Review
Valued Voters
The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born Again Years
by Steven P. Miller
Oxford University Press, 2014
(240 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by John Murdock
A decade ago, President George W. Bush was re-elected, and a baffled media establishment (no one they knew had voted for him) explained that the blame lay with "values voters," who were in turn happy to take the credit. Today, deep into Barack Obama's second term and in the midst of a social moment that we might well call the Gay Teens, plenty of journalists are beginning to gleefully type up their obituaries for the religious right. While these reports of death may be greatly exaggerated, the roller coaster that has been conservative white Evangelical politics does find itself at a place prime for introspection.
Historian Steven Miller thus presents a timely review of the four decades from 1972 to 2012, during which Evangelicals flexed significant cultural muscles even if they could not bend the times completely to their liking. In another fifty years, this compact book may well be the place to start for some curious soul inquiring about these religiously interesting times, but let us hope the story (and the history) does not end here.
For those of us who lived through the era, Miller presents a brisk walk down the memory lane of Evangelical politics and pop culture. In Cliffs Notes fashion, most of the major characters and plotlines are included, if a bit underdeveloped. There's Jimmy Carter and Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham and Bill Bright, Ronald Reagan and John Anderson, Francis Schaefer and Ron Sider, Ralph Reed and Jim Wallis, clubs PTL and 700, ID and WWJD, Promise Keepers and The Purpose Driven Life, The Late Great Planet Earth and The Total Woman, Bob Dylan and Amy Grant, Veggie Tales and The Handmaid's Tale, George Bush and George Bush, and much more. There's a helpful focus on intellectuals like James Davison Hunter and Richard John Neuhaus, and Miller digs deep to remind us of more easily forgotten figures like the U.S.-Attorney-firing Monica Goodling and self-described Satanist turned Christian comedian Mike Warnke.
Workmanlike Analysis
Miller, a graduate of the Mennonite-affiliated Goshen College who previously penned Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, has again done his homework and writes with the confidence of one well-versed in, if not quite fully compatible with, the subculture he addresses. The Age begins as the Jesus Movement flows into 1970s' "Evangelical chic," punctuated by a number of bestsellers. Back then, it was Hal Lindsey who looked to the end times, while Tim LaHaye, who with wife Beverly authored a popular Christian sex manual, was more interested in seeing that no orgasm got left behind. Politics were fluid enough that such things as liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats, and others, including a certain governor of Georgia, could together enthusiastically affirm that Politics and religion can mix!
Miller astutely notes, "The ideological sorting out of evangelical politics did not culminate with The Year of the Evangelical [as Newsweek dubbed 1976], but rather flowed from it. In the process, politics became the dominant lens through which a generation of Americans encountered and evaluated born-again Christianity." Jimmy Carter's campaign brought expectations—from both the left and right of the Evangelical spectrum—that largely went unfulfilled and led to 1980 being "a conclusive pivot in modern evangelical politics." The Christian right, organized with the greatest fanfare by Rev. Jerry Falwell as the Moral Majority, swamped the Ron Sider-led Evangelical left in the quest to define the times.
Miller adds his soft voice to a recent chorus of lament over this turn to conservatism. Unlike Randall Balmer, who openly bemoans the shift and pines for a return of the progressive Evangelical tradition in his recent Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, Miller is more neutral in his delivery, providing a crisp chronological rehashing of the conventional wisdom. (For those whose appetites are whetted by Miller's sampler, David Swartz offers a meatier and more specialized second course in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism.)
There is no grand revisionism offered here, just workmanlike scholarly analysis. Still, this approach means that some opportunities to correct the record are missed. The Terri Schiavo euthanasia episode is presented, consistent with mainstream coverage at the time, as a major overreach by the right, a reading that could be complicated if Miller had mentioned that even a star of the left, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, showed up at Schiavo's bedside to protest her court-ordered death by dehydration. For the most part, though, I found myself nodding along and saying, "That's about right." Miller fairly accurately chronicles the age rather than seeking to rewrite it.
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