Thomas S. Kidd, "Who Is an Evangelical?" (Yale UP, 2019)

News and media outlets have become especially attentive to the political leanings of a particular subset of American Protestants: the Evangelicals. Leading historian of American Christianity, Thomas S. Kidd, wrote Who Is An Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale UP, 2019) to offer a wide range of readers an easy and accessible summary of this contested religious identity. He shows how gradually a theological identifier has become associated with an ethnic and political markers. In this succinct overview of the movement, Kidd helps to both explain how those political associations were formed, and also how pollsters and popular media presentations overlook groups who might claim this theological heritage, as evangelicalism continues to become a global phenomenon. 

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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