Mine eyes have seen the glory - Randall Herbert Balmer

This is an expanded paperback edition of Randall Balmer's account of his journey into the strongholds of evangelical America, first published in 1989. Writing in the form of a travelogue, Balmer interviewed evengelicals across the nation, examining the state of American evangelicalism at a grass-roots level. He visits an old-fashioned holiness camp in St. Petersburg, Florida, an Indian reservation in the Dakotas, a huge trade show for Christian booksellers, and a fundamentalist Bible camp in the Adirondacks. His aim is to demystify evangelicalism for nonevangelicals, to correct the over-simplified media view of evangelicalism and to render a portrait of this powerful folk influence in all its variation and diversity. He ignores media celebrities like the Bakkers and Swaggarts and concentrates instead on genuine popular evangelicalism, a diverse 'patchwork quilt'. Throughout this reflective series of New Yorker-like profiles, Balmer provides theological and historical background, creating in effect a capsule history of evangelicalism.