One of the most helpful trends in the historiography of American religions is the identification of evangelicalism with Christian nationalism. Longstanding attempts to understand evangelicals exclusively through a theological lens have explained little and obscured much. From the earliest years of the young republic, evangelicalism has been made legible by a conviction that America was not but should be a Christian nation with a Christian leadership (Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation [University of Chicago Press, 2012]). Christian Americanism has grown stronger, whiter, and more partisan since the 1960s. As Seth Perry and Andrew Whitehead documented in Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020), Christian nationalism is now the main fault line in American politics. The Republican-Fox News evangelicals that animate Christian nationalism today remain determined influencers in public life, from racial and gender troubles (Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation [W. W. Norton, 2020]) to the criminal justice system (Aaron Griffith, God's Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America [Harvard University Press, 2020]). They also try to cancel other older American Christianities, including cosmopolitan evangelicalism (David Swartz, Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity [Oxford University Press, 2020]).

Lauren R. Kerby has done a great service in adding an ethnographic dimension to our knowledge of Christian nationalism. In Saving History, Kerby offers a clear, detailed, and disturbing look into the lived religion of “Christian heritage” tours in Washington, D.C. These very expensive, predominantly white multi-hour and multiday excursions are exercises in what the author terms “restorative nostalgia” (118). Heritage, she notes, is the selective manipulation of artifacts in order to reinforce a prepackaged, preconceived worldview. In the tours, George Washington is reimagined as George Whitefield, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln become better Bible believers than Rosa Parks, and the Barbary pirates are transformed into al-Qaeda and ISIS. The tours are not really about American history, in other words, but rather about who will control the country's present and future. “They turn to the past to legitimize the power or privilege they seek to claim,” Kerby concludes of her subjects (24).

Kerby identifies four dynamic, intertwined roles that tourists and their guides play within an insider-outsider framework. Most Christian heritage trekkers have been prepped in advance by the writings of Religious Right leaders, Kirk Cameron documentaries such as Monumental, Bob Jones University history textbooks, and the multimedia empire of the omnipresent David Barton. Tourists have done their homework, and they have learned that white evangelicals were the original insiders. They are one with the Founders, and most Founders are one of them. Thus, when a male white evangelical burns his hand when touching the Washington monument, it is not because of the oppressive D.C. sun but instead it is evidence of God's mystical presence. Indeed, the entire beltway is enchanted for those with the eyes to see, ears to hear, and hands to feel. Well, not everywhere. The National Cathedral, an Episcopal church that marries same-sex couples, is too gaudy for most tourists, and many tour guides do not even stop there. Instead, Christian heritage tours frequent the National Archives to visit the sacred texts of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Both, however, are subservient to the Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress, from which every blessing of American freedom flows.

So with the material evidence of a Christian founding “hiding in plain sight” (96), why must white evangelicals pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for a professional tour? The main appeal of a Barton, a Cameron, or a Mark the tour guide is in their activation of a shared sense of religio-racial grievance. If white evangelicals were once the Founders, now they are the exiles and victims of a liberal secularist conspiracy. Tourists’ complaints about nominal Christian inscriptions being removed from memorials, Christian statues being shuttered in storage, and “biased” official D.C. tour guides talking too much about civil rights leaders underscore white evangelicals’ own worries about being disrespected in public schools and mainstream media and facing threats from liberal bosses, the Supreme Court, Sharia law, and Common Core. Don't let all the laughter at liberal “ignorance” on the tours fool you, Kerby says—white Christians are scared for themselves and for their country.

Yet the heritage tours remind white evangelicals that their outsider status is unnatural. If the tours are a form of group therapy, they are also a “boot camp” (129) and political interest group mobilization. White Republican evangelical tourists are not on a “vacation” but rather are in an “initiation.” They are called to become saviors of American destiny through conservation of the nation's godly past (127). Like the fallen soldiers at Arlington and elsewhere that the tours do so much to valorize, Christian heritage tourists must “sacrifice” themselves to become aggressive apostles of Christian nationalism.

Kerby is compelling in her argument that white evangelicals are “political shape-shifters, playing whichever part grants them the most power in a given situation” (6). One wishes to have heard more from the tourists she interviewed about how they specifically would like to see Christianity instituted (or reestablished, they might say) into American government and society. Tourists, after all, have always been a vital part of any imperial project. Nevertheless, even if white evangelicals gained the whole world, it is hard to imagine them surrendering their souls—their persecution complexes—no matter how many rights they restrict, history textbooks they rewrite, and white Christians they elect to high office. Kerby is to be commended for persevering in study of persons who single her out to the group like this: “This is Lauren. She's from Boston. She's not a terrorist” (3).