Good evening. Welcome to the lecture. Before you we get started down may have noticed few cameras in the room. Please turn off your devices and also if youre going to ask a question, at question time, everybody has to come to the microphone or theyll cut the entire session. So please do that itself youre interested in asking a question. This is very excited about the program. Its a pleasure to welcome tonights featuring journalists and author Frances Fitzgerald. The lecture is made possible through the generosity of the Livingston Foundation little were in new york city and graduate from Radcliffe College she became a journalist during the vietnam war era. In 1972 she published the vietnamese and americans in vietnam. A history of vietnam and the United States military involvement in that country. The book was awarded a pulitzer prize, a bancroft prize and a National Book award. She has since authored numerous critically acclaimed works in American History and works have appeared in the new yorker, New York Times magazine and rolling stone. She is discussing the event gel cools. Struggle to shape america. Trace the history of protestant and evangelism from the against and the 18th and 19th centuries and the current intersections of religious and political life. Also explores the future of the evan general cal movement and america undergoing change. The book has received quite a critical acclaim for its scope, detail, and timeliness. The New York Times book review says, quote, anyone curious about the state of an conservative american president protestantism. Fitzgerald has now provide it. Tonight we very lucky to have reverend dr. David gushee, direct ofow center 0 theology and public life at Mercy University and a writer of 22 books, speaker and activist, president of the society of christian ethics and president elect of the american came of religion he wases pleased to find out his picture is in the book as well so we cannot have a better questioner. Join in the welcoming Frances Fitzgerald and david gushee. [applause] well, good evening. Wed like to thank all of you for being here this evening and all who are watching via cspan. It is a good to have such an opportunity to talk about, i think, as an evangelical myself know, important book on eval van gel calism i think has been written in a very long time. And its majestic in its scope, covers everything you can cover about evangelicalism its about 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 at 40 minutes and then you will have the chance here in the audience in atlanta to ask some questions yourselves. So, ill start off. Welcome to atlanta. Im sure you enjoyed our traffic this evening as you made your way from the airport. Ill start off by asking you this. Frankie, is that okay . What motivated you to do a lot of research on evangelicals and devoting to much attention to the community. Guest let me say that the last time i met david gushee i only met him once i was interviewing him and im not sure that i like this change of roles. Host going to push you hard tonight, frankie, really hard. Guest but anyway case, i began thinking a long time ago about how important evangelical was to American Life and in particular to things i studied like textbooks, like Ronald Reagan, and by accident in 1980, i was teaching in lynchburg, virginia, and a professor said theres huge fundamental church here and it what falwells church and he was just starting the moral majority, and so i in editors who never heard of him before, said, yes, okay, write a piece about him because he was starting to make news. And so i wrote less about him really at the time than about his community, because i felt that the people who belonged to the church were perhaps as far away from my own sensibilities as anyone i knew, and i thought, well, to try and understand this country, you have to understand that. And i did a few more pieces on evangelicals, particularly recently. Eventually it occurred to me that it was perfectly impossible to understand the evangelical wright without understanding its history, and because it a lot of their doctrines, ideology, points of view, make perfect sense in the context of the 19th century, but seemed completely insane to people today. Like the prove from sis. Host take the story back to inning in america oses you do in the book. Can you just sketch, how does american evangelicalism begin or take off . Well, first great awakening started in the 1740s, and it began in the church of jonathan edwards, who is the most sort of establishment kind of figure, really. But one day hundred he was preaching he has a sermon about the spider hanging over the fire and so angry god, always quoted apparently he didnt do that very much but he would always remind people they were sinners, and he but he would also for individuals to offer a way for individuals to come to christ and to god, and he eventually this church became aboil with religious sentiment, and it turned out that this was happening in various other little parts of the country, and around the same time, this english preacher who was actually an anglican by profession, came here and he preached up and down the eastern seaboard from city to city and was such a compelling presence that the great actor, david garrett, said that he could attract a huge crowd just by pronouncing the word mesopotamia. And it was whitefield who really took over the first great awakening, and moved it from state to state, and he was the first sort of intercolonial celebrity in the way he brought the americans together before the revolutionary war. The next great awaken by the way, these were happening in europe at the same time, these same kinds of revivals. Came in a good deal after the revolution, perhaps 1810, you could say it began, went into the 1840s, 50s even. But that was a much larger and more emotional affair, where methodists and baptists in particular went out and methodists were horseback riders and went from town to town, and they would give these revivals and it would be tremendous excitement on the frontiers and the excitement sort of moved from town to town because everybody wanted to have this really ecstatic experience that these preachers entertained. And full of what one called bodily agitations. Laughing and falling down and writhing around and so forth. But these preachers were very numerous and interesting in that they were they preached a very sinful bible and sort of immediate conversion, and they were very democratic in other ways, too. They were rebels against the established churches, and the established social hierarchies in virginia and in new england, and they would sort of badly criticize the anglican establish independent virginia and establishment in virginia and the establishment in boston, and one went so far as to say i think this was john leyland, baptist should be in clear cal clerical establishment at april. Should just be between the individual and god. So, this was a complete disruption but on the other hand i sort of the solution to the problem of people leaving their families, leaving their communities, going away into the woods, starting afresh, and nothing having those hierarchies to depend on anymore, and so they eventually established their own churches, methodist, baptist and presbyterians, but for a time it was really wild moment, and 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 to care for the indigent, for immigrants, they started the Public School system in country, and indeed they were the first mass base for abolitionists. People always said that William Lloyd garrison was responsible for this, but he was really 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. So the mass base was established by Charles Finney and his convert, theodore weld, who is really the hero of the story. Host singh evangelicalism became heart and soul of American Religion as it spread west and becomes impossible to understand the development of the country without understanding the pred of evangelicalism across and increasingly dominant role in heartland america as well as big cities and everywhere. The book you talk about what i consider to be a very fateful difference 2007 southern and northern evangelicalism could you say a word about that. Guest well, the south was rather isolated at the time. It was a rural community, very few towns, much less big cities, and it was, of course, plantations and slave owners and so forth. Whereas the north was a good deal more cosmopolitan. It has catholics and jews and intellectuals that the south did not. So, when there was this break between the two over slavery, with the large denominations split eight part on geographic lines, that didnt really heal for long after the civil war, and the south began to develop really its own kind of religion, where the north began to be more and more diverse, diverse ideas from europe and so on. And of course, in the 1880s, the arrival of darwinian evolution into the general populous and the higher criticism of the bible for scholars and specialists, and that of course affected the clergy a good deal, but so a divide starts to open between liberals and conservatives, and they the liberals start questioning the traditions of their churches as well as everything else, and they do import new ideas from europe, but so do the conservatives who look to england for apocolyptic proveties and the world was going to hell and that the apocalypse was upon us and various scenarios woven around this. Host ended up on a separate trajectory of development from the north and its religion, and the north, by the late 19th, early 20th century, was commit eight part between what bill known as fundamentalist and modernists later. A lot of people dont understand that really the religious landscape, if you know anything get protestant religious landscape, our mainline denomination from the liberal side of this split and what we know over the evangelicals come from the conservative side. Can you sigh a bit about the trajectory and the issues that made the wedge impossible to overcome. Guest well, it really was the great split in protestantism in that period, and it happened slowly with the two groups really not talking to each other very much. But just after the first world war, when everybody was excited on all kinds of counts, the fundamentalists decided they could take over the Presbyterian Church and the been tis church so a fundamentalist actually began by meeting those who would do battle royal against the modernists, and this effort failed. Only really because there were a lot of people in both denominations who wanted to keep the denominations together in order to promote missionaries and so forth, and to do good in local quarters. So, when this divide came, it was a huge sort of splintering and the splintering was noticed in particular by the press at the scopes trial of 1925, which is a really important moment simply because of how it was interpreted. It was, as you remember, the place where the great lawyer, Clarence Darrow, humiliated William Jennings bryan in a debate outside with thousands of people listening, and he humiliated him because bryan was really not a fundamentalist. He was antievolution and on but he also he went back to the time before fundamentalism, really. He was a democrat and a populist and as they rarely were, and so he had not been paying much attention to this nitpicking of fundamentalist theology and interpretations of the bible, so Clarence Darrow by nitpicking on his side, overcame the bryans knowledge of the bible and events and so on. And so the press andwent away from this saying that this was in rural tennessee this took place thinking that fundamentalists were a bunch of hicks, rural hicks who were just eventually going to be run over by the powers of modernity. But in fact, the fundamentalist preachers of the day were very educated men who preached in new york city and st. Louis and in these tall steepled churches, and so that no one saw, and so instead of disappearing, these fundamentalists pastors, powerful ones, started creating their own fiefdoms in various parts of the country. Hundreds of churches, their own small denominations, or parts of larger denominations, and this went completely unnoticed until after world war ii. Host talk about that the word evangelical gets retreat after world war ii. Who did that and why . Guest well, i would say in the book its billy graham and was in the popular way, but it was also a lot of his friends and mentors. But graham and what became in the National Association of evangelicals wanted a National Revival and they thought they could get it at the time because just after world war ii, america became extremely religious country. People were going home again. Its always a conservative period after wars. But also it was an anticommunist thing. People thought they were being true american evidences the went to church, any church. Said eisenhower. Doesnt matter what church you good to. But it builds character, virtue, and so on. Anyway, billy graham wanting to build a National Revival, found thats fundamentalists simply turned too many people off. To bigots, too narrow, too difficult, and he in turn cut them off and called himself an evangelical, and which he meant some people who were not angry at everybody but who had pretty much the same theology but sort of calmed down, water down if you want, but it was a kinder, gentler fundamentalism. Talk about that relationship and at the beginning of the bullet at the station of the evangelical movement, and fundamentalism for that movement. Movement. Billy graham like powerful people, he always did. They were extremely helpful to him, the rich and powerful politicians, because they would make his estate revivals much easier to accomplish and they would be with him, and they would get a shining glow of billy graham and around them. He would seem even more important than he was by having eminent leaders, democrats and republicans alike. He became very attached to richard nixon, long before nixon ran for president. So that was his downfall, because he came too close and changed his views to nixon views and when the vietnam war came to its terrible climax, he was among the people to be blamed for it. He did not denounce early enough. As i read your blog i thought of billy graham as a foreshadowing of almost novelistic, hes a foreshadowing of what happened and was a larger than life figure if i delete the 1970s, you have an empire organized movement to make a marriage has been between conservative evangelical and the Republican Party as we know in the christian right, and a lot of the figures back into jerry falwell, pat robinson, kennedy, all of them stride across the pages. So 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 of the first upsurge in the south and virtually the same moment in industrialization than the first one had. And as we all know, that predates cultural disruptions of all kinds and people come into the cities who have sort of the traditional evangelical belief. They find themselves under attack. Liberals find themselves under attack in things like that, but what was different from billy graham in this case is they planned to make a Mask Movement and graham never did. He was intended to have his own relationships with the powerful. But this came up from the grassroots are having totally novel ideas. Theres all kinds of things that preceded it like terrible textbook wars in virginia, the upsurge of conservatism in southern california, all kinds of things and then the issues began to appear. If she was most of them having to do with the resentment and you react to 1950s with the kids to protest against the war, women dressing in blue jeans. He became huge in the sense that the issues were enormous and since the 1940s had been trying to make the state of more natural between various religious groups and between religious groups and the nonreligious people. So, it all sort of happened at the same time, and it was a bit delayed and the real reactor came and at that point with the help of the new right operatives from washington, d. C. Who had their own conservative tax persuaded him to create the moral majority and to structure it in a sophisticated way. Falwell was only able to address other fundamentalists and so he didnt really succeed in creating this mass movement. There were a lot of Southern Baptists. Reagan carried the south, which for him was the point and why he paid so much attention to these folks. Eventually there came to be a merger of ideas or social ideas between the Republican Party and the christian right. That is where the great tradition and the politics begins and renames. So the republica republican d up having its center of gravity in the evangelical south especially in the midwest, and got the better of this exchange when the clergy and the activists engage the politicians from the Republican Party who wins . I think mostly politicians when. They wouldnt make up to them and they would give them publicity and that is what falwell understood. Theres a million speeches by other pastors, and so he went along with Ronald Reagan for example the Nuclear Weapons policies and south africa. He wanted to show that evangelicals could be a faithful part of the Republican Party. As the south turned republican for various reasons. They were Southern Baptist preachers that were ahead of other people in turning the south republican. So that happens and gradually Something Like a third of the Republican Partys are made up of evangelicals read by the christian right. It is inevitably politicized and theres a lot of evangelicals who try to get out of that and do a damned believe that. Many people took up the air of the press. So, what happened eventually a lot of liberals and a lot of people became kind of disgusted by this. It completely turned off and forgot they existed during the election time and they hated them and knew nothing about th them. How did it become the central organizing issue, or do you agree that it became the central organizing issue and how did that happen for the christian right . I do, and its a fascinating story because evangelicals and the 60s and 70s were very much for therapeutic abortions as they were called and that meant it is fine in cases such as incest or rape or harm to the mother. Harm to the mother meant not only physical harm, but psychological harm as well. So that left and enormous gap of possibilities. The reason or at least a good part of the reason was that abortion was a catholic issue. Into the 60s evangelicals like many protestants could understand the catholic thoughts other than the medieval tyranny that dictated everybodys way of thinking and policies and so forth. So its too it took a long timee christian right to convince them that it was in fact murder as the catholics said it was. And i would say it wasnt until the end of the 80s that evangelicals in any number began to believe this. The democrats being the prochoice people became impossible to vote for. You can vote for somebody who is allowing murder. They became more catholic than the catholics on abortion because it was a part of what they understoo understood thate disintegration of the victorian patriarchal families so there are sociological reasons and psychological reasons for opposing abortion. Antiabortion sentiment has grown over the years. The Younger Generation today, the millennial generation is very liberal on issues of homosexuality but its absolutely firm on abortion. Partly what you are describing is a broadening of the permanent left and right split from religion so its not just protestant conservatism or mormon conservatism, whatever and so the politics have become religion tribal. They were very religious no matter what tradition they come from. It is more or less than the churchgoing in that tradition and its perfectly true that the division started to cut through all of the denominations. Now you can explain why they voted for donald trump. We will get that answer here. We talk about it very briefly at the end of the book. Do you have a thought about what that says about the landscape you describe in your book . It says quite a lot to me. Virtually all of the christian right leaders such as they are today and they are not half as powerful as they used to be a came out for ted cruz now rubio and it was a faction among the pastors meeting this. It was the gap that made a difference because they were the ones that voted for chump. There was a polling done by the evangelical firm called, i forgot the name right now, but a Southern Baptist. Late october, early november. Its most important to them including and they noticed that evangelical pastors would answer for the candidate of the religious freedom and the selection of the justices and abortion and so on as someone imagine from the rightwing and religious evangelicals. So whatever is important to them was for economics and national security. Its a complete differences. Its been shown for some time. Evangelicals voted for a mormon and that isnt what they would have done if they were sticking strictly to the religious commitments. They voted for all kinds of people and for what that person would have done for them and they certainly werent entirely disappointed by george w. Bush and probably would be supported by donald trump either. If you notice even rick perry and ben carson, even the attorney generals. Some of these people are definitely christian right and others are connected to the movement in the base of support. So he has in this cabinet there are so many more questions to ask but i want to give you all the chance to ask some of these questions. So if you would like to ask a question, please come to the microphone. Ask a question dont make a statement please send us a brief question otherwise bad things will happen to you as my understanding so a brief question for the author. Yes sir. Since the 1820s or 30s or so, as the movement enjoined by the personality or ideology . I think both. In the case of some people they created the ideal in the mid19 centuries and the 80s. He put all kinds of strands of doctoring together dan was found in england and in the United States. Nobody noticed particularly because he was the heads of large corporations quite literally in his views of poverty were that it shouldnt have existed except in any case you could see it was a powerful personality and it was his disciples that created the movement. Personalities profiled in the bootheu. S. Have to read it theyt extensive treatment by the member james dobson. Remember jim and tammy faye, it is an Interesting Group and more than we can talk about this evening. You havent said anything about the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. I should have mentioned that the start that created the christian right movement because they didnt mention at the time falwell had been a huge segregationist in the Southern Baptist congregation but race wasnt mentioned any longer by 19. It was all about morality. But it was all about the bill of rights movement. It was certainly all about the disruption in their own view of the hierarchy of society and they are feeling that the society is becoming totally chaotic. So, people like the head of the First Baptist church in dallas had been a major segregationist and began to talk about integrationists as leftwing. And people [inaudible] to see them as a part of the disruption in the 60s. The parallels were made and people understood them very well without ever having to say it. This got crystallized in the south. That was what the operatives said was the real reason for the rise of the christian right and the u. S. Tax regulations on Christian Schools as well as other schools they had to be desegregated in a certain extent and it was the resistance to the this total federal regulation that did it. I was raised in an Evangelical Church and i have been to a few of them in my adulthood and im kind of at a crossroads moment personally and i wanted to hear what your thoughts were on this. It seems like any time theres these movements that you have a momentum of impasse in the ranks of other times theres these split. It feels like that to me because you have these evangelicals who are very conservative. Do you ever think im just working my way out of evangelical or do you think there is more of me that it feels reformation to me when it feels like how can it continue as a United Movement when especially right now it feels like theres no way we can agree because the right is so deep. That is a very good question and i have no answer as far as youre concerned. Its true and we havent mentioned it as a social Justice Party among the evangelicals. And its true there is enormous splintering. I describe part of that thing the christian rights and the laypeople thaway people but thes between social justice people and socalled below the belt issues people. Theres a whole chapter on the evangelicals and thats where i get mentioned so you definitely want to get to that. Did i mention my picture is in the book . [laughter] there is a whole movement that begins to develop especially in reaction to george w. And around the obama years so then youve got your whole right that send d to be social justice and a third group who remain more conservative politically that py but definitely allergic to donald trump and others but my suggestion would be theres no putting Humpty Dumpty together again. Those are not going to come back together. I think that you would know better than i do about that because you see them more regularly than i do. But i its not as though there are going to be no evangelicals. They are just a part in their thinking. Theres another group of evangelicals and their name is legion. Many people having been turned off by the whole thing especially the christian right have said this name doesnt work, this community is and my community. Im going to go someplace different. They find a lot of preacher is too simplistic and they become catholics were somewhere they can find. [inaudible] [laughter] evangelicals became sort of main line at the top for social reasons. Thats how you move u within society. And even when i visited falwells church, the episcopalians were at the top. But the evangelicals have taken over the consciousness, and i wonder if that spirit and the law can continue. Its partlthats partly becausee proven more effective working in the media in the last 40 years and so, the main line must be 20 were maybe 15 of the american population. The evangelical population is declining for obvious reasons that people become more middleclass and have fewer children to there are fewer factors. To the extent its perfectly true of all religion in america ours is a multiethnic and mult Multicultural Movement and its hard to see how it has. I think we are about out of time so why dont we think Frances Fitzgerald. [applause] now we will go into the book signing. Is there anything else you would like to say . [inaudible] [laughter] [inaudible conversations] the National Book award is given out by the foundation and organization sponsored by the Publishing Industry and literary institutions. Authors in four categories