This book tells a surprising and disturbing origin story. The commonly accepted story of the rise of the Religious Right in the U.S. goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The problem is it simply isn't true. Largely ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s, evangelical leaders were first mobilized not by Roe v. Wade but by Green v. Connally, a lesser-known court decision in 1971 that threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions-of which there were several in the world of Christian education. When the most notorious, Bob Jones University, had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976, evangelicalism was galvanized politically and brought into the Republican Party's fold. Only later, when a more palatable issue was needed to cover for an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era, was the moral crusade against abortion made the central issue of the Religious Right movement. In this expanded argument from his 2014 Politico article the author explains the convoluted historical trajectory that began with American evangelicalism as a progressive force opposed to slavery, then later an isolated apolitical movement in the mid-20th century, through the 2016 election in which 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. The pivotal point was in the late 1970s when American evangelicals turned against Jimmy Carter-despite being one of their own, a professed born-again
Christian-in favor of the Republican Party, which found it could win their loyalty through the espousal of a single issue. With the implications of this alliance still unfolding, the account uncovers the roots of evangelical watchwords like religious freedom
and family values
while getting to the truth of how this movement began-explaining, in part, what it has become.