W. A. Criswell envisioned the emergence of a new conservatism that would become the new religious right. In his most famous and revealing sermons, including "Segregation and Society" (1956) and "The Church of the Open Door" (1968), Criswell proclaimed that opposition to evangelical truths sprang from two sources: Darwin's Origin of Species and the vast inroads of German higher criticism and rationalism that explained away the miracles of the bible and reduced them to humanistic fiction. Towns's book examines selected speeches from 1956 to 2002, revisiting events that provoked the rhetorical situations of the era and exploring speaker-leader propositions and perspectives. Criswell's leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention was dynamic and unifying, and his paradigm for social responsibility in his preaching, speaking and writing can best be entailed in the following encapsulation: "Be anchored to the book and geared to the times."

Nations as well as individuals are fashioned by their ideals. When the ideal of Sparta was grace and symmetry of body, then she produced the most splendid physique that has ever graced the earth. When her ideal fell to that of mere brute force, then her civilization was "red with the fierce fires' of animal passion." When the ideal of Athens was philosophy, there was produced her Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. When the ideal of France was glory, then "glory sat with the eagles on her victorious banners." But when her ideal was agnosticism, then anarchy took the place of government; patriots were exiled and murdered; scholars were proscribed and banished; licentiousness held high carnival in her first homes, and lovely womanhood was degraded and despised.