the history of apocalypse-laden evangelical political thought and advocacy in America. But the main thing to remember about evangelicals is that they are, well, evangelical. With remarkable continuity from the days of the Wesleys forward, they have cared most about being saved from their sins, becoming more holy, getting others saved, sharing God’s love in acts of mercy, and promoting integrity and authenticity in the church. Real religion has mattered more to them than reforming politics or society, even though those causes have frequently engaged them, probably more than they intended. But these deeply religious preoccupations of evangelicalism are largely brushed aside in this book. That is why, in the end, I have to disagree with the book jacket’s hype. This is an important study, but it is not a “comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism.”

STARTING IN THE EARLY 1990s, white evangelical leaders began to discuss the idea of “racial reconciliation.” Evangelicals had a race problem: despite values of spiritual equality, prominent evangelical institutions and the majority of evangelical churches remained overwhelmingly white. At the same time, a changing social calculus in American politics, as well as clear demographic trends, meant that white evangelicals, who had learned the value of coalition building, had a vested interest in developing alliances with people of color, particularly African Americans who shared core beliefs.1 Beliefs such as the centrality of the Bible; the death, resurrection and second coming of Jesus Christ; necessity of conversion; and the need for radical moral, spiritual, and political change. For some black evangelicals, white discourses of racial reconciliation at first seemed a welcome development, but they soon grew frustrated by the inability of white evangelicals to move beyond verbal acknowledgment of racism as a sin towards examination of the deep role that white racial identity plays in the formation of evangelical institutions, norms, and practices. Consequently, even explicit emphasis by white evangelicals on race at the dawn of the new millennium could not surmount deep historical and social divides, leading Michael Emerson and Christian Smith to argue that evangelical religion “as structured in America, is unable to make a great impact” on racial divides and instead helps create new ones.2

Indeed, racial divides, as Matthew Sutton deftly shows in American Apocalypse, were foundational to the formation and rise of the modern evangelical movement. Starting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, white radical evangelicals, fundamentalists and pentecostals organized and coalesced into what would become, by the mid-twentieth century, the modern evangelical movement. Sutton’s primary focus is on how the apocalyptic sensibilities of key white male leaders and their followers profoundly impacted the shape and scope of modern evangelicalism. But throughout the book, Sutton also shows the ways race consistently worked to shape the interpretation and application of evangelical apocalyptic beliefs. As part of this project, Sutton pays notable attention to discourses of African American religious leaders. By juxtaposing white evangelicals and their African American counterparts, Sutton offers a compelling but truncated glimpse of what I consider a unique black evangelical prophetic tradition. This tradition incorporates beliefs about God’s judgment and redemption of the world with a biting critique of racial injustice.

In what follows, I want to explore how white and black Christians articulated their faith within a shared apocalyptic horizon before turning to what I consider to be the lasting legacy of the black evangelical prophetic tradition. Sutton’s text is one of several recent works that have sought to understand the historical entanglement and co-construction of white and black evangelicalism.3 What makes Sutton’s text unique is his focus on how premillennial beliefs about prophecy and divine judgment had radically different effects depending on one’s racial lens. Throughout the twentieth century, both black and white Christians imagined a world besieged by forces of evil, which would culminate in the destruction of the world and the second coming of Jesus. Both black and white Christians passionately applied themselves to the task of identifying these forces of evil as well as doing what they could to intervene on the side of Christianity. Yet for white evangelicals, forces of evil, implicitly or explicitly, often took the form of racial, cultural, and ethnic others, and the fight to restore America as a “Christian” nation often aligned with the desire to maintain white supremacy. African Americans, by contrast, found hope in apocalyptic theologies that spoke of God’s judgment of pervasive evil, but the evil they identified was racial injustice and the redemption America needed was from the sins of racism.

The proposition that Christians were living in the end times, where tribulation and death loomed on the horizon, made profound sense to many white and black Americans. Sutton carefully documents how the history of modern evangelicalism unfolded over the longue durée of the twentieth century: a century marked by unprecedented scales of violence in the form of two world wars, but also racial violence in the form of lynching and Jim Crow-era brutality and segregation. While white Americans living at the turn of century experienced many demographic changes and keenly felt emergent challenges to their power, privilege and identity, black Americans, who experienced a variety of injustices on the heels of slavery, understood themselves as already living in times of tribulation. For these reasons, black and white Christians alike found solace and meaning in apocalyptic theology, which mirrored and explained a world visibly besieged.

Unfortunately, because of their marginal status in American life, Sutton concludes that African Americans played almost no role in shaping the broader premillennial movement,4 which is why evangelicalism is often understood as a white religious movement. Certainly, American Apocalypse underscores the politically conservative and Anglo-centric dimensions of modern evangelicalism. Sutton shows how evangelical interpretations of end-times prophecy were characterized by suspicion of government intervention (most often expressed as opposition to communism, socialism, social welfare, and statism); xenophobia towards Catholics, Jews, Asians, and Muslims; anti-black racism towards African Americans; alliances with nativist groups, including the KKK; hostility towards international bodies like the League of Nations and the United Nations; and a conviction that global war and cultural conflict were inevitable.

As the twentieth century progressed, evangelical apocalyptic ideas no longer seemed out-of-touch with mainstream American views, as Americans more broadly tried to wrestle with a world “ravaged by crises, depression, and violence.”5 With the rise of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, the end of the world did seem plausible, or at least the end of the world as mainstream white Americans understood it. Paradoxically, anticipating the end of the world did not foster “complacency, indifference or apathy” among white evangelicals; rather, it fostered intense cultural engagement, even a sense of warfare.6 A feeling of urgency combined with a desire to prove worthy of God’s judgment fueled a distinct form of politics centered on saving souls and transforming American culture in what little time was left. The belief that time was running out also cemented a pessimistic view of the world: one in which progressive social movements tended to be viewed as signs of degeneracy. Such interpretation had two effects. First, it incited white evangelicals to try to win back as much of America as it could to its “Christian” roots. Second, it made white evangelicals naturally resistant, and even hostile, to black evangelical calls to address racial injustice and allowed them to ignore racial suffering and terror.

Discourses of American redemption and divine judgment worked powerfully in the post-war years to create scenes of moral and social crisis around issues of race, gender, and sexuality and contributed significantly to the rise of the Religious Right. Yet as I read American Apocalypse, I grew increasingly intrigued by Sutton’s occasional reference to the fact that prophecy cuts both ways.7 In other words, prophetic politics can be directed in a variety of different directions due to its inherent absolutist moral discourse and the urgency/confidence it inspires, particularly in relation to one’s perceived enemies. African Americans, in particular, proved adept at developing apocalyptic counter-narratives to the ones promoted by white evangelicals throughout the twentieth century. Rather than locate the rise of the anti-Christ in Germany, Russia or Italy as white evangelicals did, black leaders saw signs of the anti-Christ visible in American imperialism and racism, and they imagined a coming kingdom of God where African Americans would take center stage and no longer face discrimination and segregation. Such readings and interpretation of prophetic biblical texts contrasted profoundly with white evangelicals, who, as Sutton points out, could hardly fathom the idea that black Americans could be the “chosen” people of God.8

For black evangelicals, true Christianity exhibited itself through active resistance to the scourge of racial injustice, something that white evangelical leaders rarely addressed, if ever, in their public and private statements. By the 1960s and 1970s, African American evangelicals publically and explicitly “linked civil rights with the gospel and advocated an end to [white] Christian racism.”9 Creatively combining discourses of American redemption and divine judgment, they critiqued sins of racial inequality and segregation. In my view, such discourses allowed African American leaders to code messages of racial justice in absolutist spiritual rhetoric that appealed to large numbers of black and white Americans who were already steeped in apocalyptic imaginaries. It is here that the public influence of black prophetic evangelicalism on American politics and white evangelicals is most clearly felt.

In discussing the prophetic black Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Heltzel argues that this tradition, as exemplified by King, is deeply evangelical due to its Gospel-centered vision of social change, strong faith in a personal God capable of intervening within history, emphasis on Jesus Christ, use of the Bible, and transdenominational populism.10 Within this tradition, racism is presented as an individual and systemic sin that must be overcome through faith in Jesus Chris and subsequent social action. In the words of Civil Rights leader Andrew Young: “Ours was an evangelical freedom movement that identified salvation with not just one’s personal relationship with God, but a new relationship between people black and white.”11 In this statement, Young masterfully connects evangelical notions of salvation and conversion with racial justice.

One lesser-known example of black prophetic evangelicalism that Sutton discusses is Tom Skinner who openly confronted white evangelicals in 1970 on their failure to “affirm the worth and dignity of black men.”12 Addressing the evangelical campus organization InterVarsity, Skinner noted that it took Malcom X and Stokely Carmichael to articulate the message of black dignity and equality, and he called for white and black Christians to live out new identities worthy of the coming kingdom of God and the revolutionary message of Jesus. In this powerful speech, Skinner denounced “any attempt to wed Jesus Christ off to the American system,” and in so doing thoroughly rejected the dominant vision of white evangelicalism at the time.13

Shifting evangelical emphasis on Jesus’ second coming to Jesus’ liberating power in the here and now, Skinner’s message nevertheless utilized an apocalyptic imagination to tell a story of a world falling apart by forces of poverty, capitalism, racism, Americanism, and militarism; a message that bears striking parallels to the rhetoric of white fundamentalists in the early twentieth century who saw the world as on the brink of destruction due to “isms of all kinds,” particularly secularism, socialism, and communism. Skinner’s message contained the same urgency expressed by white evangelicals that there was still work to be done, but he directed this message towards radically different ends.

Skinner’s legacy lives on in work of black evangelical John Perkins who has, since the 1970s consistently called white evangelicals to embrace the “whole gospel” and pursue a holistic vision of social transformation that includes personal and the institutional change around issues of racial and economic injustice. The influence of black prophetic evangelicalism is also apparent in President Barack Obama’s discussions of race, most notably after the recent Emmanuel Massacre in Charleston, where Obama spoke movingly of black church contributions to the “righteous” movement to dismantle Jim Crow. He went on, in evangelical apocalyptic fashion, to plead with the nation to address racial hatred and blindness, interpreting the mass shooting as an evil event that offered both an indictment of racism and violence as well as a moment of divine grace. Obama urged Americans to take the opportunity they had been given to find their best selves and take an “honest accounting of America’s history” in order to address systemic oppression, racial subjugation, and gun violence both past and present.14

I began this essay noting that in the early 1990s prominent white evangelicals began to respond to the prophetic message of African American Christians, which had been spoken for two centuries.15 For reasons perhaps both cynical and earnest, white evangelicals began to acknowledge that racism was a sin, which demanded repentance and repair. The final chapter of America Apocalypse helps illuminate the seeds of this shift, starting with Billy Graham’s rejection of segregated revivals in 1953, a growing focus on race in the pages of Christianity Today, and the rise of the evangelical left in the 1970s. The progressive group Evangelicals for Social Action took seriously critiques by black evangelicals and were among the first to denounce evangelical perpetuation of institutional racism. Yet fifty years later, evangelicalism continues to struggle against the weight of its historical formation and the perception by many African Americans that it has “done little or nothing to help America heal from the wound of racism”16 because, as Sutton amply demonstrates, the vast number of evangelicals see their faith through a white middle-class racial and cultural lens.

The combination of these factors led Edward Gilbreath to coin in 2006 the term “reconciliation blues”: a term that describes the painful despair African Americans who work in white evangelicals institutions feel knowing it is “business as usual.”17 For this reason, I want to emphasize how important it is to remember that, while a growing number of African Americans self-consciously “make their beds in the evangelical wing of the American church,”18 African Americans have consistently used apocalyptic beliefs and ideas to craft a voice within the American public sphere that is distinct from and critical of white evangelicalism. The black evangelical prophetic tradition, which links the drama of God’s judgment, intervention, and redemption directly with systemic sins of racism, remains as relevant as ever in an age where black lives remain devalued and under threat. To be sure, the “black evangelical underside of white modern evangelicalism” continues to erupt and disrupt, and it is this story that remains to be fully told in the wake of American Apocalypse.19

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON HAS written a thought-provoking and challenging book. American Apocalypse does what a worthwhile synthesis in history should do—it brings copious archival resources to life and pushes readers to reconsider the ways they have narrated a particular phenomenon. In this case, Sutton challenges the dominant paradigm for narrating the twentieth-century emergence of a particular form of Protestantism, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom but increasingly in the Global South, that has taken the names “fundamentalism,” “pentecostalism,” or “evangelicalism.” Sutton’s preference is to call this brand of conversionist Christianity “radical” Christianity, to emphasize that, far from “conserving” Christian ideas and practices from at least the recent past, these Christians were doctrinal innovators—the most important innovation being premillennial dispensationalism. Indeed, returning to the older work of Ernest Sandeen, Sutton marks premillennial dispensationalism as the central organizing feature of radical Christianity in the twentieth century, and his most important contribution is to offer an outstanding analysis of the multifaceted and surprising ways this theological concept impacted the daily lives, political and social activism, and cultural engagement of twentieth-century evangelicals. Doing so reworks the received narrative, and this review will focus on that reworking.

The narrative Sutton wants to alter was established by historians in the 1980s and early 1990s and most importantly by George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture and Reforming Fundamentalism and Joel Carpenter in Revive Us Again. Marsden, Carpenter, and a few others posited that radical Christianity (I will use Sutton’s term) was the product of cultural and theological forces and institutional structures that connected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though the roots of this movement went further back to the nineteenth- and eighteenth-century awakenings, and maybe even to seventeenth-century continental and British Pietism and Puritanism. The received narrative starts, then, with a late nineteenth-century British/American evangelical consensus—a large tent that would include such disparate folks as Dwight Moody, Charles Spurgeon, Catherine Booth, Henry Ward Beecher, and Josiah Strong—that split into two factions. One faction, the “modernists,” adopted theological liberalism, flirted with various other “isms,” and embraced the social gospel. The other faction, which by 1925 adopted the name “fundamentalist,” drew together loosely, as Marsden argued, at least four sometimes opposing intellectual and cultural phenomena: orthodox Reformed creedalism (best exemplified by J. Gresham Machen and the “Princeton theology”); higher-life spirituality (associated with certain trans-Atlantic revivalist and holiness movements); a sense that America was chosen by God for some special plan that American Christians must defend and reinforce; and premillennial dispensationalism. These disparate parts connected—without ever fully coalescing—in the 1910s and 1920s around the sense that conservative white Protestants were increasingly under siege by the forces of modernism—communism, higher criticism, theological liberalism, and Darwinism—that threatened to shake America from its Christian foundation. Modernists, however, won control of the major denominations and seminaries in the 1920s and likewise triumphed in the public imagination in the 1925 Scopes trial. As the narrative continued, fundamentalists thus retreated from the mainstream public square, built a largely unseen empire of Bible colleges, radio ministries, and the like, and then after World War II emerged under the name “evangelicals,” reentering the public square to fight the Cold War within the mainstream political and cultural framework. Such evangelicals were symbolized by the National Association of Evangelicals, Billy Graham, and Christianity Today. The term “fundamentalist” from that point forward marked crankier folks like Carl McIntire or the Bob Jones family who remained radically separatist; it also denoted politically active conservatives like Jerry Falwell later in the century. Fast forward to the late twentieth-century, and the final chapter in this story, narrated recently by folks like Darren Dochuk (From Bible Belt to Sunbelt) and Daniel Williams (God’s Own Party), saw the emergence of the religious right marked by large-scale political mobilization and activism by a new evangelical/fundamentalist (and Catholic and Mormon) coalition. In short, then, this has been a narrative of early cultural dominance (Dwight Moody and William Jennings Bryan), cultural retreat and humiliation (Scopes), resurgence (Billy Graham), and finally a return to mainstream cultural and political influence (George W. Bush).

For Sutton, and many other observers, there are problems with this narrative. For some time now, a number of works, such as those by Dochuk and Williams, have stressed certain aspects of continuity between the 1920s and 1970s in the way radical Christians engaged the political and cultural arena, suggesting that perhaps the retreat of fundamentalists from the mainstream culture between 1925 (Scopes) and 1949 (Billy Graham’s Los Angeles revival) has been overstated in certain ways. One of Sutton’s most important contributions along this line has been to detail fundamentalist political activity in the 1920s and 30s, especially opposition to the New Deal based on apocalyptic concerns about “one world governments.” Numerous, too, have been the critiques that this narrative is largely restricted to whites and males, even though black churches also engaged these cultural and theological forces, as did women, though rarely in the highest levels of leadership (Aimee Semple McPherson and Henrietta Mears being exceptions). Picking up on this critique, Sutton in particular illuminates the important ways the black church pushed apocalypticism in directions quite different from whites. Finally, Donald Dayton and many others have noted how this narrative ignores folks of the Wesleyan or Pietist traditions and pentecostals especially. That pentecostals are left out is especially problematic, since, at least from the vantage of the twenty-first century, probably no other Protestant movement has had such a broad impact on world Christianity. Moreover, if Dochuk, Williams, and Larry Eskridge (God’s Forever Family) are correct, pentecostals were critical foot soldiers in the religious right and utterly reshaped evangelical worship practices.

But for Sutton, the primary problem is that the received narrative fails to recognized the central driving force of radical Christianity: premillennial dispensationalism. Centering radical Christianity on premillenial dispensationalism alters the narrative primarily because Sutton traces the continuity of an idea rather than the episodic convergence and alterations of contingent historical phenomena such as voting, party alignment, institution building, etc. These phenomena factor into his narrative but primarily as they are affected by or interpreted through this central, totalizing idea. For Sutton, radical Christianity is at its heart, then, galvanized by an idea—a totalizing Gestalt/worldview—an interpretive scheme from which actions and institutions flow: premillennial dispensationalism.

We could at this point debate whether premillennial dispensationalism was, indeed, the central organizing feature or even idea of the movement, but this debate can be hashed out elsewhere (Joel Carpenter does a good job of this in the current set of reviews, and Marsden has argued against this view, as stated by Sandeen, in the both editions of Fundamentalism and American Culture). Sutton has a strong case; premillennial dispensationalism was everywhere among many of these central figures, especially in the late nineteenth century, and ideas certainly can shape the way historical action proceeds. So giving him the benefit of the doubt—that premillennialism was the most important idea galvanizing radical Christians into historical action—we see Sutton alter the narrative in at least three significant ways.

First, Sutton posits a narrative primarily of continuity of, persistence of, and steady growth in influence of premillennial dispensationalism from its earliest adoption by Dwight Moody on to its persistence after Scopes, its confirmation and historical corroboration in the Second World War and Cold War (especially with the establishment of a nation of Israel), its movement into popular culture (Hal Lindsey), and finally the way it propelled the religious right to directly influence US domestic and foreign policy. In stressing this continuity, Sutton importantly downplays the role of Scopes, arguing that, while it stigmatized the term “fundamentalist,” it had no real impact on the way premillennialism shaped radical Christian social and political activity—there was no retreat, in other words, from political and cultural engagement. Rather, the pivot point in the narrative was the First World War, which politicized and made patriotic a premillennialism that beforehand was mostly apolitical and even pacifist/isolationist in its political effects. During and after the Great War, radical Christians merged premillennialism with the idea the America was God’s chosen nation, believing that, even though the world would end in conflagration and there would be no human-based millennium, they were to “occupy until He comes.” From this turning point, this merger of premillennialism and patriotism fueled political action in support of prohibition and opposition to the New Deal, Al Smith, and, increasingly, the Democratic Party, facilitating the emerging twentieth-century link between radical Christianity and the GOP, which, for Sutton, occurred in the 1930s not the 1970s. This premillennial Gestalt has continued to mark radical Christians’ “no compromise” outlook into the twenty-first century. Gone is a narrative of withdrawal and reentry; instead, for Sutton, premillennialism fueled a steady and increasing politicization of radical Christians following the First World War—a politicization that promoted a decentralized and laissez-faire economic economy that found a steady home in the GOP.

Second, tracing the continuity of an idea, rather than, say, institution building (Westminster Theological Seminary) or organized activity (it’s one thing to preach against the New Deal, it’s another to run for office or form a political party), moves pentecostalism to the center rather than to the periphery of his narrative, even though pentecostals did things quite differently from rank-and-file radical Christians. Looking backwards, this makes perfect sense, given the emergence of pentecostalism as a world historical force, its role in the religious right, and the prominence of its most important leaders from Oral Roberts to Pat Robertson to Creflo Dollar to Joel Osteen. At the beginning, too, premillennial dispensationalism had no stronger advocates than early pentecostals for whom the Parousia was their core reason for existence. So it makes sense to offer a story of fundamentalism with Sister Aimee at the heart, rather than, as Marsden has done, to propose one regarding pentecostals to be “close cousins to the original fundamentalists.”1

Third, if Sutton’s narrative moves pentecostals to the center, it necessarily moves other folks to the periphery. Two he readily acknowledges are creedal Reformed conservatives, J. Gresham Machen chief among them, and mainstream conservative Christians who were not premillennialists—William Jennings Bryan being the archetypical example. Recognizing the head-scratching response to a history of fundamentalism without J. Gresham Machen, Sutton argues that, in the fight against higher criticism, which radical Christians understood as a fight for premillennial dispensationalism (which required a literalist hermeneutic), premillennialists joined forces temporarily with creedal conservatives like Machen. But Sutton considers the denominational battles of the ’20s, in which creedal conservatives were most invested, somewhat of a sideshow. Sutton, it seems, though, is less meticulous in finding a place for non-dispensationalist, non-modernist Christians like William Jennings Bryan—that is, the vast middle ground of patriotic, mostly conservative church goers.

Sutton’s treatment of Bryan leads to the first of two question I want to raise, and in some respects (perhaps unfairly), they arise from the title’s claim to offer “A History of Modern Evangelicalism” rather than an analysis one component of that history. The question is this: how can a history of an unqualified evangelicalism not account for the conversion of conservative, non-dispensational, non-premillennial white Protestants generally—and, most specifically and importantly, white Southern Protestants—to premillennial dispensationalism? Their presence, it seems, challenges the continuity aspect of the narrative, especially given their importance to the rise of the religious right (the end of segregation-based loyalty to the Democratic Party, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”), the Christianization of the military, etc. So, restated, how does a narrative stressing the continuity/continued growth of radical Christianity through the twentieth century account for Southern conservative Christians and Southern Baptists in particular (the largest organized group of white conservative Protestants in the country) who were not initially, premillennialists?

That’s not to say Sutton ignores the South; he highlights, for example, the pivotal role played by certain premillennialists who spoke with a Southern accent: Texan J. Frank Norris, especially, along with John R. Rice, A. C. Dixon, John Roach Straton (from southern Indiana), and, of course, Billy Graham. But if we consider white Southern Baptists and Methodists generally, these leaders were anomalous (often expatriates) and did not speak for the vast majority of Bryan-like Southern conservative Protestants (and Norris, in particular, embodied what Darren Dochuk has termed “Texas theology,” shaped more by its relationship to California and Chicago than to Nashville, Atlanta, or Richmond). In addition, Sutton includes in the narrative Southern pentecostals and black Christians (who were often quasi-pentecostal in style and practice if not in theology), but, again, these folks were culturally distant from vast majority of average white Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists. Finally, he demonstrates the shift in Southern voting patterns away from the Democratic party in 1928 as a response to Al Smith’s Catholicism, though the link in this shift to premillennialism is implied, not meticulously documented.

Again, at issue is that a book that hopes to narrate the emergence of radical Christianity—which becomes synonymous, Sutton claims, with “evangelicalism” by the twenty-first century—does not account for the conversion of these white Southern Protestants to radical Christianity. At some point by the 1970s these folks started reading Hal Lindsay and voting Republican. As far as I know, these same folks in the 1920s to the 1950s would not have recognized a Clarence Larkin apocalyptic chart. The presence of Southern conservative white Protestants who came late to radical Christianist thus strains the credibility of a narrative stressing continuity. Something had to have happened, even outside the fundamentalization of Southern Baptists in the 1980s, that brought this vast swath of Southern Protestants into the radical Christian and Republican camp.

Second, then, I want to ask, what are the limits to placing an idea, rather than political, economic, social, or institutional phenomena, at the center of the history of a religious movement. As noted, doing so brings pentecostals necessarily into the fold, but it also excludes Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, and other Bryan-like conservative Protestants who weren’t premillennial but tuned into Charles Fuller, not to mention Reformed creedal conservatives. I don’t doubt for one minute that, for those who centered their faith on it (and many did), premillennial dispensationalism had the profound, world-shaping effects Sutton outlines. But can we understand an historical/social movement fundamentally as motivated by an idea, as something that can be summarized by a singular belief system—even if that idea was deeply connected to historical events? This historiographical approach certainly shapes the story we tell, as it has for Sutton. We get a lean argument from Sutton and a narrative that highlights key aspects of the radical Christian outlook. But is it the complete narrative? For all its problems, perhaps the messy quality of Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture gets us closer to understanding what happened in the early twentieth century. For Marsden, “fundamentalism” and its progeny were brought together within a specific historical period in order to arrest the forces of “modernism” in order to preserve stuff (American, Princeton Seminary, etc.). That fight, with the contingencies of time and place, for Marsden, is the organizing feature of the movement, accounting for why it emerged when it did, and why it took on the characteristics it did, not all of which accorded with premillennialism. There is no doubt that premillennial dispensationalism shaped the resulting pronouncements, institutions, and other artifacts of their cultural, social, and political engagement, but so did, for Marsden, other disparate counterforces such as the Reformed impulse to improve the world. For Sutton, Machen is a sideshow to the real historical forces at work, which are fundamentally intellectual and cultural. For Marsden, Machen—and the staunch premillennialists—were all key players at a point of messy cultural engagement that had a lasting effect on institutions we have come to recognize as “fundamentalism.”