OwenWare: Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany. Routledge: New York, 2023; pp. 198.

To say that ecumenical Protestants won the country but lost the church, may be an overstatement, observes Hollinger, but it also contains an element of truth.Hollinger also offers insightful perspectives on how American ecumenical Protestantism has lost much of the global church as well.That is ironic in that ecumenicals have been champions of global perspectives, cosmopolitanism, and "listening" to those of other cultures, rather than imposing Western values.Yet by the twenty-first century, especially in the face of overwhelmingly conservative attitudes among Global South Christians on LGBTQ issues, progressive ecumenical Protestants find themselves at odds with most of the Christians throughout the world.When it comes to American evangelicalism, Hollinger steps away from balanced analysis in favour of highlighting the need for alarm regarding the overwhelming support of white American evangelicals for Donald Trump.In his account the embrace of Trump by so many white evangelical Christians is not at all an anomaly but simply exposes what has been the true nature of evangelicalism all along.Many of the recent accounts of how white evangelicals were successfully wooed by the Republican Party have presented that as a story of how a once healthier evangelical faith was "corrupted", "ruined", or "hijacked".Hollinger, by contrast, writes that "contrary to the view that evangelicalism is a benign presence in American life, hijacked by outsiders, I argue that evangelical history prepared it to be just what it showed itself to be in the era of Donald Trump" (p.xii).It is true that "hijacked" may be too strong a term for the voluntary wedding of many white American evangelicals to conservative Republican party.Yet as many ex-evangelical or non-Trumpist evangelicals have testified, that alliance has corrupted a faith that, despite some traits that indeed prepared it for Trumpism, could also be in many respects a benign presence.Perhaps it is too strong to say that Hollinger's dismissal of all of evangelicalism on the basis that many of its white American branches embraced Trumpism is analogous to arguing that Islamic terrorists show us where Islam has been heading all along.But it is in the same interpretive ballpark of characterising the whole of a multifaceted religious movement by one of its least attractive parts.Evangelicalism over the past three centuries has come in countless varieties and appeared in many social-political settings around the world.The most adequate way to identify whether a religious group is "evangelical" is to see if it advocates a core set of common evangelical beliefs and practices.Hollinger himself sometimes identifies evangelicals in that way.So he acknowledges that much of African-American religion can be classified, doctrinally, as "evangelical".But he immediately rejects that identification as "trivial and misleading" (p.154).Along the same vein, he dismisses doctrinal definitions of white American evangelism on that grounds that such an approach "elides the entire history of fundamentalist and evangelical connections with business-friendly individualism" (p.114).But using doctrinal approaches to identify who is evangelical does not thereby elide the particular histories of any particular sub-group.Rather, it offers a way to include the diversities among evangelicals and their histories in all sorts of cultural settings and to avoid the mistake of characterising the whole the traits of a particularly conspicuous sub-set.Christianity's American Fate, then, is recommended for some excellent insights on the roles of mainline Protestants and post-Protestants in trying to shape American culture and values.For a balanced account of the rise of Trumpism among white American evangelicals one can find a host of more nuanced alternatives.