My wife, mildly depressed and generally aggravated at the time, vividly recalls driving her Volkswagen Karmann Ghia to her New Jersey high school teaching job the day after Richard Nixon carried forty-nine states and obliterated George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Her mood brightened somewhat when her favorite disc jockey, working the morning shift on a progressive rock station in New York City, played the 1967 Bee Gees hit “Massachusetts.” He spun this record in tribute to the one state that McGovern managed to carry, and it contained this memorable line: “And the lights all went out in Massachusetts the day I left her standing on her own.” Substitute the phrase “liberal mainline Christianity” for “Massachusetts,” and you begin to get a sense of the argument in this fine and insightful book by Mark Lempke.

George McGovern grew up as a preacher's kid. His father, a sternly patriarchal Wesleyan minister rooted in the Holiness movement, provided his children with a strict moral upbringing in the prairie town of Mitchell, South Dakota. George internalized the Holiness commitment to transforming the world for Jesus even as he rejected the tradition's hellfire preaching style and emphasis on born-again conversions. Rather, he gravitated toward social gospel theology with its commitment to serving the poor, reforming secular institutions, promoting justice, and bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth. McGovern's collegiate experience at Dakota Wesleyan University, as well as his seminary training at the liberal Garrett Theological Seminary, deepened these beliefs and reaffirmed his desire to do good works. He found special inspiration in the biblical prophets Amos and Hosea with their righteous condemnation of the powerful, and he gravitated toward personalist theologians who believed that a self-limiting deity relied on humans with free will to create a moral society. Though he quickly realized that he did not possess a call to the ministry, McGovern's religious faith deeply informed his subsequent political career.

Lempke combines extensive archival research with personal interviews and published sources to demonstrate the ways in which progressive Christian values permeated his subject's public life. McGovern's political program emphasized peace, social justice, and a commitment to improving the lives of marginalized Americans. He often delivered his message in a prophetic preaching style that challenged voters to confront their own complicity in an unjust system. His rhetoric contained numerous biblical allusions and his commitment to Christian humanism caused him to embrace such causes as world hunger. He moved easily in National Council of Churches (NCC) circles. Many liberal mainliners, including especially the Methodist bishop and civil rights leader James Armstrong, who receives extended treatment here, became trusted friends. Perhaps not surprisingly, an influential group of established clergy formed Religious Leaders for McGovern (RLFM) to support his presidential bid, and he also remained close to the organization Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV). Unfortunately for McGovern, however, mainline liberal Protestantism appeared on the verge of collapse in 1972. Liberal church leaders increasingly became estranged from their more conservative congregations, who renounced a politically active clergy. Mainline membership rolls dramatically declined. NCC executives no longer enjoyed high public profiles or easy access to social and political elites. A thriving evangelical movement that stressed personal responsibility and establishing a relationship with God rather than prophetically critiquing social institutions augured the rise of a politically potent religious Right in the coming decades.

Though mainline decline may constitute a familiar religious history theme, Lempke also demonstrates that the McGovern campaign exerted a surprising impact on evangelicalism. A small group of younger evangelicals, energized by the civil rights and anti-war movements especially, questioned the uncritical embrace of laissez-faire capitalism and American militarism by such prominent spokesmen as Billy Graham. Some of these rebels administered inner city ministries, others pursued academic careers in such Reformed intellectual centers as Wheaton and Calvin College, and a few emerged out of the student protest movements of the 1960s. Ronald J. Sider, whose subsequent career reflected a close affinity with the Christian left, founded the organization Evangelicals for McGovern (EFM) in an effort to unite this disparate group of socially concerned evangelicals. On one level, EFM proved to be a spectacular failure. McGovern won over few evangelical voters, who remained suspicious of his social gospel roots and his reluctance to discuss the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus. The candidate's appearance at Wheaton College turned disastrous as he was snubbed by the administration, failed to connect with students, and made numerous painful missteps in his prepared remarks. Yet, on another level, EFM had profound long-term implications. It brought together for the first time a remarkable group of religious leaders, including Sider, Jim Wallis, Richard Mouw, and John Alexander, who would sharpen their prophetic critiques of mainstream American culture over the next several decades. They ultimately would challenge the political hegemony of the Moral Majority and similar organizations, providing more socially conscious evangelicals with alternative ways of living out their faith. Though they lost their short-term political battle, these progressive voices remain a significant force within North American evangelicalism.

Lempke richly weaves all of these stories together in a concise and readable manner. He also effectively makes the case that even political biographers, who often view their subjects through a purely secular lens, need to pay more attention to their subjects' spiritual lives. Thomas Knock's The Rise of a Prairie Statesman (Princeton University Press, 2016), for example, constitutes the major biographical treatment of McGovern. Knock spends only two pages on his subject's seminary training, never references his religious network, and misses the significance of his prophetic approach. Lempke's book stands nicely alongside Randall Balmer's Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (Basic, 2014), demonstrating how faith informed two significant late twentieth-century politicians. Although he recognizes that even prophets often need to compromise in the interest of practical politics, Lempke convincingly demonstrates that religion mattered. 1972, it turns out, proved to be a transformative year for both American political and religious history.