I’ll start with a confession: I’ve never really understood the Holy Ghost. Among the divine Trinity, God the Father and God the Son made plenty of sense to a Southern Baptist boy growing up in Tennessee in the ’70s and ’80s — I was a devout son, after all, and my father, a deacon in our congregation, ferried the offering plate from pew to pew each Sunday morning. Father and son: an affirmation of the patriarchal system known as “church.” But God the Spirit remained shadowy and elusive, a will-o’-the-wisp whose divine status we gladly acknowledged, an equal partner in the firm, but who was also associated with “baptism of the spirit,” or speaking in tongues, a practice we disavowed less on theological grounds and more because, well, hillbilly Pentecostals did that sort of thing, like handling cottonmouth snakes in worship service. Those people: Ewwww. 

My congregation’s rejection of charismata reflected class tensions — some stifled, others openly roiling — and its uniformly Caucasian complexion revealed a rancid, enduring racism. And yet the Holy Ghost has played a pivotal role in the growth of Protestantism since the Reformation, as illuminated by two very different yet complementary new histories, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World by British don Alec Ryrie, and The Evangelicals: the Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The baptism of the spirit, the sacrament of Communion, the strife between modernity and orthodoxy — these bones of contention have hammered together a broader Protestant identity even as it’s splintered into numerous denominations, in the wake of Martin Luther’s famous Ninety-five Theses, nailed onto a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. The Reformation allowed believers to shake off the strictures of Catholicism, opening the door to personal relationships with God.

An ordained Anglican minister as well as an academic, Ryrie celebrates this pluralism; as his subtitle suggests, his book emphasizes Protestantism as a catalyst for Enlightenment thought, scientific discovery, and the birth of representative democracy. Catholicism, in his view, was always defined by hierarchy and corruption, from the pope on down. The first page announces his critical insight: “Protestantism is a religion of fighters and lovers. Fighters because it was born in conflict, and its story can be told as one long argument . . . But it is also a religion of lovers. From the beginning, a love affair with God has been as its heart. Like all long love affairs, it has gone through many phases, from early passion through companionable marriage and sometimes strained coexistence, to rekindled ardor.”

Ardor clings like perfume to Ryrie’s vivid, graceful account; and one can almost forgive him for elevating the love affair over the bloody conflicts waged by Protestants over the centuries. He writes with passion and persuasion, drawing fine distinctions as the Reformation unfolded in myriad forms throughout Europe, and charting the complicated (at times contradictory) influences of Calvinism. He’s adept, too, at laying out the early religious history of Colonial America, how pluralism begot pluralism in the New World, the Puritans staking their ground but then ceding it to other groups, such as the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Anglicans in Virginia, and a mélange of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists in the South.

Enter Frances FitzGerald and her magnum opus, The Evangelicals, which picks up from Ryrie the manifold conflicts within American Protestantism and teases out each strand with meticulous research and an impeccable eye for detail. Despite the range of class and education among European Protestants, theologians always prided themselves on rigorous scholarship, a carryover from the monastic tradition in Catholicism. But in America the story veered away from universities and cathedrals — largely because of the country’s vastness — and unfolded instead through the sectarian frictions that have plagued it from generation unto generation, older than the Declaration of Independence and younger than yesterday.

The most critical fault lines, as might be suspected, emerge from the deepest crack in America’s moral foundation, with Baptists and Presbyterians splitting apart over the issue of slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, other discords emerged, with liberals advocating a Social Gospel characterized by communal uplift and conservatives increasingly drawn to an ideal that unified moral perfectibility with racial purity, a vision of America in which everyone thinks and acts according to a literal interpretation of the Bible. Politics became personal. Love and war: at the dawn of a new century war began to trump love. And with the atrocities of World War I, broadcast through photographs and newspaper and telegraph accounts, the fundamentalists embraced combat as an organizing principle. “Beginning in 1918, they went from more or less peaceful coexistence with the liberals in their denominations to organized efforts to drive modernism out of the churches and schools. The war had turned them into activists . . . They had lost the battle for prestige, but they did not lose their sizeable constituencies, and as before, fundamentalism flourished with new groups springing up, as one historian put it, like dandelions.”

FitzGerald’s style is starchy in places, but her narrative is as accomplished as the scholarship denounced by evangelical preachers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her pages teem with the titans of American evangelicalism, from the famous and infamous — Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — to the lesser known, such as Dwight Moody, Charles Finney, and Washington Gladden. Evangelism had a brief moment in the North, as rapid industrialization in cities such as New York and Pittsburgh evoked spiritual malaise in workers, and divinity schools such as Princeton’s pushed for conservative interpretations of Scripture; but eventually it waned as immigrants and educated urbanites faced down reactionary groups. Au contraire in the South: Jim Crow gave denominations the theological space to affirm their authoritarian order. FitzGerald leaves no stone unturned in her quest to tell this story in its complexity, from Pentecostals to Holiness congregations to the sprawling centerpiece, the Southern Baptist Convention, which grew to become the largest Protestant denomination by the mid-twentieth century, a title it still holds today.

Protestants and The Evangelicals, then, act as yin and yang in telling an encyclopedic tale of a Christianity in constant motion, with new American religions flowering in America (think Mormonism and Scientology) because of — not in spite of — the diversity of denominations. It’s precisely that diversity that offers such a variety of cubist-like perspectives on doctrine, which may explain why, as a child, I couldn’t quite grasp a mystery like the Holy Spirit. If both these books lack the sweep and beauty of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, each is nevertheless essential reading on the conjoined nature of religion and politics today (along with Leigh Eric Schmidt’s witty Village Atheists, the most perspicacious study to date of nonbelievers in our observant country). And although their approaches are different — Ryrie brings wonder and appreciation to his narrative, FitzGerald a methodical skepticism and brilliant research to hers — both illuminate the flaws and frailties of a dazzling spectrum of people, those who love the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and yet are haunted by the many unseen ghosts who walk among them.

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