Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen (Assistant Professor of History, Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen offers a sweeping intellectual history of modern American evangelicalism. Traditionally, evangelicalism has been seen as a cohesive--indeed almost monolithic--religious movement. Sometimes, religion drops out of the picture and evangelicalism is treated strictly as a political force. Worthen argues that these views are false. Evangelicalism is, rather, a community of believers preoccupied by shared anxieties. Evangelicals differ from one another on the details of their ideas about God and humankind, but three elemental concerns unite them: how to reconcile faith and reason; how to know Jesus; and how to act on faith in a secularized public square. In combination, under the pressures of modernity, and in the absence of a guiding authority capable of resolving uncertainties and disagreements, these anxieties have shaped evangelicals into a distinctive spiritual community.