This edited collection highlights transdisciplinary research on religion and politics in the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century United States. It grew out of a 2017 conference on “Jimmy Carter and the ‘Year of the Evangelical’ Revisited,” held at Saint Anselm College.
The volume consists of nine essays and an introduction written by senior and emerging scholars working in multiple disciplinary frameworks; the breadth in approach is a strength of the collection. Together, the contributors reassess not only Time magazine's famous declaration of 1976 as the “year of the evangelical,” but also the subsequent half century of the Religious Right. They challenge some popular myths, including the supposedly apolitical evangelical era between the Scopes trial and Roe v. Wade, the false claim that Roe was the catalyst for concerted political efforts in the 1970s (it was tied at least as closely to resisting IRS enforcement of desegregation mandates for private religious schools), and the journalistic conventional wisdom that Donald Trump's candidacy created an evangelical schism during the 2016 election. These brief essays do a good job of establishing some key historiographical consensus points and guiding the way toward deeper reading on relevant topics, such as the anti-abortion movement, anti-communism, and the role of segregation and race in the rise of white evangelical political power.
Gender is the clear gap in this collection. While several essays add to the increasing historical literature on the anti-abortion movement in the 1970s, other issues related to gender and sexuality during this era are conspicuously missing. Aside from brief references to patriarchy and Trump's strong-man leadership style, this collection fails to reckon with the importance of (re)asserting heteropatriarchy amid feminist and gay rights movements as a foundational value for the Religious Right.
Unsurprisingly, given the timing of the inciting conference, there are illuminating essays here on Trump's 2016 election, with the consensus being that the support among white evangelicals was not as hypocritical or contradictory as it is often depicted because the racism and authoritarianism underlying his appeal fit within the history of the Religious Right. However, Jeff Frederick argues that white evangelicals have suffered from a crisis of credibility, as a result of their increasing politicization and embrace of Ronald Reagan and Trump over authentic evangelicals such as Carter.
Overall, despite limitations, this is a strong collection for those wanting to understand how our current political era connects to a broader context.
