And obviously I don’t need to tell you that evangelicals are a very important part of this country, and a lot of people that I know in New York really don’t understand them at all. So it’s been a long-term interest of mine. And since then I’ve done quite a bit of journalism on the whole subject. Of all the issues and of all the subject matter you could’ve addressed in a book of this magnitude, why American evangelicals?įITZGERALD: Well, I’m a New Yorker and an Episcopalian by background, and in 1980 by accident I was in Lynchburg, I visited Jerry Falwell’s church, and he was just starting the Moral Majority and I did a piece on him and his community for the New Yorker magazine. But it led me to want to ask you a very primary question. And even though in so many ways it’s the life I have lived, I have to say like in the case of any good book, I learned things that I really didn’t even know before about my own tradition. FitzGerald, I have to tell you I enjoyed reading your book. But her most recent book is the topic of our conversation today that book is The Evangelicals: A Struggle to Shape America.įrances FitzGerald, welcome to Thinking in Public. She’s the author of several books including, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the 20 th Century, Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures, and Way Out in the Blue: Reagan’s Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.

She has written for many periodicals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s and the New York Review of Books, and she serves on the editorial boards of The Nation and Foreign-Policy magazines. Her debut book Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam won a Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft prize, and the National Book Award. of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.įrances FitzGerald is an award-winning journalist and historian. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President. This is Thinking in Public, a dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

The evangelicals fitzgerald