Crawford Gribben's Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest examines a small but influential part of the Christian Right: Christian Reconstruction. Reconstructionists seek to remake American society along “Biblical lines,” which they define as economic libertarianism combined with strict social conservatism (in some versions of Reconstruction, this includes making homosexuality a capital crime). Gribben argues their agenda of “survival, resistance, and reconstruction” has supplanted older forms of evangelical activism based on traditional political organizing.

Gribben, a historian at Queen's University Belfast, is not the first scholar to explore Christian Reconstruction. Michael McVicar's Christian Reconstruction provides a scholarly biography of R.J. Rushdoony, the theologian whose ideas undergird the movement, while Julie J. Ingersoll's Building God's Kingdom gives a broad overview of Reconstruction. Gribben differentiates himself from earlier scholarship in two ways. First, he emphasizes that the movement is not dead. He contends that it remains a vital, even growing, influence on American evangelicalism. Second, he gives his account a geographic focus: the “American Redoubt,” a chunk of the Pacific Northwest that is home to many Reconstructionists. Survival and Resistance pays particular attention to Moscow, Idaho, where the pastor Doug Wilson leads a sizable Reconstructionist community centered around Christ Church and New Saint Andrews College.

This book offers what Gribben calls a “social history of theological ideas” that “draws upon ethnographic and literary critical approaches” [ix]. In practice, this means focusing on the rhetoric of Christian Reconstruction. And the movement has no shortage of rhetoric: Doug Wilson alone has published dozens of books. Survival and Resistance is thus best understood as a study of a “community of discourse” rather than a social history of the American Redoubt.

Gribben does an excellent job unpacking the language of Reconstruction, starting with the work of R.J. Rushdoony. Unlike many evangelical Protestants, Rushdoony was a postmillennialist rather than a premillennialist. He believed that the perfect society would not be ushered in by the return of Jesus Christ; rather, it had to be built by humans. But before that could happen, the old order had to collapse. Consequently, Rushdoony predicted an imminent social (rather than religious) apocalypse, marked by global war and economic crises. He found the prospect exciting. The end times would be a “glorious time to be alive,” at least for those who shared his dream of building a theocratic order [138]. The remainder of Survival and Resistance deals with the efforts of Reconstructionists to determine what this theocracy would look like. The book is particularly good when discussing Reconstructionist media. As Gribben notes, the movement's ideologues have created an “imagined community” sustained by books, blogs, and podcasts.

As Gribben notes, many Reconstructionists vehemently deny that they are a repackaged version of the Christian Right. They insist that they have grown disillusioned with formal politics and are now more interested in shaping America's culture than in making its laws. In this telling, the failures of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson led to the rise of Doug Wilson. One of the key contributions of Survival and Resistance is that it looks beyond this explicit disavowal of politics to show a more complex reality. Most Reconstructionists distinguish their work from Christian Coalition-style activism, but their ideas are political, nonetheless. As Wilson himself put it: “We have no political agenda, but we most certainly have an agenda for politics.” [75] And he and his allies have not hesitated to flex their political muscle in Idaho.

So what actually happened when the Reconstructionists came to the Pacific Northwest? Here, the book is somewhat disappointing. It never truly settles on a topic, shifting between a broad survey of Reconstruction and a focused examination of the American Redoubt. Given that it has only 149 pages of text, this means we get only brief details about day-to-day life in the Redoubt. Nor does the book give us a sense of the size of this community or the kind of people who live there. Gribben says that the Reconstructionists include “black and white, advocates of racial segregation, members of mixed-race families, and—to my surprise—segregationists who found fellowship in mixed-race congregations.” [27] But this observation, while striking, seems to be based on impressions rather than on a close study of demographics.

The issue of racism also needs further exploration. Gribben does not ignore this subject. He notes that “the racism that exists in the Redoubt is often explicit.” [28] But he also wants to push back against critics of Christian Reconstruction who have sought to link the movement to the white supremacist militias that also inhabit the American Redoubt. The desire to understand, rather than simply condemn, is admirable, but it means the book occasionally passes too quickly over the racially charged language of Reconstructionists: complaints about failing public schools, rising crime rates, and “lazy” welfare recipients.

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America should not be taken as the last word on Christian Reconstruction, but it is still an important book. Its brevity and clarity would make it a useful text for undergraduates. Specialists in the Christian Right will find it helpful, especially for its discussion of Doug Wilson and his institutional empire.