Welcome to Litsy!

In Apostles of Reason, Molly Worthen offers a sweeping 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 three elemental concerns: how to reconcile faith and reason; how to knowJesus; and how to bring faith to 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 debates have shaped evangelicals into a distinctive spiritual community.