The Age of Evangelicalism, by Steven P. Miller

The musical Hair may have been great comedy when it was re­leased in 1967, but it was poor prophecy. The spirit of the 1960s had audiences singing that it was the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Nine years later, Time magazine declared that 1976 was the “year of the evangelical.” Seven years after that, President Reagan was calling for 1983 to be the “year of the Bible.”

Then in the new millennium, pundits began discussing a God gap between the political parties. How did the era of the new left and the hippie harems give way to the age of the new right and evangelical empires? In this short and brisk book, historian Steven P. Miller maintains that evangelicalism marked an era because it was enmeshed in how Americans conceived of the links between religion, politics, and the public.

The watershed moment was Water­gate. It left a vacuum of moral leadership and propelled the search for something new. Almost like magic, a new type of identity emerged—the born-again person. Unlike the biblical Nicodemus, many Americans of the 1970s were anything but perplexed when they learned that they must be, as Jesus explained, born again. These individuals could be found all over the American map. The most obvious was Jimmy Carter, whose born-again label helped launch him toward the White House. There were also singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, misogynist essayist Eldridge Cleaver, and Nixon tough guy Chuck Colson.