The organizational origins of the New Evangelicalism can be traced to a meeting held in 1942 at the Coronado Hotel on Lindell Boulevard in St. Louis. The hotel is now a residence hall of Saint Louis University. When they met there, a large group of Christian leaders were intent on reforming their inherited fundamentalism in several respects, and especially so by reversing its separatist stance (separating from unbelievers, from theologically modernist Christian churches and individuals, and from the secular culture and its educational institutions). These New Evangelicals held tightly to most fundamentalist Christian beliefs, but meant to reengage American culture, including its educational institutions, without surrendering fundamentalist biblicism and primarily by amping up fundamentalist intellectual life. Out of this meeting, and over the years, a set of institutions emerged, including the National Association of Evangelicals, the Evangelical Theological Society, Fuller Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Seminary and College, Christianity Today, and many more institutional incarnations of the new evangelical spirit of engagement. Owen Strachan details this growth as well the largest failure in the inspiring vision of Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and Billy Graham: the founding of a Christian research university.

Strachan, an associate professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary, has written a fascinating account of those heady years based on extensive research into primary sources found in libraries across the country. He focuses on the literary remains of those who participated in the reform, particularly the central figure, Harold Ockenga, a man who made the wheels of reform turn and who was the chief enunciator of its goals, but also on the careers of Ockenga's community of what Strachan calls “the Cambridge Intellectuals,” among them Carl Henry, John Gerstner, Kenneth Kantzer, Edward John Carnell, George Elton Ladd, and a dozen more, who, while students, fell under Ockenga's brilliant and affecting preaching at the Park Street Church in Boston. At Ockenga's funeral in 1985 Billy Graham, who had been his partner in most of the projects launched at the church, said of Ockenga that no one could match his influence on Graham himself and, one might add after reading Strachan, on all of the other members of the movement, whose membership is now estimated variously at 90 million or more in the United States. Ockenga was the organizing genius and the spiritual mentor.

I did notice in this well-told tale what I take to be a deliberate omission. One of the primary motifs of the Evangelical founding documents is a strong dose of anti-Catholicism. Ockenga himself was a staunch antagonist of the American Catholic role in the public sphere at the very same time that he pumped up the Evangelical role. He was also a member of the core Protestant public worriers about John F. Kennedy's election in 1960. The omission of this theme is perhaps understandable. Strachan's book is closely focused after all. In the same line, Stratham also fails to mention the Evangelicals and Catholics Together Movement, launched in 1994, led by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus, and populated by an impressive list of Evangelical intellectuals and academics who could be characterized as the grandchildren of the Cambridge Intellectuals. There is no mention of the relationship of the Evangelicals to the Catholic Church: nothing in the text and nothing in the index. Perhaps we need another book on this aspect of the New Evangelicalism.

For those who are interested in American Evangelicalism, the book belongs on the shelf next to the admirable historical work of George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, Bradley Longfield, D. G. Hart, Earnest Sandeen, and Mark Noll, a distinguished line of historians of American Evangelicalism. It can be read with profit by advanced undergraduates and should be required of graduate students in theology and American history seminars.