On the Boundaries of American Evangelism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition

American Evangelicalism is a vast and nearly indefinable coalition movement of sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating denominations and independent churches whose ideological boundaries have been shifting since its postwar reemergence. On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism seeks to account for the emergence of this coalition of moderate Protestants in the 1940s and 1950s, as distinct from fundamentalism on the right and liberalism on the left, and speculate on the reasons for the fracturing and decline of that coalition in the 1960s to the 1990s. Beyond recounting the history of postwar evangelicalism, this volume's contribution is to our understanding of how movements define their coalitional boundaries and how coalitions change and reconstitute their boundaries over time.