Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America Horror Book Review

From Oregon to Florida, and from Texas to North Dakota; from the tens of thousands Billy Graham’s recent crusade brought to New York’s Central Park to the evangelical activists who mobilized support for Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp at the 1988 Iowa caucuses, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory crisscrosses the country to take readers on a journey into the heart of evangelical America. We visit an old-fashioned holiness camp meeting 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. But what stands out most in this book is the people Balmer meets on his journey, ranging from the evangelical filmmaker Donald Thompson to Pentecostal faith healers to fervent young evangelists working the beaches of southern California. It is through their eyes that we see into the heart of American evangelicalism, that we grasp the genuine appeal of the movement, and thereby arrive at a more accurate and balanced understanding of an abiding tradition that, as the author argues, is both rich in theological insights and mired in contradictions. For this edition, Balmer has added two new chapters, one offering a fascinating profile of disgraced TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, and the other a behind-the-scenes portrait of a Christian rock band on tour.