What would Donald do? How evangelical Christians got to the point where they could embrace a Hugh Hefner-like president.

• Author: Buntz, Samuel
• Position: The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America - Book review

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

by Frances FitzGerald

Simon and Schuster, 753 pp.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, it became common for some evangelical leaders to defend Donald Trump by comparing him to King David. Sure, King David may have committed adultery and arranged the death of his mistress's husband in battle, but despite these considerable failings he had still retained the full favor of God. (Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. first made the David comparison after revealing that he'd enjoyed a pleasant repast of Wendy's cheeseburgers with Trump.) The then candidate, according to this line of thought, was not what he so baldly appeared to be--a personality cut from the same cloth as Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt. Rather, he was a warrior for righteousness tragically beset by unpredictable appetites. (Perhaps these apologists also recalled King David's penchant for insulting disabled reporters and accusing debate moderators of being premenstrual?)

This strained analogy certainly raises questions about the state of evangelical Christianity in America today: how could evangelical authorities pound such a resolutely square peg into such an obviously round hole? After a campaign season marked by unusual theological justifications for supporting Trump (with some notable exceptions), King David the Second won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, more than any other presidential candidate in history. Coming at exactly the right time, Frances FitzGerald's mammoth history of the evangelical movement in America, The Evangelicals, helps shed light on conservative evangelicalism's transformation into a quasi-political institution.

FitzGerald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her classic study of the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake, provides an immense chronicle of fundamentalism and evangelicalism in America, delving into the movement's anti-intellectualism, narrow literalism, and focus on sexual restrictions--characteristics with which we're all familiar. At the same time, she highlights oft-overlooked evangelical history and figures who far transcend the more familiar "religious right" mold. There is, for example, the great nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Finney, who made abolitionism a central part of his mission; we also have William Jennings Bryan, whose brilliantly awakened social conscience was undercut by his misguided opposition to Darwinism and cultural defeat during the Scopes Trial; and then...