The first thing that stood out was Jones’s apologia for the racial order of the Old South. Jones questioned whether slaveowners were prone to violence toward their slaves. His own great-grandmother, Rachel Napier, owned several plantations and over 300 slaves and is protrayed as a gentle, caring paternalist who only sold slaves in family groups, taught them Scripture, and restrained her overseers. Jones then repeated a line often used in defense of slavery: “One thing is certainly true. The average black slave was in every respect a thousand times better off than he had been in Africa.” (23) And, of course, Jones asserted that the Civil War “had not been fought primarily over the issue of slavery but, rather, over states’ rights.” (24) He finished the section with a fond recollection of eating his lunch as a schoolchild while sitting on the spot where Jeff Davis took the oath of office as President of the Confederacy.

Keep in mind that Bob Jones Jr. published these thoughts in 1985, just two years after Bob Jones University v. United States and only fourteen since the school dropped its whites-only admission policy. The school had begun to change to face the realities of the times, but Jones himself remained unreconstructed. Jones’s defense of the old southern racial order is a sharp contrast to the current administration’s apology for the school’s history of racial discrimination.

I was struck by Jones’s distrust of Zionism. He staked out a moderate position by condemning acts of terrorism by both Israelis and Arabs. He praised the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, as effusively as he complimented King Hussein’s hospitality (and Jones included signed pictures from both). Jones was greatly annoyed by a group of fundamentalists who had declared their support for Menachem Begin, then the Prime Minister of Israel; instead, Jones condemned Begin’s persecuation of Christian Arabs and the massacre of Arab civilians he ordered at Deir Yassin. “I have a great love for both Jews and Arabs, but I hate tyranny, terrorism, and violence just as much on the part of a Jewish government as I do on the part of an Arab government.” (141) Jones’s moderate views towards Israel and the Arab nations were a marked contrast to the growing support for Zionism among American evangelicals at the time.

Cornbread and Caviar also evinced, what I’ll call for lack of a better term, fundamentalist enlargement. When A. C. Dixon published The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth in the 1910s, fundamentalism was a minimalist movement. The fundamentals were meant to be the basic doctrines of Christianity. They were a call to orthodox ecumenicism, cooperation across denominational boundaries and despite secondary doctrinal differences. A postmillenial, reformed Presbyterian like J. Gresham Machen and a premillenial, dispensationalist Baptist like William Bell Riley could both be considered fundamentalists. Separation was theoretically reserved for those who transgressed a discrete set of fundamental doctrines.

Since the 1910s, the fundamentals have been enlarged. The fundamentals evolved from a set of essential doctrines — e.g., the deity of Christ and the inspiration of Scripture — into a far more detailed list of secondary doctrines and proscribed behaviors. That transformation surfaces briefly in Jones’s discussion of eschatology. “I have never had any agreement with the postmillenial position…it goes contrary to the whole teaching of Scripture and, like Christian Science, is an affront to intellectuality and hard common sense as well. … Postmillenialism is a menace to the spiritual life of fundamental, Bible-believing churches today.” (110) Premillenialism had become a de facto fundamental. Interestingly, Jones did not add cessationism to the list of fundamentals, although most fundamentalists today do. Jones greatly admired O. Talmadge Spence, a Pentecostal preacher and a board member at Bob Jones. He acknowledged their disagreement over the cessation of the apostolic gifts, but he called Spence “as much of a Fundamentalist as I am.” (181)

In his previous work, Randall Balmer—professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University—has expertly woven highly readable historical chronicle with thoughtful, provocative critique. His latest book, The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, is no exception; in it, Balmer offers a concise survey of the relationship between evangelicalism and American culture since the 18th century that, while not without flaw, demonstrates his expertise as a historian and his insight as a critic.

Balmer structures The Making of Evangelicalism around four “turning points” in the history of the movement: (1) the transition from a Calvinist to an Arminian theology; (2) the turn from postmillennialism to premillennialism; (3) the construction of an isolationist evangelical subculture at the beginning of the twentieth century; and (4) the rise of the Religious Right. At each of these critical junctures, he argues, evangelicals dramatically re-aligned (either consciously or unconsciously) their beliefs and attitudes. Balmer peppers the study with what he calls “counterfactual speculation”—what-if questions that provide “ample opportunity to imagine a different course” for the evangelical movement (p. 2).

Balmer’s narrative begins in the 18th and 19th centuries with the surge of evangelical revivalism in America. He describes how an Arminian soteriology—the belief that God’s free gift of salvation extends to all people, not just a predetermined elect—supplanted Puritan Calvinism. That prerogative and its attendant focus on human agency, promulgated by evangelists like Charles Grandison Finney, reinforced the broader American culture’s emphasis on self-determinism while also unleashing “a reforming zeal unmatched in the annals of American history” (p. 30). Evangelicals set out to improve society by advocating the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women’s suffrage, but their optimism soon dampened in the wake of the Civil War and the cultural re-alignment caused by industrialization and urbanization.

Here, in Balmer’s estimation, is where evangelicals veered wildly off-track. Spurred by their embrace of dispensational premillennialism (which predicted the impending return of Christ to “rapture” His church) and driven from the the mainline churches over controversies regarding biblical inerrancy and Darwin’s theory of evolution, evangelicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century focused on the cultivation of individualistic inward piety and abandoned the amelioration of social ills to more progressive Protestants. Evangelicals retreated from the public sphere, adopted a fundamentalist outlook, and focused on the cultivation of a distinct subcultural identity.

While some might read this subcultural turn as evidence of evangelicalism’s rejection of American culture, Balmer—rooting his analysis in what that turn produced—sees it as evidence of capitulation to mainstream cultural preoccupations like consumer capitalism and the acquisition of political power: Evangelicals in the latter half of the twentieth century, he contends, became preoccupied with selling and defending their subcultural identity (and its attendant orthodoxies). Balmer credits the “neo-evagelical reawakening” of the 1950s with popularizing a marriage of revivalism and corporate culture aimed at “selling” salvation to the masses; he describes the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s as evangelicalism’s “pandering to power” (p. 73) and rejecting their heritage of progressive activism in favor of a conservative political agenda and a vigilant defense of their subculture.

Balmer caps off his study with an eight-page conclusion that presses evangelicals to “find a better vision for the future” (p. 81) by reclaiming their early 19th-century heritage of social reform. This reveals much about Balmer’s bias; it also points toward the weakness of his study: namely, his incomplete picture of evangelicalism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Balmer evinces a clear distaste for evangelicalism’s development since the Civil War: he derides dispensational premillennialism as a “theology of despair” (p. 5), and blames the Religious Right for “deliver[ing] the faith into the captivity of right-wing politics” (p. 76). Such critiques, while important for evangelicals to hear, prove troublesome in the context of Balmer’s study, as they prohibit the writer from detailing some of evangelicalism’s other developments in this era. For instance, Balmer ignores virtually all the global missionary activity set in motion by evangelicals’ interpretation of premillennialism. He neglects to mention the mid-century genesis of evangelical organizations like World Vision, Compassion International, and World Relief—modern-day iterations of the reform work done by evangelicals in the 19th century. And in placing such significance on the rise of the Religious Right, Balmer marginalizes the voices of theologically conservative but politically progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners) and Ron Sider (founder of Evangelicals for Social Action), which emerged as early as the 1970s. Failure to acknowledge these critical developments in the evangelical movement weakens Balmer’s overall argument.

Despite these obvious flaws, Balmer’s study has some praiseworthy elements. His treatment of the origins of the Religious Right will be eye-opening reading for many. Similarly, his ability as a historian to elucidate connections across the centuries will help lay readers recognize the role that both change and consistency play in historical development; for instance, his linking of George Whitefield’s itinerant evangelism in the late 18th century with Billy Graham’s urban revivalism of the 20th century demonstrates that evangelical preachers “have always understood the importance of communicating directly with the masses” (p.13)—an important realization for those seeking to understand evangelicalism’s continued popularity in America.

Overall, readers looking for a less polemical introductory historical survey should consult Balmer’s earlier Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America (1999); readers seeking a more in-depth critique of the Religious Right should pick up Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America (2006). Those wanting a fusion of the two will find The Making of Evangelicalism, while flawed, a sturdy resource.

Note: A version of this review is forthcoming in Brethren in Christ History & Life.