Deconstructing Evangelicalism

About the Title

"Hart's penetrating book, spiced with wit, will make historians blush at the carelessness and complacency with which they settle for imprecise, not to say dubious, analytical categories. Catholics may be tempted to respond with Schadenfreude to his withering critique of the current irrationalities in the Protestant churches. But sad to say, his strictures implicitly bear upon our church as well as theirs."--Eugene D. Genovese, author of Roll, Jordan, Roll

"Given new life after World War II by a generation of ex-fundamentalists, the label [evangelicalism] now is used by scholars and journalists to cover everything from Hart's fellow Orthodox Presbyterians to affluent megachurch attenders and urban Pentecostals. Hart makes a persuasive case that such lumpy thinking obscures as much as it reveals about America's more conservative believers. . . . In a particularly strong chapter on the methods of pollsters, Hart points out that they have set the bar for qualifying as an 'evangelical' so low that they undoubtedly exaggerate Americans' devotion to traditional Christianity."--Publishers Weekly