A Ithough evangelicals enjoyed respect and leadership in American society in the decades before the Civil War, their fortunes declined precipitately in the wake of the industrialism, modernism, and secularism of the next half-century. By the 1920s evangelicals felt like an embattled minority within a largely unbelieving culture, and perceived that history was very much out of their control.

Douglas W. Frank examines the spiritual significance of these events by placing them against a biblical understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He sees in the confidence and self-congratulation of the turn-of-the-century evangelicals a portrait of the spiritually rich of the Bible who must lose their riches before they can come to know God truly.

Frank discusses in detail three of the most popular responses of American evangelicals to their loss of power: dispensational premillenialism, the "victorious life" theology, and the popular revivalism of Billy Sunday. Each of these, he believes, betrayed harmful misuse of the gospel.

Less than Conquerors is a call to replace the blurred and self-serving gospel of a besieged subculture with the genuine gospel of Jesus Christ.