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Beginning with the era of Jonathan Edwards and the first Great Awakening, the American Reformed tradition had been struggling to integrate revivalism into its understanding of election. The Calvinist model of family covenant baptism and subsequent confirmation suffered alterations to various degrees. While teaching his children a Calvinist Christianity, Lyman Beecher also embraced revivalism, watching anxiously over his children to see if they underwent a sufficiently cataclysmic personal conversion. His brood of twelve may have known nothing but Christ and Him crucified from their first breaths, but Lyman Beecher was convinced that they must experience themselves as desperate sinners and reach out to an unknown God.
His son Henry Ward Beecher went through the ups and downs of many revivalist children. In his youth he had several encounters with the Almighty dramatic enough to convince him for a time that his soul had been turned permanently toward paradise. But when the ecstasy of these experiences faded and he found his behavior succumbing to old wayward patterns, he began to doubt once more. Applegate shows how the tensions of Calvinism and revivalism abraded Henry's temperament. He wanted to be sunny, to enjoy life. His sensuous nature was starved by a Calvinism that went so far as to eschew the festivities of Christmas.
Applegate takes it for granted that the dour manners of Old School Calvinism in early 19th-century New England are direct reflections of the "cruel, convoluted logic" of such doctrines as original sin. She can hardly wait, it sometimes seems, for Henry to throw this over and identify religion with noble sentiments. Indeed, her point-of-view as biographer seems so much the product of theological liberalism that her book is tainted with liberalism's most insufferable habit: the assumption that traditional doctrines are so passe that they are best passed over with a wink and a nod. This stance typically represents itself as courtesy, but it originates in conceit and clothes itself in decorous condescension.
 In the case of Applegate's otherwise fine biography, this presumption displaces and then leaves in neglect the drama of Beecher's interior life. Applegate's writing is at its best when she settles into historical narrative. Her recitation of the Civil War years, in which she uses Beecher largely as a lens on the great events of his time, is compelling. But the narrative material too often becomes a scrim shielding Beecher from close inspection. The reader will learn more about what Beecher actually thought in the five pages George Marsden devotes to Beecher in his indispensable Fundamentalism and American Culture.
Much against Applegate's intent, we are left to conclude—as did many of Beecher's contemporaries—that his liberalism and his perfidy went hand in hand. E.L. Godkin, who wrote for The Nation, commented on Beecher's theology: "As his God is wholly love and is no respecter of persons, attempts to imitate Him result simply in the deliberate and systematic suppression of all discrimination touching character and conduct, and the cultivation of a purely emotional theology, made up, not of opinions, but of sights and tears and aspirations and unlimited good-nature. As God loves and forgives the sinner, why should not we?"
Applegate wants to maintain Beecher's status as a liberal hero. She defends him on the grounds that the great strength of his emotional candor—the driving force behind his spellbinding powers as an orator—unhappily had its dark side in his inability to resist having sex with his friends' wives:
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