Baylor Early American Christianity (3 vols.)

With clear prose and a strong command of history, Randall Balmer chronicles the history of evangelicalism in the United States. Situating developments in evangelicalism in their wider historical context, Balmer demonstrates the ways American social and cultural settings influenced the course of the evangelical tradition.

Balmer argues that the history of American evangelicalism can be divided into four cultural shifts: the transition from Calvinist to Armenian theology in the embrace of revivalism, the shift from postmillennialism, the retreat into a subculture, and the rise of the religious right. Balmer outlines the distinctly American elements of evangelicalism in the Untied States and concludes with a manifesto directing where evangelicalism must go from here forward.

Surveying the religious pluralism of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shenandoah Valley, Longenecker reveals how the fabric of American pluralism was woven. Calling worldliness the “mainstream” and otherworldliness the “outsidernesss,” Shenandoah Religion describes the transition certain denominations made in becoming mainstream and the resistance of others in maintaining distinctive dress, manners, social relations, economics, and apolitical viewpoints.

Preaching Politics traces the surprising and lasting influence of one of American history’s most fascinating and enigmatic figures—George Whitefield. Jerome Mahaffey explores George Whitefield’s role in creating a “rhetoric of community” that successfully established a common worldview among the many colonial cultures. Using a rigorous method of rhetorical analysis, Mahaffey cogently argues that George Whitefield directed the evolution of an American collective religious identity that lay underneath the emerging political ideology that fueled the American Revolution.