Princeton theologian Mark Taylor here looks at the influence and stance of the right-wing Christian movement in the U.S. He questions its religious authenticity, its claim to be called Christian, and the ethical stands it has taken in national politics of the last ten years. The heart of Taylor's argument is Jesus himself. Using the latest New Testament scholarship on the historical Jesus and his tactic in relation to the Roman Empire, Taylor argues that Jesus' life and work and message are inherently political and driven by the need to show God's love for the poor, condemnation of the oppressor, and search for a reign of justice. These Christian hallmarks, Taylor asserts, stand as a critical corrective to a distorted Christianity that often dominates the U.S. political scene today.

When American evangelicals flocked to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century to fulfill their Biblical mandate for global evangelism, their experiences abroad led them to engage more deeply in foreign policy activism at home. Lauren Frances Turek tracks these trends and illuminates the complex and significant ways in which religion shaped America's role in the late–Cold War world. In To Bring the Good News to All Nations, she examines the growth and influence of Christian foreign policy lobbying groups in the United States beginning in the 1970s, assesses the effectiveness of Christian efforts to attain foreign aid for favored regimes, and considers how those same groups promoted the imposition of economic and diplomatic sanctions on those nations that stifled evangelism. Using archival materials from both religious and government sources, To Bring the Good News to All Nations links the development of evangelical foreign policy lobbying to the overseas missionary agenda. Turek's case studies—Guatemala, South Africa, and the Soviet Union—reveal the extent of Christian influence on American foreign policy from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Evangelical policy work also reshaped the lives of Christians overseas and contributed to a reorientation of U.S. human rights policy. Efforts to promote global evangelism and support foreign brethren led activists to push Congress to grant aid to favored, yet repressive, regimes in countries such as Guatemala while imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on nations that persecuted Christians, such as the Soviet Union. This advocacy shifted the definitions and priorities of U.S. human rights policies with lasting repercussions that can be traced into the twenty-first century.

A timely and galvanizing work that examines how right-wing evangelical Christians have veered from an admirable faith to a pernicious, destructive ideology. Today’s right-wing Evangelical Christianity stands as the very antithesis of the message of Jesus Christ. In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers. He scathingly indicts the religious leaders who helped facilitate the rise of the notoriously unchristian Donald Trump, likening them to the “court jesters” and hypocritical priestly sycophants of bygone eras who unquestioningly supported their sovereigns’ every act, no matter how hateful or destructive to those they were supposed to serve. In the wake of the deadly insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol, Christians Against Christianity is a clarion call to stand up to the hypocrisy of the evangelical Right, as well as a guide for Christians to return their faith to the life-affirming message that Jesus brought and died for. What Hendricks offers is a provocative diagnosis, an urgent warning that right-wing evangelicals’ aspirations for Christian nationalist supremacy are a looming threat, not only to Christian decency but to democracy itself. What they offer to America is anything but good news.

This book seeks to understand white conservative Christians’ support for Donald Trump, using their own words. Drawing on the triangular relationship between the 45th president, and his voters, and religious organizations, this work investigates the creation of the tale of Trump as the protector and enhancer of Christian values. The first part of the book discusses in detail the white conservative Christian constituency in the United States, and the development of feelings of displacement and resentment fostered by intergroup threat and nationalism. The central part focuses on the actor known as the “Religious Right,” through the rhetoric of one of their most representative organizations in the twenty-first century. The final part focuses on the character of Donald Trump and his peculiar relationship with religious discourse. The book demonstrates that while such discourse is expected of Trump as a Republican candidate, his approach to it is characterized by detachment and sloganized exploitation of Christian symbols. Ultimately, the book highlights the cultural tools that are crucial in the reproduction of structures of inequality and the ways they have been used by conservative politicians and groups to accumulate power.

Conservative evangelicalism has transformed American politics, disseminating a sometimes fearful message not just through conventional channels, but through subcultures and alternate modes of communication. Within this world is a "Religion of Fear," a critical impulse that dramatizes cultural and political conflicts and issues in frightening ways that serve to contrast "orthodox" behaviors and beliefs with those linked to darkness, fear, and demonology. Jason Bivins offers close examinations of several popular evangelical cultural creations including the Left Behind novels, church-sponsored Halloween "Hell Houses," sensational comic books, especially those disseminated by Jack Chick, and anti-rock and -rap rhetoric and censorship. Bivins depicts these fascinating and often troubling phenomena in vivid (sometimes lurid) detail and shows how they seek to shape evangelical cultural identity. As the "Religion of Fear" has developed since the 1960s, Bivins sees its message moving from a place of relative marginality to one of prominence. What does it say about American public life that such ideas of fearful religion and violent politics have become normalized? Addressing this question, Bivins establishes links and resonances between the cultural politics of evangelical pop, the activism of the New Christian Right, and the political exhaustion facing American democracy. Religion of Fear is a significant contribution to our understanding of the new shapes of political religion in the United States, of American evangelicalism, of the relation of religion and the media, and the link between religious pop culture and politics.

This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.

Far-Right Fantasy is a straight-forward, jargon-free study of contemporary American right-wing extremism. Accessible to both professional and lay audiences, it allows activists to speak for themselves in their own words. It takes the self-announced religious motivations of extremists seriously, and illustrates this by citing numerous cases of radical politics. The book addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the standard psycho-social-cultural explanations of far-right activism. It shows how extremists are similar educationally and psychologically to their more conventional neighbors; that they get into the movement in the same way that others become peace activists or radical environmentalists, namely, through their ties with fellow workers and church-goers, family members, and classmates; and that their views are given a patina of certainty by being repeatedly corroborated within closed, non-contaminated communication systems. The book avoids being preachy or judgmental, but it does try to challenge readers morally by submitting far-right fantasy to a formal ideology critique. It does this by showing how the reforms it recommends – a marketplace free of regulation, draconian immigration restrictions; an end to the federal reserve bank and the income tax; a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution; anti-union "right to work" laws and a return to debt slavery; the privatization of schools, the post office, and the commons, and so on – contradict its ostensible goal, which is to protect and enhance middle class interests. Far-Right Fantasy is suitable for adoption as a supplemental text in political psychology and sociology, sociologies of religion and knowledge, collective behavior, and American political history.