This timely reprint of Balmer's 2010 digest of American Evangelical Protestantism is vital reading for those seeking to understand the American political landscape and its relationship to American religion. Balmer is an eminent authority on the topic: he grew up in a separatist Evangelical family, converted to an Episcopal Church that his kin consider insufficiently Christian, and has devoted his admirable scholarly career to studying the history of this strain of American religion, so extreme in some ways and so mainstream in others. This book compresses the work that Balmer did in his previous monographs to present a lucid, straightforward reading of American Evangelical history. To be clear, this is largely the history of white Evangelical Protestants, whose turn toward racism in the twentieth century Balmer chronicles with palpable disappointment and disapproval. Most Americans do not know that white Evangelicals initially supported female autonomy in the reproductive realm – i.e. the right to terminate pregnancy – or that their reaction against integration, which led to the widespread establishment of ‘Christian’ academies for the purpose of segregation, pushed them politically toward the modern Republican party and its pro-life pretence. Balmer may give too much credit to the white Evangelicals of the nineteenth century for abolitionism – after all, many white Evangelicals were proslavery, and liberals, both Christian and non-Christian, were central to antebellum reform – but he does so for a very good reason. White evangelical Americans continue to deny their own baser motives to the nation's peril and that of their own souls. That Baylor University Press chose to reprint this book speaks well, however, of some white Evangelical consciences.