This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Moller, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Francis Fitzgerald is an award-winning journalist and historian, Her debut book, Fire in the Lake, the Vietnamese,

and the Americans in Vietnam,

won a Pulitzer Prize, a Bancroft Prize,

and a National Book Award.

She has written for many periodicals including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers,

and the New York Review of Books.

And she serves on the editorial boards of the nation and foreign policy magazines.

She's the author of several books including America revised,

History School Books in the 20th century,

cities on a hill, a journey through contemporary American cultures,

and Way Out in the blue Reagan Star Wars and the

end of the Cold War. But our most recent book is the topic of our conversation

today. That book is The Evangelicals, The struggle to shape America.

Francis Fitzgerald, welcome to thinking in public.

Miss Fitzgerald, I have to tell you I enjoyed reading your book.

I enjoyed it immensely and even though in so many ways it's the life I have lived

I have to say like in the case of any good book I learned things that that I

really didn't even know before about my own tradition but it led me to want to ask you a very

primary question. Of all the issues and all the subject matter you could have

...