Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore Finbarr Curtis Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. Edited by Andrew S. Moore. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 197. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7434-0.) The proclamation of 1976 as the "Year of the Evangelical" in the United States served as the capstone of a conventional narrative in which theologically conservative Protestants disappeared from American politics in the [End Page 425] mid-twentieth century only to reemerge in the 1970s with the uncomfortable pairing of the presidency of Jimmy Carter and the rise of the religious Right. Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump brings together ten insightful essays on a range of themes that consider what happened in the four decades between President Carter and President Donald J. Trump. The book uses the year of the evangelical as an organizing theme, but several contributors challenge the conventional narrative. The first essay, by Randall J. Stephens, discusses how opposition to communism drew evangelicals into politics long before the 1970s. This activism did have some features of disengagement as it was a kind of anti-politics that saw "godless communism" as a pervasive feature of an expanding liberal welfare state that needed to be curtailed to protect Christian liberty (p. 17). In several chapters that explore the intersection of racial and religious identities, suspicions of an expansion of government overlapped with suspicions of the expansion of civil rights. Dan Wells's perceptive essay on Eldridge Cleaver demonstrates the whiteness of evangelicalism, as the former Black Panther was expected to speak in a white idiom that disavowed his radical past. Opposition to civil rights is central to Randall Balmer's chapter on the changing makeup of anti-abortion activism over the course of the 1970s. In Balmer's analysis, abortion, a largely Catholic issue at the time of Roe v. Wade (1973), became a rallying point for conservative Protestants who were upset at desegregated schools but needed a more respectable means to mobilize support for racialized family values. There is some divergence among the essays about how early evangelical opposition to abortion took shape. Balmer focuses on the coalition-building project of political activists. Essays by Allison Vander Broek and Daniel K. Williams suggest that while Catholics were the most visible and organized in their opposition to abortion, there was a latent theological appeal that fit with conservative Protestant attitudes toward sexuality. The book does not promise complete coverage of the years from Carter to Trump, but one notable feature is that Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Trump capture the most attention. Jeff Frederick sees the rise of Trumpism as the loss of what he calls Carter's "evangelical political authenticity" (p. 140). J. Brooks Flippen's essay on Reagan considers the irony of how a divorced actor with sporadic church attendance became the exemplar of the Christian Right. R. Ward Holder shares Frederick's view that enthusiasm for Trump represents a betrayal of evangelical principles. These chapters tell a declension story that moves from a sincere Carter, to a pragmatic compromise with Reagan, to a full-blown abandonment of moral character with Trump. There is some confusion that extends beyond this book over whether the use of the label evangelical describes a group of people or whether it is a rhetorical project to invent a group of people. In the former, evangelical describes a theological orientation that includes diverse racial, political, and religious groups as well as a set of principles used to applaud the sincerity of Carter and lament the immorality of Trump. In the latter, this rhetorical project has political, national, and racial dimensions that are internal to the claim of working within a conservative Protestant tradition. Hannah Dick most clearly articulates the latter position with her assertion that white evangelicalism is simultaneously [End Page 426] "a cultural framework, a religious affiliation, a class-based category, and a political orientation" (p. 174). One question the book raises is whether someone like Carter represents authentic evangelicalism or whether he is an idiosyncratic figure who represents the theological ideals of evangelical academics...