Description: Evangelicalism has secured a permanent place in the minds of Americans in the last half of the twentieth century. The American Evangelical movement consists of a vast and nearly indefinable coalitional 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. Theoretically, this study draws on the insights of major sociological and anthropological scholars to construct a theoretical model to frame the analysis in terms of the relational and oppositional aspects of group boundary dynamics. Beyond recounting the history of postwar evangelicalism, this volume contributes to our understanding of ideological movements and the shifts that occur within them over time.

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