Publisher's Synopsis
This is an expanded paperback edition of Randall Balmer's account of his journey into the strongholds of evangelical America, first published in 1989. Writing in the form of a travelogue, Balmer interviewed evengelicals across the nation, examining the state of American evangelicalism at a grass-roots level. He visits an old-fashioned holiness camp in St. Petersburg, Florida, an Indian reservation in the Dakotas, a huge trade show for Christian booksellers, and a fundamentalist Bible camp in the Adirondacks. His aim is to demystify evangelicalism for nonevangelicals, to correct the over-simplified media view of evangelicalism and to render a portrait of this powerful folk influence in all its variation and diversity. He ignores media celebrities like the Bakkers and Swaggarts and concentrates instead on genuine popular evangelicalism, a diverse 'patchwork quilt'. Throughout this reflective series of New Yorker-like profiles, Balmer provides theological and historical background, creating in effect a capsule history of evangelicalism.
