Evangelical Politics

How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate's staunchest supporters? Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last 75 years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.

In Shepherds for Sale, Megan Basham of the Daily Wire documents how progressive powerbrokers—from George Soros, to the founder of eBay, to former members of the Obama administration—set out to change the American church. Their goal: to co-opt evangelicals for political purposes.

A generation of young Christians are weary of the political legacy they've inherited and are hungry for a better approach. They're tired of seeing their faith tied to political battles they didn't start, and they're frustrated with leaders they thought they could trust. Kaitlyn Schiess grew up in this landscape and understands it from the inside. In The Liturgy of Politics, Schiess shows that the church's politics are shaped by its habits and practices, even when it's unaware of them.

Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for—and finding—more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers” dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.

"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." So begins this award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement by one of evangelicalism's most respected historians.

In 2016, writer and filmmaker Ben Howe found himself disillusioned with the religious movement he’d always called home. In the pursuit of electoral victory, many American evangelicals embraced moral relativism and toxic partisanship. Whatever happened to the Moral Majority, who headed to Washington in the ’80s to plant the flag of Christian values? Where were the Christian leaders that emerged from that movement and led the charge against Bill Clinton for his deception and unfaithfulness?

In this taut inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement’s core, and how religion often cloaked anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an antidemocratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda.

Since the 1970s, an important new figure has appeared on the center stage of American evangelicalism - the celebrity preacher's wife. Although most evangelical traditions bar women from ordained ministry, many women have carved out unofficial positions of power in their husbands' spiritual empires or their own ministries. The biggest stars - such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Victoria Osteen - write best-selling books, grab high ratings on Christian television, and even preach.

The Evangelical Church in the United States and other parts of the world, in general, is in a crisis of identity and stuck at a pivotal crossroads of history, conflicted about its God-given role and direction. This paralysis has been exposed and magnified by a renewed and raging debate about the role and relevance of Christianity in the governance and destiny of nations.

What do George Whitefield, Elisabeth Elliot, and J. Gresham Machen have in common? They were all Evangelical Heroes. In the Evangelical Heroes series, Joel Beeke and Douglas Bond present thirty biographical sketches of faithful evangelical leaders from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform.

Since 2000, America's most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small Christian school that has earned the nickname "God's Harvard". Most of these students are home-schoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. The school grooms them to become the Christian elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science to wage the battle to take back a godless nation.

The future of the relationship between Israel and America is deeply uncertain: The current political leadership of each country is hostile to the other, there is no longer a sense of shared strategic focus, and demographic changes are forcing the countries further apart with every passing year. Undermining the relationship between Israel and the US is the fact that it was never clearly defined. The ambiguity has been politically helpful but now threatens the future: There is no treaty, no agreed set of obligations, no mutual dependence.

> The Teavangelicals is a one-of-a-kind book chock-full of original reporting from the 2012 presidential race, with an up-close look at how evangelicals and the Tea Party are plotting strategy to reclaim America. In his trademark breezy, funny, and engaging style, David Brody takes you inside the blossoming Teavangelical movement and describes how it is having a major effect on today’s politics with an eye on dominating the political affairs of tomorrow.