Frances FitzGerald Books

Sensitively examines the American intervention in Vietnam against its Vietnamese historical setting.

FitzGerald's polemic analysis argues that contemporary texts reflect current social quarrels, frequently distorting history into propaganda

"We must consider that we shall be a City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us," John Winthrop told his Pilgrim community crossing the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Four centuries later, Americans are still building such cities. In Cities on a Hill Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances FitzGerald explores this often eccentric, sometimes prophetic inclination in America. With characteristic wit and insight she examines four radically different communities: a fundamentalist church, a guru-inspired commune, a Sunbelt retirement city, and a gay activist community. All embody a visionary drive to shake off the past and build anew. Each regards itself as an exemplar of a new consciousness, or a new way of living, or both. FitzGerald here gives eloquent voice and definition to a quintessentially American impulse. It is a resonant work of literary imagination and journalistic precision.

The evangelical movement began in the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known in America as the Great Awakenings. A populist rebellion against the established churches, it became the dominant religious force in the country. During the nineteenth century, white evangelicals split apart dramatically, first North versus South, and then at the end of the century, modernist versus fundamentalist. After World War II, Billy Graham, the revivalist preacher, attracted enormous crowds and tried to gather all Protestants under his big tent, but the civil rights movement and the social revolution of the sixties drove them apart again. By the 1980s, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other southern televangelists had formed the Christian right. Protesting abortion and gay rights, they led the South into the Republican Party, and for thirty-five years they were the sole voice of evangelicals to be heard nationally. Eventually a younger generation of leaders protested the Christian right's close ties with the Republican Party and proposed a broader agenda of issues, such as climate change, gender equality, and immigration reform. Evangelicals have in many ways defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Evangelicals now constitute twenty-five percent of the American population, but they are no longer monolithic in their politics. They range from Tea Party supporters to social reformers. Still, with the decline of religious faith generally, FitzGerald suggests that evangelical churches must embrace ethnic minorities if they are to survive

Initially a populist rebellion against the established Protestant churches, evagelicalism became the dominant religious force in the country before the Civil War, but the northerners and southerners split over the issue of slavery. After the Civil War, the northern evangelicals split, eventually causing a conflict between fundamentalists and modernists. Only after the Second World War would conservative evangelicalism gain momentum, thanks in large part to Billy Graham's countrywide revivals. FitzGerald shows how the conflict between religious conservatives and others led to national culture wars and a Southern Republican stronghold, and how a new generation of evangelicals is challenging the Christian right by preaching social justice and the common good. FitzGerald suggests that because evangelicals are splintering, America, the most religious of developed nations, will eventually look more like secular Europe. --