American Evangelicals Today

American Evangelicals Today assesses the contemporary social, religious, and political characteristics of evangelical Protestants. Corwin E. Smidt offers a discussion of the nature of evangelical Protestantism, highlights the particular analytical issues at play when one seeks to determine just who should be classified as evangelical, and reveals some of the contradictory findings that can emerge through the use of these different analytical frameworks for defining evangelicals. The volume examines the current characteristics of evangelicals in comparison to members of other religious traditions (primarily mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, Roman Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated) and discusses how evangelicals have changed over time, but the book also looks toward the future. Evaluations of potentially important divisions among evangelicals based on racial and ethnic variations, generational disparities, educational distinctions, and religious variances of traditionalist and modernist are included. The analysis is based primarily on responses from the nearly 35,000 participants of the Pew Religious Landscape Survey of 2007, supplemented by a number of more recent national surveys.

Reviews

According to Kenneth D. Wald, distinguished professor of political science at the University of Florida: “American Evangelicals Today is the most comprehensive, insightful and perceptive book on the topic. It is the first source I’ll recommend to students interested in the subject. A masterful summary of [Smidt’s] long career as a pioneer in the social scientific study of evangelical Protestants, the book is a triumph.”