A flurry of recent scholarship has tried to locate the origins of the Religious Right. Darren Dochuk, for example, posits in From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservativism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) that the movement can be traced to immigrants from what he calls the “western South” to southern California in the 1940s and 1950s. In God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Daniel K. Williams argues that the origins of the movement extend at least as far back as the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and to the activism of such marginal figures as John R. Rice, “Fighting Bob” Shuler, and Carl McIntire.

Although neither book is without merit, the arguments are ultimately unpersuasive, which makes the appearance of Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right all the more important. J. Brooks Flippen, a historian at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, wisely confines his inquiry to the 1970s and to the tumultuous administration of Jimmy Carter, which, he says, coincided with a sea change in American attitudes about sexual mores and the nature of families.

Flippen opens with a description of the Washington for Jesus rally on April 29, 1980. By then, evangelicals, many of whom had supported Carter four years earlier, were exercised by “homosexuality, abortion, feminism, and what some termed ‘secular humanism’” (1–2). The author quickly steps back for a larger picture. “Separately,” he writes, “not one of these issues caused the Religious Right, but without them as a whole, without the issues of gender and sexuality, without the politics of family that exploded during the Carter era, the movement would not have flourished as it did” (19).

Not surprisingly, Flippen believes that Carter himself sowed the seeds of his undoing with his carefully calibrated statements on abortion, family, and sexuality during his quest for the presidency in 1976. His repeated protestation that he was “personally opposed” to abortion but that he would, as president, respect the law, for example, was enough to secure his election. But the changing politics surrounding the issue during the course of his presidency, especially the extraordinary success of Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in making abortion an evangelical issue by 1979, meant that Carter's earlier statement satisfied no one—neither the prochoice crowd nor the prolifers.

Flippen is at his best in unraveling the internal politics of the Carter administration and understanding its interactions with larger forces in the culture. In the early 1970s, for example, while Carter was governor of Georgia, support for the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution was safe political turf, and its proponents included such names as Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Wallace, and Robert Dole. During Carter's presidency, however, hard-right activists, including evangelicals (who had historically been in the vanguard of the women's rights movement), used the ERA as a wedge issue to organize what became the Religious Right and to deny Carter a second term. Similarly, support for gay rights enjoyed bipartisan (though not universal) support early in the 1970s; by the late 1970s, it had become a partisan issue, with Carter frantically—and unsuccessfully—seeking middle ground.

The author shows that Carter's own miscalculations contributed to the discontent of politically conservative evangelicals. The president turned down invitations to address groups like the National Religious Broadcasters and his own Southern Baptist Convention. Only belatedly did he hire a staffer, Robert Maddox, to nurture ties to religious groups. By then, however, it was too late. Despite Maddox's frenzied efforts, Carter had lost his evangelical base. A primary challenge from Edward Kennedy forced Carter even farther to the left and further imperiled his chances for reelection.

For Flippen, any lingering questions about Carter's political fate evaporated as the 1980 White House Conference on Families spiraled out of control. The author spends a good deal of time parsing out the proceedings, but what was supposed to be a substantive conversation about family policy degenerated into a partisan food fight, with conservative evangelicals staging a long-planned walkout exquisitely timed for maximum publicity.

Flippen offers a compelling narrative, and it is clearly based on prodigious research, though the book is not without its flaws. The author consistently, and unaccountably, confuses the nouns “evangelical” and “evangelist,” and he misstates an alarming number of names: John Conlan is “James”; Andrew Greeley is “William”; V. Gene Robinson is “Gene V.”; Wallie Amos Criswell is “D. A. Criswell”; Susan Friend Harding is “Susan Field Harding.” He also writes that the Southern Baptist Convention “defeated a statement of condemnation” of abortion in 1971 and 1974, when in fact the Convention endorsed the legalization of abortion in 1971 and reaffirmed that resolution in 1974 and again in 1976 (42).

The epilogue places the rise of the Religious Right in perspective. Flippen shows that, despite its herculean efforts on behalf of the Republican candidate in 1980, the Religious Right received little in return. As Paul Weyrich, architect of the movement, lamented, leaders of the Religious Right were so dazzled by access to the White House that they neglected to press for the issues they had used to forge the movement in the first place. Their rise to political power, as Flippen ably demonstrates, came at the expense of one of their own, an evangelical caught in the whipsaw of changing norms, sexual politics, and a newly mobilized evangelical conservativism. “A true man of faith,” Flippen concludes, “Carter had rallied the faithful only to learn that religious diversity ensured partisan discord” (349).