Background, Clarifications, and Overview
This introductory chapter opens with a brief summary of the big picture. It then establishes the existence of a New Calvinist movement in the United States since the turn of the millennium while acknowledging that the reality of the movement is itself a part of the puzzle. The chapter then provides an overview of the empirical data collected for this book, which includes participant observation at three (wildly popular) New Calvinist megachurches across the country, personal interviews with seventy-five Evangelical leaders (including New Calvinists and their religious challengers), and content analysis of printed and online materials, as well as how these data were analyzed. This chapter includes a section that responds to five common misconceptions about the nature and approach of this project. It ends with a summary of the narrative arc of the rest of the book, broken down by chapters.