POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES OF
BRITISH EVANGELICALS
By Andrea Hatcher
Palgrave Macmillan. 264 pages. £89.50
(E-book) or £112.00 (hardback)
ISBN 978 3 319 562 810
Andrea Hatcher is known to British evangelicals as co-author of the 2013 study, published by think-tank Theos, about the British religious right. With Andy Walton, she showed that this movement – centred on the Christian Institute and Christian Concern – exercised influence through its relationship with the right-wing media, notably the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
Now Hatcher has returned with this study contrasting the political attitudes of British evangelicals with their white American counterparts. British evangelicals, she finds, are ‘highly interested in politics and manifest a particular concern for social justice issues’ but express this in ‘community organising rather than electioneering’. When we vote, she finds we are ‘just as likely to be on the left as right or centre.’ We are slightly more likely to vote Labour than Tory, we value state services and social equality, and unlike Americans we ‘do not exhibit in-group/out-group feelings’ in politics.
