Book Review: Gasaway, Brantley W. Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. x+324 pp. $29.95 (paper).

(excerpt)In the past two decades historians of the twentieth-century United States—including many working in subfields that long-neglected religious developments—have plunged headlong into the American evangelical past, where they have discovered clues vital to unlocking one of the great puzzles of contemporary history and historiography: namely, how and why did the Right, which by the mid-1960s appeared entirely moribund, prove so resurgent? Important studies by Bethany Moreton (To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009]), Darren Dochuk (From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism [New York: Norton, 2010]), and numerous others have established that evangelicalism was a key factor in this surprising turnabout, fueling the rise of neoliberalism, the Reagan Revolution, and more.