Isaac Sharp knows that there are too many books on American evangelicalism. He also knows that there are not enough. While the field is overflowing with studies that reproduce “the conventional story” of evangelicalism in the twentieth-century United States, it is sorely lacking in studies that explain “how the conventional story became conventional” (21). The Other Evangelicals offers an original and compelling explanation, delivered in a tone that is refreshingly full-throated, at times even cheeky.

This is a history of how the term “evangelical” came to be so widely associated with theological anti-liberalism, political conservatism, whiteness, anti-feminism, and homophobia. One of the book’s chief provocations is to challenge the assumption (prevalent in both scholarly and popular discourse) that any of these five features associated with American evangelicalism is a given, an automatic consequence of some purportedly inherent and unchanging doctrine. Sharp shows that it is hard to hold this assumption while also doing good history. The hegemonic holds of theological anti-liberalism, political conservatism, whiteness, anti-feminism, and homophobia over evangelicalism all had to be made. The making took time, and the making got tricky. It got tricky primarily because of “the other evangelicals”—theologically liberal evangelicals, politically progressive evangelicals, Black evangelicals, feminist evangelicals, gay evangelicals—whose vision of what evangelicalism should be looked radically different. Sharp’s book is not only a history of these other evangelicals, but also a history of how “the evangelicals” (i.e., the theologically and politically conservative, white, antifeminist, and antigay majority) won the war for evangelicalism—and why so few people are aware that a war had to be fought.

In telling these histories together, Sharp performs a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, The Other Evangelicals stresses just how much power was held, all along, by the theologically and politically conservative, antifeminist, antigay white men leading influential evangelical institutions. On the other hand, the book stresses just how threatening “the other evangelicals” have been to these evangelicals in power. Sharp sheds light on this threat from multiple angles. For example, he highlights the risks intrinsic to the big-tent approach taken by those who launched a trans-denominational “neo-evangelical movement” at mid-century. As another example (to which I will return), Sharp insists on the inevitable versatility of the term “evangelical.”

Like many of the book’s readers, I am most drawn to its fifth chapter, “The Gay Evangelicals.” The title notwithstanding, this chapter is mostly focused on the rise and fall of the ex-gay movement. As the chapter progresses, Sharp shares fascinating (and tellingly neglected) evidence of internal debate over homosexuality within evangelical circles in the 1970s. Crucially, these debates predate the popularity of the ex-gay movement within evangelicalism. Sharp’s main example of this internal debate is Dr. Ralph Blair and his organization Evangelicals Concerned, founded in 1976. A psychotherapist by training, Blair had been educated at Bob Jones University, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary before he started working for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical college ministry. Regional chapters of Evangelicals Concerned provided a home for gay evangelicals across the nation, and meanwhile Blair’s publications targeted major evangelical institutions. Intriguingly, Sharp proposes (he knows more evidence is needed to make a convincing case) that the efforts of Blair and other gay evangelicals actually helped to fuel the evangelical commitment to the ex-gay movement.

One review of The Other Evangelicals calls Blair “the most surprising” figure in the book.1 The phrase stuck out to me because the same language was used almost fifty years ago, when Christianity Today reviewed a book that featured another wing of evangelical gay activism in the 1970s. That book, The Gay Church (published by Eerdmans, like The Other Evangelicals), was a study of the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), a largely LGBTQ+ Christian denomination.2 Christianity Today’s review of The Gay Church stated, “The most surprising thing about the MCC is that on virtually every doctrine but sexual behavior, it is as fundamental as any evangelical church.” The reviewer then elaborated: “The doctrines of the way of salvation, infallibility of the Bible, person and work of Christ, and evangelism its pastors espouse are all in line with the Pentecostal teachings on which the church’s founder, the Reverend Troy Perry, was educated.”3 (Perry was educated at Moody Bible Institute.)

So, these gay evangelicals were “most surprising” among “the other evangelicals” back in the 1970s, and they are still “most surprising” among “the other evangelicals” today. Why? Sharp’s book left me asking: Where have gay evangelicals stood, and where do they stand, not only in relation to “the evangelicals” (i.e., conservative straight white male leaders of evangelical institutions), but also in relation to “the other evangelicals” over the past fifty years? Throughout the book, Sharp speaks about the “gatekeepers” of evangelicalism. How have the gates been kept differently when gay evangelicals are on the other side of the gate as opposed to when other other evangelicals (if you will) are on the other side? Sharp also speaks throughout the book about an “uphill battle” faced by “the other evangelicals.” How should we distinguish between the uphill terrain for gay evangelicals and the uphill terrain for other other evangelicals?

On the note of the uphill metaphor, I wonder if Sharp is really as pessimistic as he sounds at the end of the book. In his penultimate sentence, Sharp writes that the other evangelicals’ uphill battle “grows steeper by the day” (272). Was it not steeper in 1990 or 2000 than it is now? Now that around half of young evangelicals support the legality of same-sex marriage? Now that evangelical organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ host educational events on systemic racism? Now that the President of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) is, for the first time, not white? Apart from the individual case of NAE’s current president, Walter Kim, the book’s non-engagement with the histories of evangelicals of color besides Black evangelicals is, I think, its biggest shortcoming. Such engagement could very well challenge Sharp’s pessimism.

This is not a call for optimism, however. On the contrary, while I do think that the terrain faced by “the other evangelicals” today is, in general, less steep than it was a few decades ago, I also see good reason for skepticism about the battle being fought on this terrain. Let’s call it, from the perspective of “the other evangelicals,” the battle for reclamation: the battle to reclaim the term “evangelical.”

I can explain my skepticism by returning to a highlight of Sharp’s second chapter, which is a highlight in most histories of progressive evangelicalism: a speech by the Black evangelist Tom Skinner at InterVarsity’s student missions conference, known as Urbana, in 1970.4 Like other historians, Sharp calls this speech courageous for challenging Skinner’s predominantly white audience. Absolutely true. But it is also true that the speech was calculating in the ways it appealed to his audience. We see this plainly in a joke that Skinner made about not advocating for interracial marriage. We can also see it—though some will not see it as plainly—in another joke he made. Before he got saved, Skinner claimed, everything he had been told about Jesus gave him the impression that Jesus was “some kind of softie, some kind of effeminate.” Skinner was not content merely to utter this derogatory code word for queerness. He went on: “There is no way that I can relate to that kind of Christ. He doesn’t look like he would survive in my neighborhood. We would do him in on any street corner, and we wouldn’t have to wait until after dark.”5

To be clear: this queer-bashing line is no more violent than the antigay rhetoric of, say, Harold Lindsell or Tim LaHaye. But such rhetoric serves a function for “the other evangelicals” that it does not need to serve for the likes of Lindsell and LaHaye. Namely, the antigay positions of “the other evangelicals”—even when more moderate than the positions of Lindsell or LaHaye—have long benefited straight or straight-passing “other evangelicals” by increasing their chances of winning over more conservative evangelicals. There is archival evidence of this phenomenon for numerous subjects in Sharp’s book, and there is ample evidence of it today. Playing gatekeeper against the gays seems to help “other evangelicals” get a bit closer to becoming one of “the evangelicals.”

But even if all of these “other evangelicals” suddenly, magically became fully affirming of LGBTQ+ people, I would still be skeptical of the project for reclamation. The reason has to do with what I call the rhetorical function of evangelical identification (building on what Linford Fisher called the “‘true-Christian’ usage” of the term “evangelical”).6 Amid the decades of debate about the content of evangelical identity, a function of evangelical identification has remained remarkably constant: to lay claim to “the Gospel,” to “true Christianity,” over and against other Christians. The political utility of this function helps to explain why Sharp’s subjects, both conservative and progressive, cared so much about obtaining the power to define the word “evangelical.” Once they obtained it, Sharp observes, “the mostly white, male, evangelical power brokers in charge during any given controversy retained their power by serving as self-appointed gatekeepers who could rule those who challenged their interpretations out of bounds” (29). Antifeminist evangelicals did this to feminist evangelicals, and antigay feminist evangelicals did this to gay evangelicals, and the power to do this seems to be part of what evangelical identity is all about.

Importantly, the rhetorical function of evangelical identification is operative even in discourse about the theological content that purportedly defines this identity. Take, for example, the well-worn line: “An evangelical has a high view of the Bible.” That statement does not necessarily tell us anything about the content of a person’s view of the Bible; what it does tell us is that this person is highly invested in deeming certain other people’s views of the Bible as ‘lower’ than their own.7 Gay evangelicals like Ralph Blair know this well, because their views keep getting deemed “lower,” keep getting gate-kept out of the supposedly big tent of evangelicalism, even as their theological discourse immaculately mirrors that of straight evangelicals whose right to make a home in the tent goes unquestioned.

So: Reclaim what? Reclaim the power of this word to do what? The more I see “the other evangelicals” using the exact same tricks as “the evangelicals” in their efforts to exclude some other “other evangelicals,” the more apparent it is to me that, when it comes to evangelicalism, there is no feature more defining, no characteristic that runs deeper, than the impulse to exclude.

Decentralized power and contested sites of authority are defining features of US evangelicalism, as many scholars have described. Isaac Sharp’s <em>The Other Evangelicals</em> (Eerdmans, 2023) shows how, after World War II, these contests unfolded along the lines of theology, politics, race, gender, and sexuality. It is a history of power in white evangelical spaces: who has it, who doesn’t. It tells the history of the “evangelical losers, the dissenters who were sidelined” and “those who were defined out of the category evangelical” and expunged from evangelicalism’s “historical record” (30). Some left voluntarily, some were forced out. But one way or another, the groups named in the book’s subtitle—”Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist, and Gay Christians”—all became “others.” The flagship white evangelical organizations and institutions, those that came to comprise what Sharp calls “capital-E Evangelicalism,” became inhospitable places for them, despite their firm belief in many of the tenets of evangelicalism.

The events Sharp recounts would not suggest that the leaders whose actions drove much of this expulsion and flight would graft in any racial others. Yet they did. As I chart in my forthcoming book, Korean-language presbyteries formed in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) during the early 1980s; InterVarsity Christian Fellowship created Asian American Ministries in the 1990s; and theological schools such as Fuller Seminary began Korean-language D.Min. and Master’s programs starting in the mid-1990s. By the 2000s, capital-E evangelicalism organizations included a significant number of post-1965 Asian immigrants, and over the past decade many of their English-speaking children, mostly sons, rose to leadership of organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization; Westminster Seminary, CA; PCA; Master’s University and Seminary; and the Gospel Coalition.1 This trend is all the more remarkable when you consider that Asian Americans make up fewer than 3% of all US evangelicals.

As a historian, I had to ask why. What has been happening in the last decade that made Asian Americans useful to white evangelical gatekeepers? I would argue that one of the biggest factors was the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which catapulted questions about racism—and specifically, structural and institutional racism against Black Americans—to prominence. In nearly all cases, the Asian American leader is the first person of color in his position. Asian Americans have long occupied an ambivalent position vis-à-vis Black Americans within ever-shifting American racial hierarchies that make them ideal to serve in such a role. Since the model minority trope was popularized as part of white backlash to 1960s civil rights and Black Power movements, those in power have used Asian American success to undercut Black calls for reparations and redress. Or as one scholar recently put it, since the 1960s, Asian Americans (and especially East Asian Americans) have become “alibis of the US racial state” that could be held up as evidence of America’s equal opportunity and weaponized against Black communities on everything from welfare policy to affirmative action.2 Thus the grafting of Asian Americans into evangelicalism repeats a longstanding pattern. In addition to their multiple qualifications on other grounds, Asian American leaders give cover to their organizations on questions of diversity, most powerfully for groups with mixed records on race.

Historian Jesse Curtis, in his excellent book <em>The Myth of Colorblind Christians</em> (NYU, 2021), addresses these dynamics. Curtis recounted how in 1985, the Southern Baptist Convention and North American Lausanne leaders planned a conference called “Evangelizing Ethnic America” targeting non-English language groups including Latinos and Asian Americans specifically. Behind closed doors, they decided that working with so-called “ethnic Americans” was easier than working with Black leaders who, they believed, were more likely to demand deeper, structural changes. In Curtis’s telling, the exclusion of Black Christians showed how white evangelical elites were “eager to make their movement multiethnic” even as “an antiracist gospel” continued to fall “outside of most evangelical imaginations” (Curtis, 169). In the 2010s the message is more subtle but similar in spirit. By promoting non-Black people of color, white evangelical elites can demonstrate that they value diversity while sidestepping thorny race questions related to their institutions’ historical support for slavery, record on the civil rights movement, and anti-Black racism generally. That is, they platform Asian American and other nonwhite, non-Black figures as a strategy to avoid institutional change.

Curtis told the top-down story. Sharp does this as well in his epilogue, where he takes to task the “predominantly white evangelical gatekeepers” who “retroactively graft Christians of color with evangelical beliefs onto the official evangelical roster” as doing a “profound injustice to many who want nothing to do with the label and what it represents” (269). For multiple audiences, Sharp’s lament blaming white Christians for manipulating innocent people of color is a familiar and appealing one.

But what about the desires and choices of Christians of color themselves? Serious scholarship exploring race and religion must also acknowledge and take seriously those people of color who actively embrace and even welcome the evangelical label. “Asian American” encompasses everyone from a fifth-generation US-born Chinese or Japanese American to someone who arrived from Burma yesterday. Thus they may embrace the label for vastly different reasons. The Asian American leaders whose appointments are the clearest tool of white evangelicals’ desire for racial amnesty are mostly US-born citizens who presumably share many white evangelicals’ understanding of the label. In this era of deconstruction and ex-vangelicals, they may want to reclaim or rehabilitate the term. Some may be willing to play the part of race alibi. But their coethnic congregants include migrants who understand the term quite differently in their transnational contexts. So, for example, institutions like the <em>Hapdong</em> Presbyterian denomination in South Korea or Rainbow 7, an evangelical anti-gay group in Taiwan, may play a larger role in their identification as “evangelical” than does any US-based group.

The biography of Chinese-born evangelist Thomas Wang illustrates some of these tensions. Wang has been legible in both US national and international understandings of evangelicalism. He first appeared in <em>Christianity Today</em> in 1974 for his work as a leader of the Chinese delegation to the 1974 Lausanne Congress. By the time of the Second Lausanne Congress in Manila in 1989, he was serving as the international director of Lausanne—and <em>Christianity Today</em> ran another piece introducing him to its white evangelical readers. In it he was quoted speaking about the decline of Western dominance and the rise of a more global evangelicalism led by the Majority World. Indeed, those who supported Wang’s appointment within Lausanne believed that Chinese Christians occupied a special place in international evangelical visions and chose him as a vital missionary bridge to a hoped-for future when Chinese Christians in the PRC could spread the Gospel and practice their faith freely. Despite these commitments, Wang’s term in office tested the organization’s commitment to decentering the West.

Wang’s turbulent relationship with Lausanne’s Anglo-American leadership would presumably have surprised the leaders who, as Curtis described, chose so-called “ethnic” Christians over Black ones in the 1980s, expecting them to be pliable. Certainly it surprised the Lausanne leaders who, by many accounts, had imagined Wang would be a deferential yes-man. He repeatedly clashed with the movement’s U.S. and European leaders, and their complaints ultimately made it clear they considered him “too Chinese.” He earned a reputation as not only difficult but also authoritarian, a poor fit with the organization’s consensus-based ethos. Wang later described, “Because I had lived in America for many years, and because I spoke English well, they made the mistake to think that I also thought like them!”3 He was unapologetic about his international vision for Lausanne and missions work in general. One upshot of that vision was that even though he had been hired to plan the Second Lausanne Congress, he spent much of his time launching a global evangelization initiative called the AD 2000 & Beyond Movement, which aimed to take the Christian Gospel to the entire world by the year 2000. Wang had initially conceptualized AD 2000 as part of the Lausanne Movement, but amid his rocky relationships and growing suspicion from Lausanne’s Anglo-American leaders, the idea received little support. Wang therefore turned to a young evangelist from Argentina named Luis Bush. Over the next few years, Bush would become well known for coining the term “10/40 window” to describe the regions of the world where most “unreached people groups” lived.

After leaving Lausanne, Wang went on to pay US issues more attention, but even then, he saw them primarily in global and diasporic terms. During the same-sex marriage debates in early 2000s California, he partnered with the Family Research Council and right-wing evangelical groups to oppose marriage equality. In 2006, he put together a book called <em>America, Return to God</em> featuring a prologue by Bill Gothard and including writings by James Dobson and John MacArthur among other white evangelical elites. Through a national lens, one can easily see Wang as a marginal immigrant figure seeking proximity to power through an association with white evangelical power brokers. But he saw himself differently. For Wang, the Family Research Council and other US evangelical groups were vehicles for Chinese evangelicals like himself to carry out a reverse missions project in which they bring America back to God. Many Chinese and other Majority World evangelicals, both inside and outside the US, saw Wang as he saw himself: a lifelong evangelist of great authority who, albeit a naturalized US citizen, was working toward the global salvation of souls. Far from a mere pretender or mimicker of the US Christian Right, he regarded himself chiefly as a global missionary whose actions transcended the concerns of nations.

Expanding our purview to consider “other evangelicals” like Wang complicates histories of white evangelical power such as the one Sharp provides. When you take seriously the perspectives of migrants—whether immigrants, refugees, displaced persons—questions of evangelical authority become more complex as they become transnational, necessitating new ways of analyzing power beyond the US. Doing so forces us to grapple with thorny questions of complicity with US-based powerbrokers as well as look beyond the US to consider how “American evangelicals” remain entangled with a wider Christian world. Sharp’s book provides a background for interpreting the grafting of Asian Americans into US evangelicalism. It reveals some of the motivations and anxieties that make Asian American leaders useful to white gatekeepers. As those who were disappointed by Wang may have learned, white American evangelicalism is increasingly constructed in a global context. Those observing it would also do well to look beyond the US and take these broader contexts to heart.

I remember when I first laid eyes on Isaac Sharp’s 912-page dissertation, with its 44-word title. Here, I thought, was a true kindred spirit! Not because I likewise wrote a 946-page dissertation (unlike Sharp, my committee required me to submit a 630-page version instead), though I do have a fondness for exceptionally long books. Rather, I could tell immediately that Sharp, like myself, is someone who understands evangelicalism from the inside—and is grappling with the fact that evangelicalism today has no place for someone with his convictions.

I grew up knowing I was a direct descendant of Jonathan Blanchard, the founder of Wheaton College. His portrait hung over my grandparents’ fireplace, along with a picture of Wheaton in the 1860s. But I did not fully grasp Blanchard’s complex legacy until much later. It was not until I was a Wheaton student myself that I encountered Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and began to grapple with the dispensationalism and young-earth creationism I grew up with represented a recent and relatively small subculture within the evangelical fold. I remember stumbling across Wilhelm Ernst Schmitt’s 1966 work, Steps toward Apostasy at Wheaton College. For most of my sophomore year—the year I began to rethink my relationship with evangelicalism—I had that checked out from the college library, a reminder that the boundaries of orthodoxy are fluid and constantly in motion.

It was only at the end of my time at Wheaton that I finally encountered Donald Dayton’s Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (1976),1 a topic that Sharp takes up in chapter 6 of his dissertation—one of two chapters sadly cut from the book, along with a chapter on the Barthians. When I first found Dayton’s work, it was mostly of interest because of the opening chapter on Blanchard, but it was not until I arrived at Princeton Theological Seminary a couple years later and discussed Dayton with John Drury and Christian Collins Winn that I began to understand the larger significance of Dayton’s thesis regarding the common origins of Wheaton and Oberlin. Dayton helped make sense of why my family was so different from the evangelicalism of Blanchard. My grandfather, who had Blanchard’s photo prominently on display in his home, was a Goldwater supporter and a Bircher, a man who exemplified the right-wing turn in American evangelicalism. My grandparents were more loyal to Dallas Theological Seminary than to Wheaton and tried to persuade me to attend Dallas instead of Princeton. When Wheaton changed its policy about dancing and faculty drinking in 2003, my grandfather wrote a letter to the president announcing the withdrawal of his financial support.

In other words, the changes that Sharp documents in his excellent book, The Other Evangelicals, have played out within my own family. In addition to wrestling with my complicated family legacy, I experienced the boundary policing of evangelicalism firsthand, getting fired from two churches and a nonprofit Christian organization for violating unstated or ambiguous norms regarding issues such as LGBTQ affirmation and universal salvation. These eventually led me to my own project on the history of how orthodoxy has been defined and negotiated, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, a book that was already with the publisher when The Other Evangelicals was released.2 In many respects, Sharp and I are examining the same set of questions, except he focuses on evangelicalism, whereas I focus on Christianity in general. That difference brings me to the topic I want to examine in more detail: the issue of modernity.

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At the beginning of his book, Sharp points out that the problem facing “capital-E Evangelicalism” during the twentieth century was the fragility of the consensus over “what it meant to be a real, true evangelical” (27). Much later, at the end of The Other Evangelicals, Sharp asks the question: Is US American evangelicalism “currently in the midst of an identity crisis” (268)? His answer is both yes and no: yes in the sense that many evangelicals are abandoning the label and even abandoning the evangelical movement or Christianity altogether, but no in the sense that evangelicalism is not remotely close to a 50/50 split into two separate movements. Mainstream institutional evangelicalism—the so-called “winners” in the battle to claim the label—is as confident as ever and sees little threat to its control. The prospect of “a looming mass defection” does not look good (270).

While I don’t dispute Sharp’s point that an institutional crisis in this sense is not likely to occur, I want to suggest that we think about crisis from a wider vantage point. The Other Evangelicals presents itself as a history of twentieth-century US evangelicalism from the perspective of those who were ultimately marginalized from capital-E Evangelicalism. But it could also be read as a case study in how Christianity as such has adapted to the challenges of modernity. And modernity itself, from the perspective of the old authoritarian regime, is a crisis. To respond to modernity is to respond to a crisis.

As much as both insiders and outsiders speak about evangelicalism as a clearly identifiable thing, I am increasingly a radical nominalist when it comes to ecclesiastical labels. Sharp claims that “there is at least some consensus that [evangelicalism] is actually not so hard to recognize once you get a feel for it. Like the judge said about pornography, perhaps you just know it when you see it” (255). But is this really true—either for pornography or, in this case, for evangelicalism? We like to think this being-able-to-recognize is a common-sense truth, but my own research into early twentieth-century mainline Protestantism has made it clear to me that I had placed too much confidence in my capacity to discern the presence of evangelicalism. The essays of mainline Presbyterian leaders in this period, including those on the “modernist” side of the controversy, are often indistinguishable from something an evangelical might say twenty years later. Lerone A. Martin’s The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover is perhaps the best illustration of this. He opens the book by examining mainline reactions to Hoover, and then later looks at evangelical responses. The names of the speakers are the only real difference.

If a mainline Protestant in the 1930s speaks like today’s evangelical, can we apply the label of evangelical to them? If someone walks and talks like an evangelical, are they evangelical? Or is evangelicalism a fixed institutionalized identity that persists, like a genetic marker, regardless of what evangelicals do or how they act? Or is neither the case, and “evangelical” instead shifts depending on what people who describe themselves as evangelicals do and say? Sharp largely avoids this line of questioning (for good reason!), but the issue appears so often that I wanted him to address it. In my work, I distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive accounts of Christianity, and I apply this to the question of evangelicalism. I largely side with those who adopt more descriptive approaches, but I recognize that this places someone like Sharp in a difficult position. His book traces how descriptive evangelicalism changed to conform to the prescriptive evangelicalism advanced by evangelical leaders in positions of power, and at the same time he describes marginalized evangelicals who wield their own alternative prescriptive evangelicalisms in an effort to keep themselves and their communities within the circle of descriptive evangelicalism. In short, it’s messy and I well understand Sharp’s desire to skirt these matters entirely by appealing to the principle of “you know it when you see it.”

Mark Thomas Edwards, in The Right of the Protestant Left, has observed that the “old Protestant left” of the 1930s and 1940s was the “Christian Right” of their time, in their explicit effort to advance a theocratic agenda of Christianizing America and expanding their influence in civil society. Edwards remarks that “today’s ‘conservatives’ are yesterday’s ‘classical,’ limited-government liberals.”3 I suggest that evangelicals, if we can still use the term meaningfully, have a similar relationship with mainline Protestants. In the nineteenth century one could argue that today’s mainliners were yesterday’s evangelicals (i.e., evangelicals innovated with techniques of religious communication that became culturally widespread), while in the twentieth century the reverse is the case: today’s evangelicals are yesterday’s mainliners (i.e., evangelicals tend to champion positions that were once held in the mainline).

My point is not (necessarily) that we ought to abandon the word “evangelical” altogether, nor am I seeking a more descriptive account of evangelicalism that will satisfy everyone, though proposals to define this term around institutions and networks of power and money (e.g., people who like Billy Graham, churches who participate in Operation Christmas Child, or those who belonged to NAE vs. NCC) strike me as the best available option for keeping the term “evangelical” in scholarly circulation. Rather, the remarkable similarities between mainline and evangelical Christians suggests to me something larger and more important: both groups, as well as others not included in this conversation, are trying to address the challenge of defining what it means to be Christian in modernity. Repeatedly in The Other Evangelicals, Sharp shows us groups of self-described evangelicals who are wrestling with what defines the “essence of Christianity” (without using that term) and facing institutional barriers and power brokers who, in response, draft new lines of demarcation between the in-group and the out-group. These dynamics are, of course, not unique to evangelicals. Even the issues themselves (e.g., historicism, race, gender, sexuality, and politics) are not unique. What should we take away from this observation?

I leave to the historians to debate the terminology and the fluidity of the boundary between evangelical and ecumenical (to use David Hollinger’s term).4 For me, the more interesting story is that evangelicals and ecumenicals are both liberals. By “liberal,” I mean that both communities (if we can still meaningfully distinguish them) are responding to (a) the breakdown of traditional authority structures and (b) the loss of salience associated with traditional marks of Christian identity. The first point refers to Charles Taylor’s observation that modernity is the period in which one is able to choose one’s religious identity, to claim a certain affiliation as one’s own. Evangelicalism can be described as one of the first Christian movements founded on the principle that one’s identity as Christian is chosen, and this tended to make them a progressive movement in their early years. In a sense, evangelicalism is a secular religious movement. More recently, however, evangelical leaders have sought to reverse this tendency by emphasizing authority structures (the church as mother, the father as patriarch, the Republican president as Führer), whereas mainline ecumenical leaders have embraced the principle of choice. Evangelicals and ecumenicals have switched places, with respect to modern secularity.

The second point is a more recent development, at least on the evangelical side. Liberal Protestants going back to the eighteenth century sought new definitions of Christian identity that made more sense to them, including natural morality, scientific reason, existential concern, and emancipatory politics. Evangelicals were late to this game, but they eventually caught up. As the era of “Protestant America” eroded in the second half of the twentieth century, the old doctrinal marks of distinction between communities became increasingly irrelevant. Disputes over doctrines such as justification by faith, sacramental efficacy, biblical infallibility, and divine providence faded with time—the evangelicals held out for a few decades longer than the mainline Protestants—only to be replaced by new versions of the essence of Christianity.

From this perspective, Sharp’s book is a story of how certain American Protestants gradually redefined the essence according to new orthodoxies: antimodernism, whiteness, conservative politics, complementarian patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In Who Is a True Christian?, I focus on the orthodoxies of antimodernism, persecution by the world, and cisheterosexuality (framed as antignosticism), and I highlight how these include both mainline and evangelical Christians. The proliferation of new statements of faith—including the mainline Hartford Appeal and the evangelical Nashville Statement—is a sign that traditional marks of orthodoxy have lost their efficacy and new declarations became necessary. Hartford makes secularism a heresy, while Nashville makes any relationship outside of monogamous heterosexuality a heresy, but the larger issue remains the same: Modernity has made it necessary to construct new prescriptive accounts of Christianity, and that necessity inevitably raises the question about who has the power to construct these accounts.

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The evangelicals who speak in anxious tones about a crisis in the wake of Trump have, as Sharp points out, a naively ahistorical picture of evangelicalism.5 They seem to think there is a stable uncorrupted evangelical core—das Wesen des Evangelikalismus, so to speak—that we can recover if we just get back to some moment in the past, whether that is the 1950s, the 1920s, the 1820s, or the 1670s. In my book, I examine the broader interest in recovering and defending the idea of “historic Christianity,” and I collectively refer to these as efforts to make Christianity great again. Some of the evangelicals Sharp discusses are likewise guilty of trying to make evangelicalism great again without reckoning with the way evangelicalism in the past has produced today’s apparent crisis.

More importantly, however, evangelicals and ecumenicals together need to reckon with the way modernity itself has been a permanent crisis. Too many evangelicals and ecumenicals alike react to this permanent crisis by longing nostalgically for an imagined past that never existed, but which serves powerfully to motivate political coalitions in the present. They do not actually want a premodern world; they merely want the comfort that comes with cultural dominance.

In response to this reactionary antimodernism, it might be worth listening again to Karl Barth—a theologian whom both evangelicals and ecumenicals have claimed for themselves. In the preface to his 1922 Epistle to the Romans, Barth spoke of “the permanent crisis of time and eternity,” that is to say, the permanent crisis posed by God.6 The American neoorthodox theologian Paul Lehmann rightly described Barth as a theologian of “permanent revolution.”7 From Barth’s prescriptivist perspective, the crises posed by modernity or war or technology are literally nothing compared to the Crisis that is God. Those who claim to follow God, therefore, ought not to retreat from crisis but embrace it and learn to theologize from within it. I suggest in my work that this will take the form of a pluralistic theology—not only interreligious pluralism but intrareligious, and specifically intra-Christian, pluralism. If humanity as such is always in crisis, then accommodating modernity should pose no threat. Christianity that responds to God will thus necessarily be a form of liberal Christianity.

This, of course, is a prescriptivist claim. Whether it becomes descriptive of any community, evangelical or ecumenical, remains to be seen.

In The Other Evangelicals, Isaac Sharp answers a question rarely asked in the historical scholarship on American evangelicalism by explaining the twentieth-century origins of the distinctive character of mainstream, conservative white evangelicalism, or what has been called “neo-evangelicalism.” According to The Other Evangelicals, capital-E evangelicalism became a “proprietary trademark” that signifies “fundamentalistic, theologically and politically conservative, white, straight, and male-headship-affirming” (32). Sharp’s book argues that these elements were not organically grown from the seed of evangelical theology and tradition, but were actively curated over the period of years by evangelicalism’s gatekeepers. Sharp details the way that evangelicalism was tailored and marketed to be anti-modernist, white-centric, anti-feminist, politically conservative, and anti-LGBTQ. Through intentional, rather than accidental, exclusion, the evangelicalism we see today was actively made.

As I have found in my research on twenty-first-century American Christianity, the “gatekeepers” featured in The Other Evangelicals were so successful, in fact, that today’s “other evangelicals” largely do not identify as evangelicals. In other words, those Christians who were shaped within the evangelical tradition but are explicitly feminist, call for racial justice, advocate for the inclusion of LGBTQ individuals, and campaign for Democrats, today do not stake a claim on the label “evangelical” or in most cases consider the identifier to be redeemable.

Moreover, this identity-curation has been so successful that the media largely accepts an inherently conservative definition of evangelicalism. The New York Times, for instance, tends to contract politically conservative, white writers such as Tish Harrison Warren, David French, and David Brooks to offer an evangelical, or Christian, view on current events. Warren, despite being a woman minister herself, is part of a denomination that does not consistently ordain women—only certain dioceses do—and which rejects LGBTQ expressions of gender and sexuality. David French was a longtime member of the Presbyterian Church in America, which takes a position against women’s ordination and the feminist movement, and has done so since its split with the Presbyterian mainline. These writers also lean politically conservative, giving the readership of The New York Times the impression that Christians are naturally conservative—in other words, that they come by their conservatism honestly, inherited from their theological tradition.

The Other Evangelicals points out a reality so obvious to the contemporary reader—the conservatism of modern-day American evangelicalism—that one might wonder about its contribution. But its brilliance is to bring together the various histories of exclusion into one volume in a way that causes the student of American evangelicalism to wonder if the primary mark of American evangelicalism is exclusion. Certainly all religious movements have boundaries of belief and of culture. However, twentieth-century evangelicalism had to work incredibly hard to maintain its conservative character because its theological roots in fact grew in a number of directions, many of them progressive and liberatory. Evangelicals, for instance, were present in movements including abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, second-wave feminism, and gay rights. Only by defining them outside of evangelicalism did evangelicalism’s self-appointed leaders equate evangelicalism with political, theological, and social conservatism.

As a scholar of evangelical and post-evangelical feminism, I was most interested in Sharp’s fourth chapter, “The Feminists.” Sharp identifies key leaders of the evangelical feminism that peaked in the 1970s, along with other forms of progressive evangelicalism, including Letha Dawson Scanzoni, Nancy A. Hardesty, and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. Sharp puts it like this: “During the early 1970s women like Scanzoni, Hardesty, and Mollenkott thus began sprinkling a bit of feminist leaven in the overwhelmingly male-dominated evangelical world” (178). This understated wording belies the intentional and convicted feminist messages these evangelical messagers spread. They were outnumbered, but they wielded the common tools of evangelicalism, including scriptural interpretation, a central emphasis on Jesus, and a theology focused on the Holy Spirit’s gifting, to make an argument for women’s liberation.

A key text in the development of evangelical feminism was Scanzoni and Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be (1974). Scanzoni and Hardesty wrote, “We are equipped by the Holy Spirit for many tasks—to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, helpers, administrators, speakers . . . Scripture nowhere indicates that men alone are given the gifts of leadership and women those of following and helping.”1 As Sharp points out, this book was largely well-received at first because of its recognizable evangelical language and it was hard to ignore because it was solidly positioned within evangelical theology. It required a coordinated effort to contradict its claims, which indeed came.

As Sharp’s book indicates, voices that reinforced gender hierarchy were louder because they had networks to amplify them as they sought to uphold the status quo. Writers and speakers such as Marabel Morgan, Elisabeth Elliot, and Billy Graham, did not challenge the patriarchal nuclear family ideal of the mid-twentieth century, but instead made it a pillar of their Christianity. They were “widely celebrated” in evangelical magazines, radio, and churches (179). They rivaled the quieter voices of the evangelical feminists who were a minority of the evangelical culture, and American culture, at the time.

In my work on contemporary post-evangelicalism, I have witnessed a phenomenon that Sharp’s book helps to explain: the ahistoricism of today’s iteration of progressive evangelical feminists. The post-evangelical feminists who began questioning gender hierarchy on blogs in the 2000s and on social media in the 2010s rarely, if ever, referenced the evangelical feminists of the 1970s or the remnant that remain today. They also did not harken back to the women preachers of evangelicalism’s beginnings. As they rifled through scripture in pursuit of gender equality, they portrayed themselves as discovering feminist truths anew. Jesus’ feminism—God’s feminism—was a new revelation they, as twenty-first-century Christians, were uncovering. Why, when evangelical feminism, or at least the Spirit’s empowerment of women in ministry, is as old as evangelism itself, did the evangelical feminists of the twenty-first century not intentionally stand on the shoulders of their predecessors?

This silence can be explained by the backlash Sharp describes that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The reaction against the 1970s evangelical feminists buried viable expressions of evangelical feminism in the dust bin of history. The explicitly patriarchal voices of the late-twentieth century self-styled “complementarians” drowned out the nascent evangelical feminism of the 1970s. Male figures fought to contradict evangelical feminism, especially John Piper and Wayne Grudem through their text Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (1991) and the accompanying Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.2 “Male headship,” that men are divinely appointed to leadership in the home, church, and society, as was spelled out by Piper and Grudem was not readily apparent to evangelicals in the late twentieth century. Instead, it had to be packaged, distributed, and sold to the evangelical public in the form of books, conferences, organizations. This innovation of “complementarianism,” a dressed up version of patriarchy, as Beth Allison Barr reminds readers in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, was spread by male leaders afraid of the feminist movement.3 It became the dominant view of gender roles in evangelical churches and organizations not by default but by effort, as Sharp demonstrates in his chapter.

Thus, the evangelicals in the Generation X and Millennial cohorts grew up without the awareness of an alternative to evangelical patriarchy. They did not have Scanzoni, Hardesty, and Mollenkott to look to as feminist heroes of the faith. Instead, they were taught to look up to the more traditional Elisabeth Elliot—once a daring missionary, but reinvented as champion of domestic life—and Billy Graham. For those uninterested in idealized midcentury white domesticity, what alternative did they have? Piper and Grudem’s “biblical manhood and womanhood” messages seeped into their Sunday school curriculum, their youth group events, and their popular Christian books. New generations grew up in late-twentieth century and early twenty-first-century evangelicalism without knowledge of their feminist predecessors.

This tendency of ahistoricism and infrequent references to recent theological precedents is not unique to progressive evangelicals, of course. Conservative and patriarchal movements within evangelicalism, such as the “young, Reformed, and restless” movement of the 2000s, also spoke about their form of Christianity as being derived directly from scripture, rather than as cultivated from hundreds of years of evangelical history, or as a reaction to recent progressive versions of the faith. Protestantism’s emphasis on “sola scriptura” has encouraged Protestant Christians to view their theologies as arising uninterrupted from biblical texts rather than as repeating other Christians’ theologies.

One fact about evangelical feminism that Sharp does not fully contend with in his chapter deserves attention: the persistence and prominence of one particular strand of evangelical feminism in some of the most powerful institutions in evangelicalism. Sharp does note that evangelical feminists continue to exist in both Christians for Biblical Equality and the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus (201). But only one of these groups continues to receive support and agreement from evangelical powerhouses including Willow Creek Community Church (WCCC) and Fuller Theological Seminary. Christians for Biblical Equality, which distinguished itself from the Evangelical Women’s Caucus by their rejection of their lesbian feminist counterparts, continued to partner with these organizations. WCCC, the host of the popular Global Leadership Summit, held an egalitarian stance since the 1980s, and until the sexual abuse scandal in 2018 was a cultural powerhouse in the evangelical subculture.4 Its founders were intertwined with Christians for Biblical Equality. Fuller Theological Seminary made all of its degree programs open to women by 1966. Today, it considers itself dedicated to “making its resources fully available to women as they pursue the professions and ministries to which the Lord has called them”—that is, straight women.5 Fuller Theological Seminary has in recent years expelled LGBTQ students and fired LGBTQ-affirming staff members.6 The cases of WCCC and Fuller indicate that though fundamentalist organizations and the Southern Baptist Church certainly disagreed, particular evangelical feminists were included in the evangelical world. There was room in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century evangelicalism for egalitarian institutions, but not for those who also affirmed the equality LGBTQ Christians. While Fuller and similar institutions may eventually reconsider their stances and affirm LGBTQ relationships, this direction was rejected by Christians for Biblical Equality in the 1970s, and this exclusion resulted in their evangelical inclusion, however marginal.

The Other Evangelicals is a valuable addition to the scholarly history of American evangelicalism, centering the role of gatekeepers in determining the character of evangelicalism. Sharp’s turn away from theological distinctives and toward the dynamics of power clarifies the makeup of the contemporary tradition without making the evangelical tradition uniform. Sharp both builds upon and corrects a stream of scholarship that includes George Marsden’s work on fundamentalism and the emphasis on scriptural inerrancy in evangelicalism, Mark Noll and Molly Worthen’s work on the distinctive relationship evangelicalism with the intellectual—or anti-intellectual—life, and Nathan Hatch’s work on early evangelicalism and populism.7 Sharp elucidates the social and political characteristics of contemporary evangelicalism and their origins. By highlighting these characteristics as the result of contention between various interests, Sharp represents a broader swath of evangelicals than has appeared in much previous scholarship. The monolithic appearance of today’s evangelicalism is, in other words, made, not begotten.