In The Cross and Reaganomics, Eric R. Crouse, a professor of history at Tyndale University College, Toronto, explores how theologically and socially conservative Christians debated and defended the economic and foreign policies of the Reagan administration. Crouse sets out to answer the question, “who were these Christian defenders of Reagan?” (3). His answer is neither sociological nor transparently theological. Instead, he focuses most of his attention on the evangelical popular press and its engagement with politicians, pundits, and economists. By focusing narrowly on internal Christian debates over free market economics during the 1970s and 1980s, Crouse carves out a niche in the crowded space of recent studies of the rise of the Religious Right.

Through an introduction and six chapters, the text walks readers through a series of exchanges between Ronald Reagan's defenders and his critics. In the introduction, Crouse situates his text as a corrective to “the mainstream media,” which “viewed conservative Christianity through the prism of explosive social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and pornography” (11). Chapter 1 seeks to reorient readers to conservative Christians' sophisticated intellectual engagement with free market economics and their eventual conversion to Reagan's supply-side model. Crouse parses the difference between supply-side economics and various rival systems such as the monetarism of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and the Austrian economic school of Friedrich von Hayek. Supply-side economics, or Reaganomics, sought to create “additional wealth rather than the transfer of existing wealth to business owners” (31). Supply-sider efforts to lower obstacles to individual productivity and emphasize personal responsibility matched long-held Christian beliefs about self-transformation.

After laying the economic ground rules, chapters 2 and 3 outline tensions between Christian conservatives and Christian leftists, with each vying to claim a orthodox economic model. For Crouse Christian conservative is a broad category, encompassing “evangelicals, fundamentalists, conservative Protestants, conservative Catholics, Pentecostals, and other charismatic Christians” who “upheld capitalism and smaller government” (3). Crouse deploys Christian left to label any “socialist-leaning” Christian who fell to the theological or ideological left of the mainline Protestant churches (6). With these battle lines drawn, chapter 4 covers the economic recovery during Reagan's second term, while chapter 5 delves into the moral murkiness of Reagan-era military interventions in Central and South America. In the final chapter, Crouse triumphantly concludes that American Christian conservatives were not unthinking Reaganites, but rather clear-eyed pragmatists who rejected collectivism and regulation for the benefits of small government and the free market.

Despite the title, Reagan plays only a minor role in the text, popping up occasionally as movie star, candidate, and president. The real stars are the various debates between Christian conservatives and Christian leftists. Crouse does a service with his careful reading of journalistic articles and editorials in popular—and not so popular—sources in the evangelical and fundamentalist press. Publications such as John F. Alexander's The Other Side and Jim Wallis's Sojourners enter into heated polemics with Christianity Today and more ideologically-driven journals, including the libertarian The Individualist Review and The Freeman. The result is a compelling and complex series of exchanges over the failures and successes of free market economic theory. According to Crouse, the ignorant and “shrill” (52) Christian left eschewed reason and orthodoxy to instead rely on emotional stories to illustrate the perceived failures of Reaganomics. By juxtaposing hyperbolic statements from Sojourners or The Other Side with more clear-eyed assessments of market rationale from conservatives, Crouse intends to overthrow stereotypes of conservative Christians as ignorant rubes or blind agents of the Republican Party.

Although an engaging read, the book is a conceptual muddle. For example, while some observers might reasonably doubt the existence of a clear distinction between a Christian “left” and “right” and expect meticulous development of the point, Crouse simply assumes the binary and allows it to mobilize much of his narrative. The book also draws clear distinctions between elite “liberal” America—embodied most clearly in academia and the “mainstream media.” In this manner, Crouse still embraces a “culture war” historiographic paradigm that pits god-fearing, locally-oriented Christians against agents of a distant leviathan state. To make matters worse, Wallis, Alexander, and other so-called leftists are portrayed as simple-minded apologists of the welfare state—a real stretch for these fierce critics of American state power. Finally, the narrative lacks engagement with significant recent contributions in the field. Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton, 2010), Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), and similar works would have added nuance and historiographic depth to the book.

Conceptual reservations aside, by shifting attention away from abortion, political organizing, and controversies over cultural issues, Crouse offers a useful supplement to the literature that can be read alongside David R. Swartz's Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Crouse reminds readers that wages, income redistribution, and productive labor were as significant to many Christians as any of the hot-button social issues of the day. Even if the resulting debates undercut the author's neat parsing between the Christian right and left, his exposition is useful for illuminating the understudied relationship between popular economic theorizing and conservative Christian activism.