Devices and also if youre going to ask a question, everybody has to come to a microphone or theyll cut the entire session. Please do that if youre interested in asking a question. Were very excited about science program. Its a pleasure to welcome tonights journalist and author francis ms. Gerald. Its made possible from the generation of the livingston foundation. Born in new york city and graduating from radcliffe college, she came of age as a journalist in the vietnam war era. In 1979 she published far in the lake, the vietnamese and american in vietnam. The history of vietnam in the United States military involvement in the country. The book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a bancroft prize and a National Book award. She has since authored numerous critically acclaimed works of American History and works of the puritan publications in the new yorker, and rolling stone. Tonight fitzgerald will discuss her recent book the evangelials the struggle to shake america. She traces the history of protestant and evangelism from its beginning in the great awakening of the 18th and 19 th centuries to its current influence and intersection of religious and political life. She also explores the future of the evangelical movement in america undergoing significant graphic and cultural change. The book has received quite critical acclaim for its goal, detail and timeliness. The New York Times book says anyone curious about the state of the conservative american product is him will have a trusted guide in this bancroft and Pulitzer Prize winner. We have long needed a fairminded overview of this vitally important religious sensibility. Fitzgerald has now provided it. Tonight we are very lucky to have reverend doctor, christian ethics and the center of theology and public life at mercy university. He wrote 22 bucks, speaker and activist. His present of this societys and fx and the American Academy of religion. He was pleased to find out that his picture is in the book, as well [we cannot have a better questionnaire tonight. Please join me in welcoming Francis Fitzgerald and peter david,. Good evening. We like to thank you for being here this evening. All who are watching bsb sent to man. It is good to have such an opportunity to talk about, i think, as an evangelical myself the most important book on evangelicalism that has been written in a very long time. Its majestic in its scope. It covers everything you possibly cover about evangelicalism. It 700 plus pages. Its the work of many decades of reporting and my happy task, this evening, is to get the ball rolling by asking as many questions as i can fit in in 40 minutes. Then you all will have the chance in atlanta to ask questions yourself. Start off this way. Welcome to atlanta. Im sure you enjoyed our traffic this evening as you made your way from the airport. Ill start off by asking, frankie, is that okay . Frankie. What motivated you to do research on evangelicals and to decide to devote so much attention to the evangelical community . Where were the entrance points for you . Let me preface this by saying the last time i met david, and i only met him once, i was interviewing him and im not sure that i like this change in role. [laughter] ill push you hard on that frankie. In any case, i began thinking a long time ago about how important evangelical was to American Life and in particular, the things i studied like textbooks, like Ronald Reagan, and by accident in 1980 i was teaching in lynchburg, virginia and a professor at this liberal arts college said, you know, theres a huge fundamentalist Church Next Door and you must go and see it. So i went. It was paul wells church. As it happened, he was just starting the morrow majority. My editors would never heard of him before said yes, okay, write a piece about him because he was starting to make news. I wrote less about him than about his community. I felt that there were people who belonged to the church were perhaps as far away from my own sensibility than anyone i knew. I thought, well, to try to understand this country you have to understand that. I did a few more pieces on evangelicals, particularly, recently. Eventually, it occurred to me that it was perfectly impossible to understand the evangelical rights without understanding its history. A lot of their doctrines, ideologies, points of view made perfect sense in the context of the 19th century but seems insane to people today. Those apocalyptic prophecies and so on. I set myself to this test. Take the story of american evangelicalism to the beginning in america. Can you just sketch, how does american evangelicalism begin . Or really take off . The first great awakening started in the 1740s. It began in the church of Jonathan Edwards who was the most establishment figure. One day, he was preaching that sermon of his about the spider hanging over the fire and so on, the angry god, its always quoted but he didnt do that very much. He would always remind people that he was a sinner indeed. He would also. [inaudible] for individuals to come to christ and to god. Eventually, this church became a boil with the sentiment. It turned out that this was happening in various other little parts of the country. Around the same time, this english preacher who is actually an anglican profession came here and he preached up and down the eastern seaboard from city to city. He was such a compelling presence but that great actor David Garrick said that he could attract a huge crowd just by pronouncing the word mesopotamia [laughter] it was whitefield who really took over the first great awakening. He moved it from state to state. He was the first sort of inter colonial celebrity and in a way he brought americans together before the revolutionary war. The next great awakening by the way, these were happening in europe as the same time, the same type of revivals. 1810, began when into the 1840s even and but that was a much larger and more emotional affair where methodists and baptists, in particular, went out and the methodists were horseback riders and they went from town to town and they would give these revivals and it would be tremendous excitement on the frontiers. The excitements would move from town to town because everyone wanted to have this ecstatic experience that these preachers entertained. One called bodily agitation, laughing, falling down, riding around. These preachers were very numerous and interesting in that they were preached a very simple bible and immediate conversion and they were very democratic in other ways. They were rebels against the established churches and the established social hierarchies in virginia and in new england. They would badly criticize the anglican establishment in virginia and the establishment in boston. One went so far as to say, i think this was john leyland, a baptist, there should be no clerical establishment at all. Only the relationship that should be between the relationship between the individual and god. This was a complete disruption but on the other hand, the solution to the problem of people leaving their families, leaving their communities and going away into the woods and starting afresh. Not having those hierarchies to depend on anymore. They eventually established their own churches, methodist, baptist, presbyterian. For a time, it was a good moment then in the cities which last thing ill say about this is that in new england, anyway, they were real reformers. The evangelicals began programs for care for the indigent who were immigrants. They started the Public School system in this country. Indeed, they were the first math based for abolitionist. People were always William Lloyd garrison was responsible for this but he was too radical for the religious people and he was an anarchist and a feminist at the same time. That was going too far for them. The mass base was established by Charles Finney and his converts, theodore wells. There the heroes of the story. Essentially, evangelicalism became heart and soul of American Religion as a country spread west. It becomes impossible to understand the development of our country without understanding the spread of evangelicalism and an increasingly dominant role in the heartland of america as well as the big cities and everywhere in the book you talk about what i consider to be a very fateful difference between southern and northern evangelicals. Can you say a word about that . The south was a rather isolated at the time. It was a rural community, very few townsmen, much less big cities. It was of course, plantations and slaveowners and so forth whereas the north was a good deal more cosmopolitan, always. It always had catholics and jews , intellectuals and of the sort the south did not. When there was this break between the two over slavery with the large denominations splitting apart on geographic lines, it didnt really heal for long after the civil war. The south began to develop its own kind of religion where as the north began to be more and more diverse. They had diverse ideas from europe and so on. Of course, in the 1880s the arrival of darwinian evolution into the general populace and the higher criticism of the bible were for scholars and specialists. That, of course, affected the clergy a good deal. So the divide starts to open between liberals and conservatives. The liberals start questioning the traditions of their churches as well as everything else. They do import new ideas from europe so that the conservatives who look to england for these apartment apocalyptic prophecies that were simply allaround at the time, particularly in england after the french revolution that, you know, the world was going to hell. We apocalypse was upon us and various scenarios woven around this. Banded the south ended up on a separate directory from the north and its religion. The north by the late 19, late 20th century was splitting apart what became known as fundamentalism and modernist, a little later. A lot of people dont understand this that really the religious landscape, if you know anything about the protestant religious limited, what we know as our main line denomination comes from the liberal side of the split, mainly. What we know of our evangelical and fundamentalist comes from the conservative site. Can you say more about that trajectory in what some of the issues were that made the wedge impossible to overcome . It really was the great split. It happened slowly with the two groups really not talking to each other very much. Just after the First World War when everyone was excited on all account accounts, the fundamentalist decided that they could take over the Presbyterian Church in the baptist church. Fundamentalist actually began by those who would do Battle Royale against the modernists. This effort failed. It failed because there were a lot of people in both denominations who wanted to keep the dominations together in order to promote missionaries and so forth. And to do good in local quarters. When this divide came it was a huge splintering and the splintering was noticed, in particular, by the press. Critically, the 1925 trial, a really important moment because of how it was interpreted. As you hear, remember, the place where the great lawyer Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings bryan in a debate outside with thousands of people listening. He humiliated him because brian was really not a fundamentalist. He was anti evolution and so on but he also went back to the time before fundamentalism, really. He was a democrat and a populist and as they really were. He hadnt paid much attention to this sort of nitpicking fundamentalists theology, interpretations of the bible. Clarence darrow by nitpicking on his side overcame brians knowledge of the bible and events and so on. The press went away from the sane that this was in rural tennessee, this place thinking that fundamentalists were a bunch of hicks, rural hicks that would eventually going to be run over by the powers of modern entity. In fact, the fundamentalist preachers of the day were very educated men who preached in new york city, st. Louis, in these tall steepled churches and that, no one saw. Instead of disappearing, these fundamentalists pastors, powerful ones, started creating their own fiefdoms in various parts of the country, you know. Hundreds of churches, their own denominations, parts of larger dominations and this went completely unnoticed until after world war ii. Talk about that. The word evangelical gets retrieved after world war ii. Who did that . Why do they do that . I say in the book that it was billy graham. It was in the popular way but it was also a lot of his friends and mentors like ogden gay and others. Graham and ogden gay were what became the nationalist decision of evangelicals. They wanted a nationalist revival and they thought they could get it at the time because just after world war ii americans became an extremely religious country. People were going home again and its always a conservative. After wars. But also, it was sort of an anticommunist thing. People thought they were being true americans they went to church, any church, said isaac heiser. Doesnt matter what church you go to. It builds character, virtue and so on. Billy graham wanting to build this National Revival found that the fundamentalist simply turn too many people off, they were too bigoted, and to narrow, too difficult. So, in turn, he cut them off and called himself an evangelical. He meant people who were not angry at everybody but who had pretty much the same theology but had calm down, watered down, if you want. It was a kind alert kinder, gentler, fundamentalism. So, billy graham gets a lot of attention in your book and most people in this audience who are watching has some memory of billy graham, billy graham on tv , billy graham doing a revival how about billy graham doing hanging out with Richard Nixon. Talk about that relationship and the beginning of a politicalization of evangelicalism and fundamentalism for that matter . Billy graham liked powerful people. He always did. They were extremely helpful to him. They were rich and the powerful politicians because they would make his estate revivals much easier to accomplish. They would be with him and they would get the shining of graham around them. Even more important than he was by having Senate Leaders demo oo Richard Nixon long before nixon iran for president. That was his downfall because he became too close and changed his views to nixons views, really. He started to defend the Nixon Administration so that when the vietnam war came to its terrible climax he was part of, of some of the people blamed for it. Later, for watergate, he did not denounce early in. As i read your book, i thought of really graham as a foreshadowing its almost novelistic, hes a foreshadowing of what happens after him. He was one personal largerthanlife figure by the late 1970s you have an entire organized movement to make a marriage happened between conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism and the Republican Party. Which we know as the christian right. A lot of us saw back on the tv, pat robertson, dj kennedy, largerthanlife characters. Talk about the birth of the christian right and its trajectory . I think it was preceded by an upsurge of fundamentalism in the south. It was the second upsurge and it was the first upsurge in the south. It happened at virtually the same moment in industrialization and urbanization and the first one happened in the north. As we all know, that creates cultural disruptions of all kinds. People are coming into the city who have traditional evangelical beliefs. Suddenly they found themselves back to the wall, as it were, and they found themselves under attack. Then the liberals found themselves under attack and so forth. What was different from billy graham in this case was Jerry Falwell planned to make a Mass Movement and graham never did. Graham was content to have his own relationship with the powerful. It came up from the grassroots, really. Religious groups and between religious groups and nonreligious people. So, it all sort of happened the same time, and it was a bit delayed because of the real reaction came in 1980 as opposed to the 60s, and at that point falwell, with the help of this new right operatives from washington, dc who had their own little consecutive pacs and so forth, persuaded him to create the moral majority, and to structure it in rather sophisticated ways, and in their view it should have included conservative catholics as well as everybody else, but falwell really was only able to attract some other fundamentalists, and so he didnt really succeed in creating this Mass Movement. On the other hand, it made a big fuss and there warlet of Southern Baptists were a lot of Southern Baptists around in this, and Ronald Reagan carried the south, which was for him the point, and why he paid so much attention to these folks. So eventually there came to be a kind of merger of ideas between the social ideas when the Republican Party and the christian right, and the democratsre democrats were pushed left on all these where the want before, and thats where the Great Division in our politics begins. And remained. And remains. The Republican Party had the center of gravity in evangelical south, especially the midwest. Who would you say got the better of the exchange when the clergy and the activists from the religious evangelical Community Engaged the politicians from the Republican Party, who wins . Are both gaining or are the christians being played by the politicians . I think mostly its politicians win. There was very little legislation that the christian right wanted