Evangelical reckonings

What more can we say about evangelicalism? This is the perennial question for religious scholars of the past decade. While the answer may very well be “not much,” evangelicals continue to give historians, scholars, and public commentators ample source material for the next book.

Indeed, an incredible number of commentaries, histories, and analyses of American evangelicalism were released in 2023. This shelf includes heartfelt memoirs such as Beth Moore’s All My Knotted-Up Life, sociological examinations of Christian nationalism such as Andrew Whitehead’s American Idolatry, counter-histories of the evangelical story such as Isaac Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals, and inspired imaginings of what evangelicalism might be, such as Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination and Russell Moore’s Losing Our Religion.

The vast majority of texts written about American evangelicalism in the past year came from White male scholars located in and around the evangelical tradition. When women do bring their voices to the conversation, it is often out of a position of disenfranchisement or outright abuse from their evangelical community. (It is no surprise that women writing about evangelicalism are often the ones who offer a more fruitful and robust vision of the tradition.)