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Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice . By Brantley W. Gasaway . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2014. x + 324 pp. $29.95 paper.
Book Reviews and Notes
Studies of late twentieth century American evangelicalism inevitably focus on the rise of the Religious Right. Brantley W. Gasaway provides a needed corrective to the tendency to see this recent historical landscape primarily from the perspective of religious conservatives, by analyzing what has been commonly called since the early 1970s, "progressive evangelicalism." While not as numerically dominant as its politically conservative counterpart, Gasaway argues that this movement "successfully created and sustained a notable form of biblically based public engagement. In the process, they developed a public theology that became the foundation for their movement's distinctive political positions, distinguishing themselves from both the Religious Right and the political left" (276).
Gasaway's first two chapters discuss the roots and origins of progressive evangelicalism. While acknowledging the tradition's antecedents in antebellum postmillennial reform efforts, Gasaway sees progressive evangelicalism emerging out of the social unrest caused by the civil rights movement and Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Gasaway, the 1973 foundation of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA) represents the pivotal moment for chronicling the movement's birth and creating a template for its ongoing activism over the past forty years.
Gasaway discusses numerous individuals associated with this tradition since the early 1970s, including Tony Campolo, Nancy Hardesty, and Virginia Mollenkott. However, his narrative mostly centers upon...