**A historian and ordained Episcopal priest offers everything you need to know for shaping and defending your own beliefs on the role of religion in American lifeFilled with stories from America's struggle for religious freedom most readers have never heard before and perfect for fans of Jesus and John Wayne and On Tyranny**The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution codified the principle that government should play no role in favoring or supporting any reli...

What really gave rise to the Religious Right?There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.The problem is this story simply isn't true.Bad Faith recounts how it was in fact the elimination of...

Survey data and anecdotal evidence agree that Christianity is losing its hold on American life. The Roman Catholic hierarchy struggles to regain its credibility following the pedophilia scandals, mainline Protestantism wrestles with issues of sexual identity and attrition, and white evangelicalism has merged with the far-right precincts of the Republican Party. Moral authority, it seems, is hard to come by, with all three of the major Christian traditions--Roman Catholicism, mainline Prote...

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn’t help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball’s inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Mu...

This illuminating biography of our thirty-ninth president by an acclaimed historian of American religion presents Jimmy Carter as the last great standard-bearer of progressive evangelical politics. Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics are commonly viewed today as inseparable. But when Carter, a Democrat and unabashed born-again Christian, won the presidency in 1976, he owed his victory in part to American evangelicals. Yet four years later, those very same voters abandoned Ca...

**A historian and ordained Episcopal priest offers everything you need to know for shaping and defending your own beliefs on the role of religion in American lifeFilled with stories from America's struggle for religious freedom most readers have never heard before and perfect for fans of Jesus and John Wayne and On Tyranny**The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution codified the principle that government should play no role in favoring or supporting any reli...

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. Abortion, gay marriage, intelligent design -- the Religious Right is fighting, and winning, some of the most important ...

Randall Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is an insightful and engaging journey into the world of conservative Christians in America. Originally published twenty-five years ago and the basis for an award-winning, three-part PBS documentary, this new edition is complete with a new chapter and an Afterword. In this immensely readable tour of the highways and byways of American evangelicalism, Balmer visits a revival meeting in Florida, an Indian reservation in the Dakotas, a tr...

Evangelicalism has left its indelible mark on American history, politics, and culture. It is also true that currents of American populism and politics have shaped the nature and character of evangelicalism.This story of evangelicalism in America is thus riddled with paradox. Despite the fact that evangelicals, perhaps more than any other religious group, have benefited from the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, several prominent evangelical leaders over the pa...

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn’t help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball’s inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Mu...

Historian Randall Balmer takes us on a tour of presidential religiosity in the last half of the twentieth century—from Kennedy's 1960 speech that proposed an almost absolute wall between American political and religious life to the soft religiosity of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; from Richard Nixon's manipulation of religion to fit his own needs to Gerald Ford's quiet stoicism; from Jimmy Carter's introduction of evangelicalism into the mainstream to Ronald Reagan's co-option of the ...

The distinguished author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory returns with a searing examination of a new generation of evangelical leaders who have hijacked the Christian faith on behalf of the Republican Party.