Much of the best recent scholarship on conservative Protestantism in the middle decades of this Century focuses on what is sometimes called the “mainstream” of interdenominational evangelicalism. Although this variety of evangelicalism was deeply influenced by and, indeed, in some respects the direct successor to the fundamentalist movement of the 1910's, 1920's, and 1930's, it did not begin to assume its present shape until the early 1940's. The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 is a convenient symbol of the emergence of what we now think of as constituting the evangelical mainstream.

Drafting a perfect definition of this mainstream is impossible; drafting a good working description of it is not. In the present context, “evangelical mainstream” simply refers to that network of born-again Christians associated with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, and Campus Crusade for Christ; with schools such as the Moody Bible Institute, Füller Seminary, and Wheaton College; with publishing firms like Eerdman's and Zondervan; and with magazines such as Christianity Today, Eternity, and Moody Monthly.

Northern Protestant leaders are commonly portrayed as uncritical scions of a cultural Obsession with “progress” that reached high tide in the two decades before the Civil War. Convinced that the United States held a divinely appointed commission to usher in Christ's millennial Kingdom on Earth, ministers supposedly sanctioned the nation's material and political development as integral to spiritual advancement. While they served their American flock a füll portion of Christian moralism to sustain this collective destiny, only a few renegade naysayers—such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne—remained sensible to human limitations and challenged a pervasive clerical frenzy of “progressivism, bravado and boasting.” Mainstream Protestantism's accommodative spirit, in other words, dulled its “critical edge” and rendered its message subservient to what one scholar calls a “nationwide ritual of progress.”

In 1643, twelve years after his arrival in Massachusetts Bay, John Eliot (1604-90), the Roxbury clergyman better known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” began to learn an Algonquian dialect in preparation for missionary work. After three years of study, he started to preach to the Indians in the colony. He continued to labor among them until the late 1680's, when his infirmity no longer permitted him to leave Roxbury. Over the course of these forty years, he attracted some eleven hundred Indians to the Christian faith, established fourteen reservations (“praying towns”) for his proselytes, and produced for Indians' use a number of Algonquian language works, including a translation of the Bible.

During the past twenty-five years, Eliot's career has received considerable scholarly attention. In 1965 Alden Vaughan portrayed Eliot as a conscientious missionary whose objective was to spread “Christian civilization” among the Indians.