The religious history of the United States is a large and diverse subfield. Any survey that tries to cover the entire scope of U.S. religious history is going to have notable omissions. That said, two works that are valuable in this regard are Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People and Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer’s Religion in American Life: A Short History. Both these are getting a bit old, but they should provide a broad overview of the history of American Christianity.

Recommending a book on the origins of evangelicalism is a complicated by the fact that scholars heavily debate exactly what constitutes an “evangelical.” During the nineteenth century and earlier, almost all Protestant Christians described themselves with the label of evangelical, but it was only in the twentieth century that it took on the connotation of specifically referring to theologically conservative Protestants. As a result, a history of American evangelicalism that uses the term broadly might begin with the Puritans in the 1620s, or if a historian is using the term more narrowly, accounts might center on the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942.

I tend to think that when most people say evangelical, they are really referring to descendants of the “neo-evangelical” movement led by people like Harold Ockenga and Carl Henry in the 1930s and 1940s. My recommendations reflect the fact I classify evangelicalism as a modern movement.

Thomas Kidd’s Who Is an Evangelical? is a useful introduction to American evangelicalism as a movement and explains many of these debates. It mostly focuses on twentieth century evangelicalism. This might be a good starting place.

George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture is a classic history of the intellectual origins of the fundamentalist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most evangelicals saw themselves as separate from the fundamentalists, but the movement had a lasting impact on American evangelicalism. Marsden particularly documents the beginning of dispensational premillennialist theology, the view that Christ will return to save believers before the apocalypse.

Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason is an intellectual history of twentieth-century evangelicalism. It explains why and how the movement began to focus on the idea that the Bible was without error. This is a very useful book for understanding contemporary evangelical theology and thought.

Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse is a history of evangelicalism centered on its emphasis on apocalyptic thought and prophecy. This a major current in evangelical belief, and it also informs their politics.

Darren Dochuk’s Bible Belt to Sunbelt is a history of the ties between evangelicalism and the rise of the modern political right. Understanding how American evangelicalism became closely tied to the Republican Party is fairly essential to understanding the trajectory of the movement after the 1960s.

One final note, all these books principally focus on white evangelicals. African American Protestants frequently have similar beliefs to white evangelicals, but they have radically different voting patterns, tending to favor the Democratic Party. Scholars only rarely describe Black Protestants as “evangelicals,” and there is a vast body of scholarship that separately examines African American Protestantism.

Books Mentioned:

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972.

Butler, Jon, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life: A Short History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.

Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Kidd, Thomas S. Who Is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism in American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.