“In this highly readable history, Hollinger shows us why even nonreligious people should take a keen interest in the divisions within American Christianity. Dionne Jr., author of Souled Out and coauthor of 100% Democracy Hollinger’s scholarship has forced me to reevaluate many of my own assumptions. Hollinger offers challenging, thoughtful, and well-grounded insights into the peculiar path American religion has taken over the past two decades. Christianity’s American Fate could not be more timely. “No contemporary historian has probed more deeply, fruitfully, or insightfully into the mind of American Protestantism than David Hollinger. Accessible and generative, Hollinger’s narrative is a valuable contribution to our understanding of religion and public life in America.”-Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation “Lucidly written and expansive in scope, Christianity’s American Fate situates the ascendancy of conservative evangelicalism within the broader transformation of American religion. But by embracing a socially diverse and scientifically engaged modernity, Hollinger tells us, ecumenical Protestants also set the terms by which evangelicals became reactionary. By the 1960s, Jews and other non-Christians had diversified the nation ethnoreligiously, inspiring more inclusive notions of community. Hollinger argues that the United States became not only overwhelmingly Protestant but Protestant on steroids. Hollinger explains the origins of what he calls Protestantism’s “two-party system” in the United States, finding its roots in America’s religious culture of dissent, as established by seventeenth-century colonists who broke away from Europe’s religious traditions the constitutional separation of church and state, which enabled religious diversity and the constant influx of immigrants, who found solidarity in churches. A Protestant evangelicalism that was comfortable with patriarchy and white supremacy soon became the country’s dominant Christian cultural force. After 1960, mainline Protestantism lost members from both camps-conservatives to evangelicalism and progressives to secular activism. In Christianity’s American Fate, David Hollinger shows how the Protestant establishment, adopting progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, empire, and divinity, liberalized too quickly for some and not quickly enough for others. How did American Christianity become synonymous with conservative white evangelicalism? This sweeping work by a leading historian of modern America traces the rise of the evangelical movement and the decline of mainline Protestantism’s influence on American life.