Thomas Kidd is a man in a hurry. Since completing his doctoral studies in 2001, Kidd has published close to a dozen books, including important studies on the Great Awakening and evangelical-Muslim relations. In his apparent effort to become the Jacob Neusner of American religious historians, he has become so prolific that one is tempted to dust off the tired jokes about personal book-of-the-month clubs or holding the line while Herr Doktor Professor completes his latest tome.
One of the recent additions to the Kidd oeuvre is Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis. In the wake of Frances FitzGerald's deeply flawed doorstopper The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon and Schuster, 2017), Kidd apparently believed that the market was ready for a brief survey of American evangelicalism.
The author quickly dispatches with the question in the title, sidestepping David Bebbington's cumbersome “quadrilateral” (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain [Routledge, 1989]) in favor of a triad: born again, primacy of the Bible, and the somewhat amorphous “divine presence of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit” (4). Given his previous work, Kidd is on solid ground in his treatment of the Great Awakening, although his singular focus on George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards comes at the expense of such revival precursors as Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, Lars Tollstadius, and Gilbert Tennent.
Coverage of evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, arguably evangelicalism's most colorful century, thins out into a ribbon. Despite his enormous influence, dispensationalist John Nelson Darby does not make the cut, nor does William Miller or Sarah Lankford. Charles Grandison Finney, by any measure the most important evangelical of the century, merits mention only in passing, with no reference whatsoever to his excoriations of free-market capitalism.
Having declared preemptively that he would not write about Pentecostalism, Kidd picks up the evangelical narrative with fundamentalism and Billy Graham in the twentieth century. He chronicles the familiar story of Graham's emergence in the 1949 Los Angeles crusade, though nothing about Charles Templeton and Graham's crisis of faith immediately before that. The author acknowledges that “most white evangelicals did nothing to assist the civil rights movement” (101), and then devotes considerable attention to the growing ethnic diversity among evangelicals following passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 (the same year that Kidd mistakenly credits Chuck Smith with the founding of Calvary Chapel).
The author's broad knowledge leaves the reader occasionally wishing that Kidd would deploy his analytical skills, not merely his descriptive skills. He notes, for example, the evangelical turn toward Calvinism late in the twentieth century, including at such unlikely venues as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. That development is doubtless significant, and the author correctly flags it. But he offers nothing to help us understand the sudden appeal of Reformed theology within a tradition that largely rejected it a century and a half earlier.
Absent any mention whatsoever of the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, let alone Sojourners or Jim Wallis, the author understandably finds it difficult to locate Jimmy Carter within his rigid white-evangelical-equals-Republican paradigm. Indeed, the author's refusal to acknowledge any expression of white evangelicalism that does not lean hard to the Right (from Wallis all the way back to Finney) leaves him grasping to explain “the Crisis of Evangelicalism” in the final chapter. Kidd tries to explain away the 81 percent of white evangelical support for Donald Trump in various ways—lesser of two evils, faulty polling data—before veering off into a discussion of evangelical charities.
“The crisis of evangelicalism has resulted from the widespread perception that the movement is primarily about obtaining power within the Republican Party,” Kidd asserts, adding that “at least since 1976 evangelical has become a code term for white religious Republicans” (154). If he moved that date to 1980—Carter, neglected again, was elected in 1976—Kidd might have a case. Then, having spent the latter half of the book positing the alliance between white evangelicals and the Republican Party, Kidd offers a curious conclusion: “We should not define evangelicalism by the 81 percent” (155).
Perhaps not. But Who Is an Evangelical?, having bracketed the entire tradition of progressive evangelicalism, offers little in the way of alternatives.
