RU: The Evangelicals came out in 2017, and it’s quite a dense book. I really enjoyed it.

FitzGerald: I did a lot of reporting on it for The New Yorker, starting in 1980 actually. Very much off and on. But quite a bit on toward the end of the Bush administration, when evangelicals were really taking power. But having done all of these pieces, I then thought, you can’t understand evangelicals if you’re someone like me, unless you go back into history. I mean, they just didn’t appear like that out of God’s eye.

RU: You say in the intro, which I find very interesting, that the sudden appearance of the Christian Right shocked most political observers. So, why do you feel like that was the case? Why do you feel like people misunderstand or are surprised when the Religious Right comes back into the public eye?

FitzGerald: Well, it didn’t come back actually. In the sense that [Jerry] Falwell was doing something new for evangelicals. He was not just sort of in politics himself like Billy Graham used to consort with all the presidents. But Billy Graham never had a movement that was focused on certain very secular reforms. Falwell did that or started that. That was something new––it really was. The fundamentalists, for example, had been in politics but locally and made a lot of speeches but they’d never tried to actually corral groups of voters to get things done in the government.

RU: Then why do you think it is surprising when something like 2016 or George W. Bush––why are people surprised it?

FitzGerald: Well, it’s funny, but most people don’t like to think about evangelicals… They don’t like to think about a religious group. Most people are so secular, even if they go to church. What happens is they learn something and then they forget about it.

RU: That’s why journalists are so important, right? Having the memory.

FitzGerald: I think I quote some journalist in there saying that they jump from scandal to neglect; scandal to neglect. And similarly, the consciences of evangelicals have gone from intense interest to total memory loss.

RU: What do you think is the most misunderstood aspects of evangelicalism is, especially in the last couple of decades? It’s obviously shifted every decade or so.

FitzGerald: I have to keep reminding my audiences that it’s a religious group, not a political group. This is something evangelicals worry about themselves a good deal. Not wanting to get thought of as a political group, which they are very much in danger of doing, at least the Christian Right. But people don’t know about groups like that National Association of Evangelicals, which is very much into policy but not at all into politics. And there is a difference.

If you really want something, you behave like the Catholics or NAE for example, and you have an office in Washington, and you say, “Look, we care about Darfur, or religious freedom someplace,” or “We really care about government not cutting poverty programs”––which they both have done, for example. They don’t care which party they say this to. They say this to everybody. And of course they worry about other things, such as abortion and gay rights and so forth. But that’s policy, rather than actually getting up and defending candidates or parties in general.

RU: It’s probably not comparing apples to apples necessarily here, but you talk a lot about different splits in your book––the fundamentalists vs. the modernists, the liberals vs. the conservatives, various schisms or splits. Toward the end, especially in 2016 with Donald Trump and what we’ve seen in the media over the past few years there’s been a different kind of splintering that you’ve referred to. Do you see that split as similar to some of these others or very different, and how so?

FitzGerald: It was very different. The difference is the fundamentalist-modernist split, or the liberals and conservatives in the 19th century, was a split between two existing groups of people who inhabited the same space, essentially. I mean, the modernists controlled the denominations––Presbyterians, Baptists and so on––and fundamentalists wanted to take them over. And one would win and one would lose, but it was people of the same age and the same general background had theological and other kinds of splits.

More recently, the split is more generational. It’s sometimes gender. It’s certainly racial. Black evangelicals vote 98 percent Democratic all the time. Latinos and Asians also vote Democratic, by a lesser degree, like 67 percent.