Abstract
With Liberty and Justice for Whom? first took shape as a doctoral dissertation under Peter Berger. The book reflects that start with careful documentation and a sociological perspective. In a debate that is often acrimonious, Gay is scrupulously fair to each examined author. His purpose is "to get to the bottom of the evangelical debate over capitalism, an attempt to determine just how it is that evangelicals, who share a fairly broad range of theological commitments, can have arrived at such radically different assessments of one of the more central institutions in modern American society." After an extensive analysis of scholars under three major headings of left, right, and center, he concludes that evangelical scholars have to various degrees been co-opted by the class conflicts of wider society. For many, their perspectives have been shaped and polarized more by the secular discussion than by the Christian tradition.