FROM BILLY GRAHAM TO SARAH PALIN
Evangelicals and the betrayal of American Conservatism
By D.G. Hart. Eerdmans. 240 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 0 802 866 288
Darryl Hart is an academic Reformed theologian and church historian in the USA, and an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church originally founded by J. Gresham Machen. He writes well and is a prolific and witty blogger.
His new book tracks the rise of evangelical politics in the shape of America’s ‘religious right’. During the 19th century, he says, a united white Protestant elite maintained an ‘informal establishment’ of religion despite the constitutional separation of church and state. This unity was shattered after WWI by the rise of fundamentalism, driven in its political aspect by opposing threats to society from Darwinism, Communism and alcohol.
