CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM: A Reading List

I grew up in Yorba Linda, California, in the neighbourhood of the Ronald Reagan Library. There was a time when I didn’t really even know who Reagan was, that’s how disconnected I was from politics. My parents are immigrants. They were too busy trying not to get evicted from the country to discuss political theory with us. It was like we were unwanted guests in another person’s home. Our job was to keep our heads down and make money, be productive and go unnoticed. So if it wasn’t going to be on the AP Test, I did not care, and even then, I only cared long enough to get a good grade. Of course, AP Tests were almost 2 decades ago, now. Since then, I’ve grown up a little.

Going to graduate school, watching Donald Trump get elected, questioning the evangelical tradition I was raised in that ridiculed Black Lives Matter and persecuted LGBTQ people, made me reflect and think. I guess questioning is normal to growing up. I used to feel full of rightness, confident in having answers given to me by my church, family, and culture. I am embarrassed to say it took me a long time to question my rightness. Since then, I’ve had so many amazing conversations about the issue of what is happening to our faith over on my Instagram, but they are usually private direct messages, heavy with heartbreak and confusion. I can’t help but think it is heavily tied to the wave of toxic church implosions and the rise of “orphaned believers”.

The more I think about it, the more bewildered I become. Why do evangelicals care more about capitalism than mercy or grace? Why do politicians adopt evangelical culture as a campaign strategy? What does white fragility have to do with a Jewish faith tradition from thousands of years ago? I think it is past time we question the cultural dominance of Christian faith in American culture. Guns and individual freedom, colonialism and wealth is anathema to the call of Christ to lay down our lives for others, to become all things to all men, to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbours more than we love ourselves, to trade places with the enslaved that they might be free.

Maybe one day I’ll get to do doctoral research on this, but until then, I’m just reading and thinking. I’ve linked the books to Barnes & Noble, and they are not affiliate links. So, here are some books I’ve read and highly recommend if you are interested. (I put an * next to the ones that are at the intersection of political economy and religion because they’re my favourite. Chef’s Kiss*)

• God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon by Kevin Coe and David Domke

  • Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the authors show that U.S. politics today is defined by a calculated, deliberate, and partisan use of faith that is unprecedented in modern politics.

• Protestantism in America by Randall Balmer

  • Protestantism's history and its interaction with American culture has shaped such facets of the wider society as healthcare, welfare, labor relations, gender roles, and political discourse.

• One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse*

  • A history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era. We're often told that the United States is a Christian nation, but Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 who inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto.

• Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal by Kim Phillips-Fein*

  • An economic history of the birth of the modern conservative agenda. In the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal, corporate giants like the National Association of Manufacturers and the chemicals company DuPont, campaigned against the New Deal and championed neoliberal/ free-market thinkers Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who promoted a conservative "ideological revolution". These men organised a political force to preserve their profit margins and the “American way” of doing business, and spent decades working to repeal the New Deal from the end of WWII to Reagan's election as president.

• Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper*

  • In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues?

• God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right by Daniel K. Williams

  • When the Christian Right burst onto the scene in the late 1970s, many political observers were shocked. But, as God's Own Party demonstrates, they shouldn't have been. The Christian Right goes back much farther than most journalists, political scientists, and historians realize. Relying on extensive archival and primary source research, Daniel K. Williams presents the first comprehensive history of the Christian Right, uncovering how evangelicals came to see the Republican Party as the vehicle through which they could reclaim America as a Christian nation.

• God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush by Randall Balmer

  • How did we go from John F. Kennedy declaring that religion should play no role in the elections to Bush saying, "I believe that God wants me to be president"? From Kennedy's 1960 speech that proposed an almost absolute wall between American political and religious life to the soft religiosity of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; from Bill Clinton's covert way of turning religion into a non-issue to George W. Bush's overt Christian messages, Balmer reveals the role religion has played in the personal and political lives of these American presidents.

• The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark A. Noll

  • Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis. Noll, who writes as a Christian and used to teach at Wheaton College, examines writings about slavery and race from Americans, both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada.

• The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” by William Arnal & Russel McCutcheon

  • A collection of essays that question what "religion"—word and concept—accomplishes for those who employ it, whether at the popular, political, or scholarly level. The focus here is on the dividing of the world between religious and political, church and state, sacred and profane.

• Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump by John Fea

  • Historian John Fea explains how we have arrived at this unprecedented moment in American politics. An evangelical Christian himself, Fea argues that the embrace of Donald Trump is the logical outcome of a long-standing evangelical approach to public life defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for an American past. 

• The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances Fitzgerald

  • A history of the Evangelical movement in America—from the Puritan era to the 2016 election, from 19th century Great Awakenings to Jerry Falwell, and other southern televangelists, such as Pat Robertson, who formed the Christian right.

• Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right by Anne Nelson*

  • In 1981, after Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. They called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Tim LaHaye to Kellyanne Conway, to the elite DeVos and Mercer families. Nelson reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.

• The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet*

  • Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world.

• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart

  • The Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations; following the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations.

• Faith & Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush by Gary Scott Smith

  • Religion has been a major part of the presidency since George Washington's first inaugural address. Smith takes a sweeping look at the role religion has played in presidential politics and policies. Drawing on extensive archival research, Smith paints compelling portraits of the religious lives and presidencies of eleven chief executives for whom religion was particularly important. Faith and the Presidency meticulously examines what each of its subjects believed and how those beliefs shaped their presidencies and, in turn, the course of our history.