Frances FitzGerald

Understanding That Old Time Religion

Readers who are not evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, who are not religious at all, or who merely pay lip service to the idea, will learn a lot from Frances Fitzgerald’s new, and at times numbingly detailed, history of these two groups, as well as their many splinters.

Perhaps the most intriguing and, when considered carefully in the light of reality, is the thorough infusion of religious mysticism into the world, as if God and the eternal were show more palpable participants in our physical world, or something like a parallel dimension separated by a most porous, frequently traversed membrane. Writing a sentence like the preceding, however, does little to capture how disturbing (yet also insightful) many will find the manifestations of an overarching, other worldly belief system, because whether or not you believe, it impacts your life. Fitzgerald illustrates how when she reaches “Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority” (just short of halfway) and proceeds through most of the high points of recent history, with particular concentration and insight into the theologizing, philosophizing, and politicizing not visible to non, marginal, and true believers. For this reason, for its practical value, many will find this an invaluable history and resource.

While readers will find it tempting, given the length and density of this history, to sprint or just leap to current times, spending time with the first half of the history will help you frame current times. After all, the belief systems, some of which feel simplistic, spring from some deep thinking, particularly in the era when religion dominated the landscape. Thus, Fitzgerald takes readers through the First (1730-40s) and Second (1800 through the 1830s) Great Awakenings, the days of Calvinist Jonathan Edwards and the personalization of the religious experience, and Charles Finney’s “burnt-over district,” a period marked by the rise of revivalism and the jettisoning of rationalism in favor of emotion. Then follows the Civil War and wrapped around it from antebellum to post reconstruction the splintering over slavery and other issues related to the experience of religion. Finally, in the run up to current days, readers walk through the preaching of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, from Dwight Moody to Billy Sunday, until they reach the days of the influential Falwell, the scandalous Jim and Tammy and Jimmy Swaggart, the monumentally influential Billy Graham, and, regardless of what you think of him, the immense influencer, the game changer extraordinaire, Pat Robertson.

The ground Fitzgerald tills here is a truck farm of religion, politics, business; of larger than life personalities; of theologies and philosophies that will strike nonbelievers as bizarre. You’ll learn much that may surprise you, too, such as the fact that before our days of politicalized religion, Protestants in their various manifestations agreed in steering clear of politics. How things have changed, indeed. show less

Understanding That Old Time Religion

Readers who are not evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, who are not religious at all, or who merely pay lip service to the idea, will learn a lot from Frances Fitzgerald’s new, and at times numbingly detailed, history of these two groups, as well as their many splinters.

Perhaps the most intriguing and, when considered carefully in the light of reality, is the thorough infusion of religious mysticism into the world, as if God and the eternal were show more palpable participants in our physical world, or something like a parallel dimension separated by a most porous, frequently traversed membrane. Writing a sentence like the preceding, however, does little to capture how disturbing (yet also insightful) many will find the manifestations of an overarching, other worldly belief system, because whether or not you believe, it impacts your life. Fitzgerald illustrates how when she reaches “Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority” (just short of halfway) and proceeds through most of the high points of recent history, with particular concentration and insight into the theologizing, philosophizing, and politicizing not visible to non, marginal, and true believers. For this reason, for its practical value, many will find this an invaluable history and resource.

While readers will find it tempting, given the length and density of this history, to sprint or just leap to current times, spending time with the first half of the history will help you frame current times. After all, the belief systems, some of which feel simplistic, spring from some deep thinking, particularly in the era when religion dominated the landscape. Thus, Fitzgerald takes readers through the First (1730-40s) and Second (1800 through the 1830s) Great Awakenings, the days of Calvinist Jonathan Edwards and the personalization of the religious experience, and Charles Finney’s “burnt-over district,” a period marked by the rise of revivalism and the jettisoning of rationalism in favor of emotion. Then follows the Civil War and wrapped around it from antebellum to post reconstruction the splintering over slavery and other issues related to the experience of religion. Finally, in the run up to current days, readers walk through the preaching of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, from Dwight Moody to Billy Sunday, until they reach the days of the influential Falwell, the scandalous Jim and Tammy and Jimmy Swaggart, the monumentally influential Billy Graham, and, regardless of what you think of him, the immense influencer, the game changer extraordinaire, Pat Robertson.

The ground Fitzgerald tills here is a truck farm of religion, politics, business; of larger than life personalities; of theologies and philosophies that will strike nonbelievers as bizarre. You’ll learn much that may surprise you, too, such as the fact that before our days of politicalized religion, Protestants in their various manifestations agreed in steering clear of politics. How things have changed, indeed. show less

Reagan's legacy is a complex topic, and unfortunately I felt that Way Out There in the Blue didn't do it justice. FitzGerald used Strategic Missile Defense to approach Reagan's time in office, but SDI never amounted to much. At best, it was just a poker chip bounced around between the Department of Defense, State, the National Security Council, and arms treaty negotiators, as various factions within the American government tried to advance any kind of coherent Soviet policy. Reagan and his show more administration do not come off looking well in this account. The man himself is profoundly disinterested in both policy and personnel, the movie star who sees his job as selling the American public on whatever his advisers have decided. Reagan was an idealist in the worst sense of the word, someone who dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons and of an American triumph, but without the fortitude to work out the messy details of his technologically impossible visions. Perhaps the most damning flaw is that despite the billions of dollars poured into SDI and new strategic weapons during the 80s, the Soviets never bit at the arms race, keeping their expenditures essentially flat without changing the classic Mutually Assured Destruction balance. According to FitzGerald, the USSR fell because of internal flaws and Gorbachev's overly ambitious reforms, not anything Reagan did. If that's the case, why should we even care about Reagan's foreign policy? And finally, despite the billions of dollars invested in basic research, science and scientists barely appear in this work, aside from a few pages with Edward Teller. How can you write the history of a scientifically dependent weapons system without the science?

There's probably an interesting (and much more theoretically ambitious) book about the imaginaries of strategic missile defense out there, but it isn't this book. show less

A history of the Evangelical movement perhaps better subtitled, "The Story of Why Evangelicals Vote the Way They Do," aka the only reason secularists tend to care about Evangelical Christianity.

The author is well researched and does about as well as a person can in attempting to maintain a secular disinterest but communicate about the subject. She spends very little time in the early period of the movement, focusing mostly on the divides manifest in the great awakenings leading to the show more fundamentalist / modernist schism fully complete by the 1920s.

The author spends a bit more time discussing all the streams that lead to the Religious Right coalition of the 1970s and onward; the majority of the book, provided in extreme detail, focuses on that Religious Right coalition in its various iterations and the attempts of various Evangelicals to shape political movements and policy over the past 40 years. The author concludes by establishing her purpose: to show that the Evangelicals of today are really no different from the fundamentalists of yore, manifesting the same concerns, and still as alien as ever.

I'm not sure if we needed a book describing the political endeavors of the Evangelicals and its origins, considering that the Evangelicals would be offended by their portrayal and the secularist posture of the author, and I'm not quite sure many secularists are that particularly interested in what motivates Evangelicals...considering, as the author points out well, that the secularists tend to think Evangelicalism has died out as a political force until it arises again and influences elections, and is still summarily otherized or ignored. Nevertheless, we have it, and so:

...for secularists: the book does well to show that you can ignore conservative Christianity, you can summarily dismiss it, you can fear it or otherize it or in whatever various ways consider it a spent force going into decline, and yet it continues to exist and exerts continual influence.

...for conservative Christians: the work gives an opportunity to see how the political work over the past few decades has been managed and how it looks to secularists. Unfortunately it's not a very pretty picture...and it has not helped advance the purposes of God in Christ in His Kingdom.

If you're looking for an actual history of Evangelicalism you're going to have to seek out Noll or others like him. You won't find it here. But if you're looking for all the politics, here it is.

**--galley received as part of an early review program show less