Every four years, American political journalists, who rarely interest themselves in spiritual matters outside of election cycles, act out their own sort of religious ritual: foretelling “the evangelical vote.” Think back to February 2016, after Donald Trump had won his large victory in the Republican primary in New Hampshire, but before South Carolina had voted. He was not supposed to win that state, because there are a lot of evangelicals there, and evangelicals, our soothsayers told us, did not like Donald Trump. They did not like him because he was Donald Trump, and we all know that story, but also because he mistakenly referred to “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians” when he spoke to evangelicals at Liberty University.

As it turned out, Trump’s biblical mishap didn’t matter. He won South Carolina handily, and went on to capture 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in November, beating the previous high of 78 percent for George W. Bush in 2004. (By comparison, Ronald Reagan won only 67 percent of evangelicals, and Jimmy Carter—a Southern Baptist whose candidacy marked for many secular observers the emergence of evangelicalism as a political force—won even fewer.) The outcome called into question plenty of assumptions about evangelicals and their political agenda. How could the so-called “Christian Right,” believed to vote according to a fiercely moral agenda, embrace the most impious presidential candidate in American history?

Frances FitzGerald’s new book, The Evangelicals, would seem to be one that might explain to secular readers this puzzling turn of events. She opens with Carter as the beginning of the modern evangelical presidential era, and concludes with Trump, whose very nomination was supposed to be that era’s tombstone. In between she sweeps through nearly three centuries of American religious history. She draws on her long experience of modern evangelical politics, which she has chronicled for four decades—most famously in her novella-length profile of Jerry Falwell, one of the preeminent warlords in the Christian Right’s crusade for political power. Her massive accounts of the Vietnam War (Fire in the Lake) and the Cold War (Way Out There in the Blue) have been praised for FitzGerald’s ability to wed the “inner histories” of complex political events, as the historian Alan Brinkley put it, with their cultural contexts. The promise of this similarly vast, new history—all 752 pages of it—lies in its subtitle: The Struggle to Shape America. Here, it suggests, is a book that will speak to our times.

THE EVANGELICALS: THE STRUGGLE TO SHAPE AMERICA by Frances FitzGerald Simon & Schuster, 752pp., $35.00

But despite its size, the scope of FitzGerald’s history is oddly narrow. Like many historians, she sees the 1980s as the moment when the Christian Right “reintroduced” religion into politics—a focus that makes it difficult to persuasively connect recent events, like the rise of Trump, with the long and extraordinary history of compromises and shifting allegiances among evangelicals. For her, Trump’s victory reflects the waning power of the Christian Right’s leaders more than the actual priorities of millions of evangelical voters. Her story follows a single path through evangelical history, from the big men of the Great Awakening to the big men of today’s Southern Baptist Convention. As a survey of the political inclinations of evangelical white male leaders, The Evangelicals is a valuable book, but it leaves out too many other people to yield much insight into the state of American politics, much less the varieties of evangelical experience. A tradition rooted in a belief in a personal Jesus and an intimate—if sometimes terrifying—divine can’t be defined by its pulpits alone. To understand “the evangelicals,” even just within the context of politics, means exploring what it feels like not just to preach, but also to sit in the pews. It requires us to examine evangelical Christianity as a religion lived by people who are also concerned with race and class, art and music, fear and ambition.

FitzGerald begins her history in the 1730s, with the First Great Awakening—the revival that did much to give American evangelicalism its intertwined public fervor and personal intensity—and its most notable figure, Jonathan Edwards. The Evangelicals devotes only two pages to this most central of early figures, and FitzGerald spends them mostly on the “vivid rhetoric” of his “most quoted sermon, ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’” Preached in 1741, “Sinners” is vivid in its blistering account of human unworthiness, its description of “the God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” Edwards, writes FitzGerald, was “telling people what they already believed.”