The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America 
Frances FitzGerald 
(Simon & Schuster, 752 PP, £27.26) tablet bookshop price £24.54 • tel 01420 592974

For Gary Wills, the American Catholic writer, “Evangelical religion is revival religion, that of emotional contagion. It can best be characterised, for taxonomic purposes, by three things: crowds, drama and cycles.” For Wills, Evangelicalism is all about Methodist paroxysms and Billy Graham crusades. He is wrong, and to misunderstand Evangelicals in this way leads to situations such as the one in which many other Christians found themselves, on election night last November, watching Donald Trump win the American presidency. Evangelicals are sober, principled, determined people. They organise well. 

Eighty-one per cent of Evangelicals voted for the Republican last November, though they knew Trump wasn’t really one of them. The paroxysms and crusades Wills refers to took place before the 1980s, and the Moral Majority made Evangelicalism a political movement. The 2016 election shows it remains just as political as it is religious or spiritual. Frances FitzGerald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, understands this perfectly. She begins by painting a picture of the demise of Jimmy Carter (who felt at home in a revival meeting) and the rise of Ronald Reagan (who knew exactly how to blend faith and politics). There is more than politics uniting Evangelicals, of course, and this is where Catholics and Evangelicals usually part. An Evangelical is also committed to two things: sola scriptura, the notion that each person with a Bible is an authority on the will of God; and a personal, easily expressible ­experience of spiritual transformation.