I hope browsing readers will feel the palpable connections between the revolutionary period of the Reformation and our own times. The Introduction and Conclusion would be the places to get that feel quickly.Instead of simplistic accounts of liberalism emerging as in a direct and pure stream from Protestantism, we understand that Liberalism is all the more precious and rich for having fought its way clear of evangelical religion. Instead of simplistic accounts of evangelical religion as “conservative,” we understand its powerful magnetism as a crucial expression of Western modernity. And instead of assuming that the liberal position will always be free of religious violence and intolerance, we understand that liberalism emerged from the same furnace as evangelical religion; the forging of the Liberal order bears the same scars as does evangelical religion. Liberalism, no less than evangelical religion, and for the same historical reasons, is easily capable of its own intolerances. Evangelical religion and Liberalism share the same DNA.The stakes of connecting these two forces that dominate American culture and politics (not to speak of other polities across the globe) are high. We stand to reconceive the following: the history of liberalism; the relation of liberalism to evangelical religion; and, by no means least, the nature of our own modernity. The stakes of such understanding are especially high in our own moment, with liberalism in global retreat before evangelical religion, and with liberalism in the West becoming increasingly fragile as it finds itself unable to formulate persuasive models of durable, flourishing cultural cohabitation, subject as it is to its own identity-driven exclusivisms, and its default positions of institutional distrust.Readers interested in the history of despair, hypocrisy, the image, theater and the pursuit of “witches,” reading, and liberty itself will easily find their way to those separate histories in clearly marked sections.As a cultural historian, I work to the ideal that cultural history is ancillary to the complex history of freedoms. I also aim to write what I call “cultural etymology,” by which I designate a practice of excavating the present. The present is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, the place where most historical enquiry most urgently and frequently starts. I myself always start with the conditions of contemporary modernity, where “conditions” also designates pathology. Many cultural historians would describe their work as an act of discovery. My project is rather one of recovery, where one starts from the present and recovers immanent histories by which the present is understood, as if for the first time. As a cultural historian, I write as, and for, both scholar and citizen.To the scholar, my appeal is to write cultural history with long chronologies, as we try to evade the historiographical deformities imposed upon us by the standard periodic divisions of cultural history. To write either as “medievalist” or as “early modernist” is already to buy into many prejudicial presuppositions. The standard divisions of cultural history are designed so as neutralize most powerfully the interest of our fractured histories.As a citizen, I appeal not to the evangelical, since in my experience that reader judges only from their convictions. If any evangelical is prepared to engage with me, I will be delighted, but that has not been my experience with previous books. As a citizen, I appeal instead to the liberal. I ask her or him to understand the liberal tradition more deeply, as a precious but fragile product of history. As Liberalism is in retreat worldwide, liberals need to understand their opponents, and their intimate relation with their opponents. They need to understand that they, as liberals, can be just as intolerant as their evangelical opponents, and they need to understand Liberalism less as a belief system and more as an instrument for managing potentially violent belief systems.