Protestants and American Conservativism: A Short History comes swaddled in lavish praise from estimable scholars such as Darren Dochuk, Mark Noll, and Daniel K. Williams. This is indeed a worthy book, albeit one that manages somehow to be both ambitious and myopic.

Gillis J. Harp's focus is Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, and he is careful to stipulate that his use of the terms conservative and conservativism “apply only to a social or political position, rather than to denote theological or doctrinal orthodoxy” (7). The author's definition rambles a bit, but conservativism appears to connote a respect for tradition, a defense of established institutions, a belief in human imperfection, the importance of the family and traditional gender roles, accepting the legitimacy of elites, a resistance to the redistribution of wealth, and “a commitment to the social utility of religion for how it ‘legitimates the state’ and promotes civil order” (6).

For the colonial period, Harp focuses on Virginia and Puritan Massachusetts, although he arguably would have a stronger case in New Netherland and New York, where the Dutch Reformed clergy unabashedly supported the merchant class and the political order. The identification of Puritans as conservative conforms to popular stereotypes, but Puritanism in historical context was anything but conservative, as William Laud and Charles I learned back in England. Puritans in New England wanted not merely to reform but to discard existing institutions, both political and ecclesiastical. When Harp comes to the contestation over the Great Awakening, for and against, he wants to have it both ways, concluding: “both groups were essentially conservative” (27).

Loyalists during the American Revolution were conservative, although that ignores a larger number of Protestants who embraced rebellion as the “sacred cause of liberty.” Harp embarks on the nineteenth century with blinders firmly in place. Although no one would contest that Charles Hodge and Princeton Theological Seminary “combined a Whiggish conservatism with Reformed theology,” the author confines Charles Grandison Finney, without question the most influential evangelical of the nineteenth century, to a single sentence, allowing only that Finney “saw the church as a great engine of social reform” (71).

Well, yes. While the Princetonians and other conservatives were defending slavery and seeking to designate the United States as a Christian nation, Finney and his allies were agitating for reforms in gender roles, education, criminal justice, and economics. What would Harp do with Finney's excoriations of free-market capitalism, as when he declared that “the maxims of business generally current among business men, and the habits and usages of business men, are all based upon supreme selfishness”? Or what would he say to Elias Smith's declaration that Jesus Christ came to put “an end to unjust inequality in the world”?

Moving into the Gilded Age, Harp designates both Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks as conservatives, and he notes that many Protestants decried the growing incidence of divorce and sought to retain prayer and Bible reading in public education. The author takes a nuanced view of both William Jennings Bryan and J. Gresham Machen. “In the first half of the twentieth century,” he writes, “Protestant belief played a more restricted role in the thinking of jurists and other political conservatives as they strove to counter Progressivism” (159).

In the post-World War II era, Harp creatively juxtaposes Carl F. H. Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism with Richard Weaver's Ideas have Consequences to form the intellectual-theological foundation for the resurgence of conservativism, both political and theological, giving rise to the Religious Right in the late 1970s. J. Howard Pew, James Fifield, and Billy James Hargis also make appearances, with the latter declaring that “there is a strong scriptural basis for the position taken by the political conservative” (181). Anticommunism simmered beneath the surface, including “the ex-patriot [sic] Australian Baptist Fred Schwarz” (182).

Unsurprisingly, given the author's neglect of Finney, Harp ignores the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern completely, and Jimmy Carter (a conservative in many ways) receives only glancing attention. Harp uncritically embraces the abortion myth, the fiction that evangelicals mobilized politically in response to the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. He dates the formation of Moral Majority to both 1978 and 1979 (the latter is correct), but he astutely says that Ronald Reagan's “nostalgic invocations of a simpler American past and criticism of the cultural legacy of the 1960s attracted many Protestant conservatives” (198). While the author allows that “some journalists have exaggerated the influence of Reconstructionists,” Harp identifies Rousas John Rushdoony and Francis A. Schaeffer as something akin to the intellectual godfathers of the Religious Right (204).

Protestants and American Conservativism is an impressive work of intellectual history, a book that showcases the author's prodigious skills as a researcher. We can only hope that Harp will turn his sights to a complementary volume demonstrating the ties between Protestantism and liberal ideas throughout American history, a book of equal or greater length.