Following are brief reviews of some of the current books I have been reading over the summer of 2023:

1.)  America’s Cultural Revolution – How the radical left conquered everything – Christopher F. Rufo

The author does a good job of accurately presenting the violent behavior and rhetoric of several of the more extreme characters leading the political and racial unrest of the ‘60s. He also correctly reports that as violent tactics fell out of favor, the civil rights movement shifted its strategy toward social influence, initially toward academia.

But then he uses this factual history along with today’s social media reality to promote the idea of a vast successful conspiracy to subvert American public institutions and even the electorate. He claims that this “socialist/communist” dogma first took over the universities and has since spread to education at all levels, government at all levels, the media, and even corporate executives, directors, and shareholders.

Sadly, the author’s only focus seems to be staking out territory in extreme right wing politics. He never considers the possible validity of the goals, objectives, or demands of the civil rights movement. And of course he does not acknowledge that any societal inequality requires attention, or that maybe what he calls a conspiracy could simply be addressing those issues.

2.)  Woke, Inc. – Inside corporate America’s social justice scam – Vivek Ramaswamy

I know the author is brilliant and wealthy; and I suspect his run for the presidency is mostly just because he wants public attention. Regardless, if there is a central theme to his book, it seems to be that capitalism is failing in America. He claims that corporations’ only responsibility is to maximize profits for shareholders. He expresses offense at the very idea that capitalists should consider that they may have some broader social responsibility to the society that protects them and in which they operate.

The thing that came across to me in reading his material is his extreme authoritarian tone. He is effectively a Trump clone who wants to believe that the US President has, or should have, near dictatorial power to rule as he/she sees fit.

Another clear reality is that Mr. Ramaswamy is very conscious and proud of his ruling class roots in India. He appears to aspire to be recognized as a member of some special upper class in the United States as well. I think the value of his book is in recognizing how dangerous he could be to our democracy if he were elected or appointed to a public position of power.

3.)  Christian Supremacy – Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism – Magda Teter

This book is a striking indictment of the Christian Church for its promotion of hate, intolerance, and corruption beginning in the 4th century CE when it was made the official religion of the Roman empire. The author documents the history in stunning detail (using the actual writings of Church leaders themselves) the brutality of the Church through the ages from then until now.

The author documents the Church’s centuries of advancing the religious doctrine that Jews are intended to be subservient to Christians. She tracks how that Christian doctrinal concept of Jewish inferiority became inscribed in law. That in turn created social and legal structures that reinforce a sense of Christian dominance, superiority, and intolerance that is still common, maybe even prevalent, in white Christian dogma today.

Ms. Teter also documents how the Christian Church was pivotal in supporting the colonial interests of European governments by providing religious authority for kidnapping, enslavement, and exploitation of people of color sent to the Americas. That legacy of hate and intolerance still taints the worldview of Christians to this day.

This book, more than any other I have read, demonstrates how theological and legal frameworks created by the church centuries ago has created the antisemitism and anti-Black racism we are living with today. It demonstrates why Christian identity lies at the heart of the world’s violent white supremacy movements. And lest readers think this indictment is only of the Catholic Church before the Renaissance, think again. The author documents the same white Christian supremacy argument from both Catholic and Protestant church leaders today.

4.)  The Ballot and The Bible – Kaitlyn Schiess

The author explores and documents how the Bible has been used to justify political actions in America from its earliest days. She starts the discussion focused on the early 17th century with John Winthrop as a key character. She looks at how politicians from that early time and throughout American history have manipulated biblical scripture, often without associated historical context, to support whatever political position they were promoting at the time.

Specifically, the author follows how American patriots used scripture to support their revolt against Britain. While at the same time, she documents how the loyalists were using different scripture to justify remaining colonies of the British Empire.

In similar fashion the author explores the use of the Bible to support both pro-slavery and anti-slavery political positions during the Civil War. She continues the history lesson through the scriptural contortions during the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights struggle, and ultimately through the politics of the late 20th and the first couple decades of the 21st centuries.

Ms Schiess does a good job of describing and explaining how the Bible is commonly used to promote various conflicting political positions. Though the book has a bit more of a religious narrative than I usually read, it gives significant insight into the bending, twisting, and manipulation of scripture for political ends that should be valuable to both religious and non-religious readers in this time of great political polarity.

5.)  Being White, Being Good – Barbara Applebaum

The central theme of this book is:  White Americans tend to be complicit in maintaining systemic racism in our society. The author dedicates significant effort to explaining that complicity is not the same as direct guilt. She further suggests that most white people don’t even know that they are being complicit or that their behavior is perpetuating systems of racism. She advances the proposition that whiteness itself defines acceptable social standards by which people of color are judged, conveys privilege to that dominant class, and assigns a kind of moral innocence to white Americans that is not granted to people who are not white.

Throughout the book the author discusses the mechanisms white people use either consciously or otherwise to reject the idea that they could possibly be complicit. She explores the claim of ignorance or denial of complicity as common defenses white people use. She also presents “complicity pedagogy” as a teaching method to help students recognize their own complicity and take responsibility. 

I share the author’s view that systemic racism is prevalent in American society. I chose to read this book in the hope that it would teach me how to discuss that subject in an objective non-confrontational way. The unfortunate reality for me is that I don’t think the author’s intended audience is laypeople like me. I got a lot out of it, but the book was not as useful to me as it probably is to professionals in the social sciences.

If you have decided to read some of my book reviews you will likely notice that I seem to have read most all of them on the same day. That’s not quite the case. On that one day (today – July 31, 2023) I corrected one of my more brilliant errors.

Over the months/years as I wrote reviews of books I had read I not only categorized them as “Book Summaries”, but also assigned them to other categories as well based on the central theme of the work. Ultimately that interspersed the book themes with my own thoughts and perspectives in a way that I just thought was not helpful and confused my thinking with that of various authors. So I decided I would maintain the book reviews only within that specific category and eliminate reference to them from other categories.

With that intention I proceeded to erase them from all categories other than “Book Summaries not realizing what I was doing erased them completely from all categories. As a result of my brilliance I had to reload them from a master fill that I fortunately keep. So therein lies the answer to why nearly all of them were published today.

For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump – Ralph Reed

Ralph Reed is one of the founders of the Christian Coalition as well as the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. I chose to read this book because of its title and author. I had hoped to learn something to help me understand what made so many Evangelical Christians abandon the sacred values of their faith to support Trump in 2016 and why they still stand by him. This review may be shorter than most because after suffering through all 330 pages I learned virtually nothing of value.

The book is mostly a history of Trump’s transition (starting in 2010) from a marginally legal business mogul with amoral character to autocratic style politician, his run for the White House, and his presidency. In the very first couple of chapters my hopes of learning anything useful or honest were dashed. The author essentially regurgitated all the Trump and Republican talking points. He attacked Democrats as socialists bent on taking away Evangelicals’ right to free speech and religious freedom, promoting abortion on demand at any time during pregnancy and at tax payer’s expense, and stacking the court with judges who will not respect the Constitution. Trump and Evangelicals in general he claims are both victims of this extreme Left conspiracy.

Chapter by chapter the author repeats the Trump mantra:  crooked Hillary; liberal hypocrisy, fake news, no Russia collusion, perfect call to Ukraine. Mr. Reed does a brilliant job of lying, spinning, twisting, and misrepresenting the facts of President Trump’s tenure in office. He gives Trump a pass on every amoral, hateful, and vindictive act by Biblical rationalization or assigning it to the past. Sadly, the author advances and strengthens the proposition that national evangelical leaders’ goals are political rather than spiritual. He promotes the very intolerance and hatred too many of those leaders express toward anyone whose beliefs and goals even slightly challenge evangelicals’ right to force Americans to submit to their dogma.

Factfulness – Hans Rosling

The entire focus of this book is on demonstrating through publicly available statistical data that the condition of the world is much better than people think; further, that it is continuing to improve. The author was an internationally known Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker. He called himself a very serious “possibilist”. That means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason; someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview.

Professor Rosling starts off in the introduction with a 13 question test about how things are in the world. Here is just one of the questions:  “How many of the world’s one year old children have been vaccinated against disease?” 20%? 50%? 80%?  Rosling says he has asked this question of more than 12,000 professionals in meetings around the world – bankers, health scientists, academics, and members of the World Economic Forum, among many others. The correct answer is 80%, the most common answer is 20%. No group of professionals has done as well as 50% correct.

The author then follows up in subsequent chapters to explain the human and societal nature that makes people so wrong about what the real condition of the world is. He identifies the source of our wrong impressions in 11 human instincts. I will just list one such instinct here: The gap instinct – he says humans tend to see the world around them in binary terms. In our minds we divide the world into rich and poor countries; developed and under-developed; Western and the rest; as well as other binary assessments. We assume all countries fall into one category or the other with a large gap between them. The truth however is that most everyone actually lives somewhere in the middle with relatively few at the extremes.

The author says it is especially helpful in understanding the state of the world and its rate of change if one uses an explanatory model that divides world population into 4 income categories. While some assume culture and religion are key drivers of progress, Mr. Rosling says they have virtually no impact when compared to income. Income categorization is a central theme that he uses throughout the book.

The author further discusses how we tend to assume that what we learned about the world in earlier years is still true, and that there has not been significant change. The reality though is that there has been dramatic improvements in world health, economics, education, and adoption of technology in the past few decades. He suggests that we need to regularly test what we think we know against the latest information. In short we need to continue to educate ourselves throughout our lives. He stresses that he is not saying that things in the world are all good; in fact they are bad in many places, in most cases just much better than they used to be.

In one of the final chapters the author addresses what he calls the urgency instinct – the need to act immediately. He says most urgent crisis really aren’t once factual data is examined. But then he identifies five urgent global risks that he thinks we should be worrying about and addressing more seriously than we are:  1)  A global pandemic – very appropriate for our current world situation. He sees a new flu-like pandemic as the most dangerous threat to global health. He says we need the World Health Organization to remain healthy and strong to coordinate a global response;  2)  A global financial collapse. He believes the current system is too complex to understand and control. We need a simpler one so we have a better chance of avoiding a future collapse;  3)   A world war. He believes we need to accelerate global interaction (trade, educational exchanges, free internet, global safety net, and other coalitions) to mitigate the risk of the terrible human instinct to violent retaliation and war;  4)  Climate change. The planet’s common resources can only be governed by a globally respected authority, in a peaceful world abiding by global standards; 5)  Extreme poverty. This one is not really a risk. The suffering it causes is well known and now, not in the future. Though much less today than decades ago 800 million people worldwide still suffer extreme poverty.

This book was really enlightening to me. I dare say you will be surprised at how little you really know about the worlds condition today and how it is actually improving in nearly every important metric.

Surviving Autocracy – Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist, author, and activist who is an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin as well as President Donald Trump. He holds dual citizenship and has lived the political reality in both countries under both presidents. He currently lives in New York.

After Trump was elected in 2016, Gessen wrote that it was folly to regard him as a regular politician and predicted that he would attempt to transform America into a Putin-style autocracy. In this book he demonstrates how Trump has so far come closer to achieving autocratic rule than most people would have thought possible.

The author says that most Americans believe that our democratic institutions of governance and oversight – the electoral system, the judiciary, the free press, and others – will prevent autocracy. But most of those institutions are enshrined in political culture, tradition, and democratic norms rather than in law. Virtually all depend on the good faith of the politicians in-charge to fulfill their official responsibility and uphold the constitution.

He says Trump ignores virtually all historical convention and violates nearly every established precedent. And sadly there is no clear legal framework to prevent him from doing pretty much as he pleases. He has the biggest megaphone in the world and he uses it to bully and abuse anyone who dares not to immediately bend to his will. Worse, the Republican Party either endorses Trump’s autocratic tendencies or is paralyzed with fear of challenging him.

Gessen says Trump is showing that an autocratic attempt in the US has a credible chance of success, especially when his own political party refuses to hold him accountable. It shows such an attempt builds logically on the structures and norms of the American government: more and more concentration of power in the executive branch over the decades as well as the marriage of money and politics. Whether by fear or ideological agreement Republican politicians’ seem willing to endorse Trump’s every whim. He seems to be their only audience.

In order to actually survive Trump’s attempt at autocracy Gessen says we have to give up the idea that just getting rid of Trump will solve the problem. We can’t return to government as it used to be. Recovery from the damage of Trumpism will only be possible by reinventing our institutions; we have to more clearly define and memorialize what it means to be a democracy. He says we have to deal with some fatal flaws at the root of our system of governance. He suggests the protests we are experiencing are calling for an American reinvention – equal treatment before the law, equal opportunity, and less economic inequality. In short, protestors are demanding a more perfect union.

The SS officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi – Daniel Lee

Most histories of the Third Reich focus on its senior leadership. This book, on the other hand, is the story of one of the tens of thousands of lower level mostly anonymous SS officers; they were the ones who actually directed and oversaw the implementation of the policies of anti-Semitism, slave labor, property confiscation, torture, and executions in the Third Reich. This officer’s story would likely never have been known except for an accidental discovery 70 plus years later.

I first learned about this case and the imminent publication of Daniel Lee’s book from an op-ed in the Times of Israel. His book is factual and contains history, mystery, and human interest, in more or less equal parts. I won’t provide much detail here. The story is much too complex to do it justice. I will just present the central theme and leave the details to those who choose to read the book:

In 2011 a lady in the Netherlands (not related to the officer in any way) sent a chair that had been in her family for many years to an upholstery shop to be recovered. In the recovering process multiple Nazi documents belonging to an SS officer by the name of Robert Griesinger were found hidden in the seat cushion. That discovery started the author on a multi-year research and investigative mission to discover who Griesinger was and try to understand his story.

Griesinger was a lawyer by training and mostly served as a “desk perpetrator” of the crimes the Nazis carried out against humanity. That means this particular officer for the most part did not kill or commit other atrocities himself; he administered the laws, managed the process, and issued the orders for the inhuman abuses that others carried out. In his day job he used his position to confiscate property, requisition slave labor, and round-up people for torture or execution; then he went home to his wife and children as any normal office worker might.

The last couple of years of the war Griesinger, with his family, was stationed in Prague, Czechoslovakia where he practiced his criminal Nazi duties and eventually met his end. As the war ended his wife and children became refugees trying to walk through the Alps to Liechtenstein.

Much of the value of this book is the insights we get into the character and internal workings of the feared SS/Gestapo organization as well as the typical life of a lower level SS officer. The author, with almost heroic effort, uncovered much of Griesinger’s life as well as how he fit into the broader Nazi regime. He also provides short glimpses of the anti-Semitic attitudes of the German population during the war, their belief in ultimate victory even toward the end, and a bit of insight into their plight afterwards.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – Caroline Criado Perez

This book should be required reading for every male before he can get a drivers license or register to vote.

The author is a British writer, broadcaster, and feminist activist. In this volume she documents gender inequality and its root causes worldwide. She makes the case that a massive data gap exists between the assumed “default human” (an average male) on which the whole world has been built since the beginning of human history and the reality that the “atypical” (or female) half of the population’s uniqueness is generally ignored. That gap leads to dangerous patterns in women’s lives, including compromised safety in cars, medications, public spaces, as well as increased political and domestic abuse. She uses strong correlation statistics to prove her point.

Ms. Criado Perez’s book is broken into 6 parts:  1) Daily Life; 2) The Workplace; 3) Design; 4) Going to the Doctor; 5) Public Life; 6) When it Goes Wrong. In each section she touches on ways that modern life negatively impacts the health, happiness, fulfillment, and safety of women. She unearths a dangerous pattern in data collection, analysis, and sex dis-aggregation (or lack thereof) and its consequences on women’s lives.

She identifies how product designers use a “one-size-fits-all” approach for everything from cars to cell phones to musical instruments to voice recognition software. Everything is designed to fit men. And consciously or not cities and other political jurisdictions prioritize public transportation, roads, and other public spaces and facilities primarily to meet the needs of men. In so doing they neglect to consider women’s needs, safety, unique responsibilities, and travel patterns.

Similarly in medical research, women have been mostly excluded from studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed. For instance women are frequently just assumed to react to medications the same way men do, though there is clear evidence that often is not the case. In fact women are frequently excluded from medical studies because they don’t react the same as men. That difference will somehow corrupt the results! Women are also frequently misdiagnosed in heart attacks and other life threatening conditions because their symptoms are not what are seen in men and as such are not “normal” or necessarily even studied in medical school.

When it comes to working life, the author discusses in detail a number of issues and realities that stack the work environment against women. Among other challenges, she explores the concepts of encumbered versus unencumbered labor and its impact on women’s wellbeing; she covers discrimination against women in pension systems as well as child care responsibilities. She makes the point that all industrialized countries except the US guarantee paid maternity leave; the US is one of only 5 countries in the world with no guaranteed paid maternity leave. Besides the US the other 4 countries are Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

She also effectively demonstrates the myth of meritocracy in the job market. Reviewing employment opportunities as diverse as music, tech, and academia, she shows that women are at a distinct disadvantage simply because they are women. This section is rich with other solid examples of male bias against women in the workplace from things as simple as office temperature settings to as serious as sexual harassment and abuse.

In a section called Design, Ms. Criado Perez discusses the issue of design of buildings, work environments, machinery, tools, and even musical instruments. She points out that virtually all such facilities and systems are made for the “default human” which to repeat is an average sized male. Cars are made for default humans; most other products are also designed around that default human, even including crash dummies used in testing vehicle safety. And when protective equipment is made specifically for females, the product is usually simply a smaller size of the male version without taking into account that women’s bodies have a fundamentally different shape.

The author also has a lot to say about how the political system excludes, minimizes, or demeans women even if/when they are elected to public office. The “good old boy” network works tirelessly to ignore or work around women politicians and community leaders to undermine or minimize their issues and effectiveness. If they press their ideas they are considered too ambitious and power hungry. Strong willed men are praised for being assertive; strong willed women are bitches. And of course when there is a public catastrophe like a flood or hurricane, recovery planning and prioritization decisions are usually done by men without input or consultation from women, or consideration of female victims’ needs.

I have always felt that we get better governance when women are in positions of power. Similarly, probably because my kids are mostly girls, I thought I was fully tuned in to gender discrimination. But this book was an eye opener for me. The author has done an outstanding job of laying out gender discrimination reality in areas I had never even considered. I know she has her own bias on the subject but she has earned the right; she documents the truth of her point beyond any doubt. If I were the Secretary of Education I would order that this book be the basis of a semester-long course on gender inequality required to graduate from high school and well as college.

White Like Me – Tim Wise

The author is a prominent anti-racist activist, writers, and educators. He has spent the past 25 years lecturing to audiences in all 50 states, on over 1000 college and high school campuses. He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and dismantling racism in their institutions. He probably has the strongest credentials of any antiracist activist in the United States.

White Like Me is a unique book in that much of it reads like a personal memoir; other parts are like a series of essays on institutional racism in American society. The author discusses his own personal life growing up in Tennessee in a working class white family. He traces his family roots back through several generations, including ancestors who were wealthy land owners and slave holders. He discusses how his personal whiteness gave him advantages in school and college that were denied or just not available to black and brown people.

Mr. Wise examines the ways in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and elsewhere. Using stories from his own life and professional experience, the author demonstrates how racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits, in relative terms, those who are “white like him.” He discusses how racial privilege can even harm whites in the long run and make progressive social change less likely.

He explores and refutes the various denial mechanisms white people use to justify their inaction and/or the preservation of the status quo on racial relations: slavery and racial abuse happened a long time ago and we need to move on; white people today shouldn’t be held responsible for what was done generations ago; anyone can “make it” if they just work hard; black people are just looking for handouts so they don’t have to work. Perhaps one of the more juvenile denial arguments is to point to successful black celebrities or professionals like Oprah or Colin Powell as proof that racism does not exist.

Mr. Wise also dedicates a chapter to strategies for white people to use in recognizing and confronting racism. He discusses at some length the subtleties of some racist behavior and how to deal with it. He even shows how well-meaning antiracists can frequently unknowingly collaborate in racist behavior.

This book is well worth the read if you are an antiracist, or even if you don’t necessarily recognize that racism is still an integral part of our American society today. The single criticism I have is that the author did not include a notes section. Though he specifically declared his intent not to be “statistical”  he could have, and in my opinion should have, listed studies that he broadly referenced but without naming them. I was actually familiar with studies that illustrated his points in some cases. But I think a specific list of the ones he was referencing would have been helpful in re-enforcing his credibility and the points he was making.

The Uninhabitable Earth:  Life After Warming – David Wallace-Wells

Wallace-Wells is an American journalist who is a contributing writer and deputy editor for New York Magazine. He also writes for the Guardian. In recent years he has focused his research and writing primarily on the science and the societal impact of climate change. He calls himself an optimist, but this book paints a very dark portrait of climate change and its impact on human civilization.

In the first section of the book the author sets the stage for a reality check. He lays out in general terms what global warming and associated climate change will mean to the world’s population. He discusses the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment of the state of the planet and the likely trajectory of climate change. He reviews the goal of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accords of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees celsius and makes the point that we have made no progress in achieving that goal.

In the second section of the book the author dedicates 12 chapters to analysis of specific climate impacts of global warming by 2 or more degrees celsius. In that section he dedicates his discussion to the scientifically based predictions of death and displacement of people that will result from climate change. He commits one chapter each to describing the chaos, death and disruption of humanity:  from extreme heat;  hunger; drowning; wildfires; severe weather phenomenon (hurricanes, tornados, typhoons); loss of fresh water; dying and rising oceans; unbreathable air; plagues; economic collapse; climate conflict; and finally what he calls “systems” (mass migrations by perhaps as many as a billion people and the likely associated general breakdown of society).

In the third section of the book the author discusses how we tend to kid ourselves about the crisis we are facing. He says we have been telling ourselves stories about imminent apocalypse for centuries; we are now conditioned to feel like it is just crying wolf. Also we tend to believe that our capitalist and technologist society can ward off any catastrophe once it is fully identified. The other issue is that we are a consumption society and hate to be inconvenienced by adjusting our behavior to address an issue as nebulous as climate change.

The author is careful to explain that the best climate scientists simply don’t know how global warming will play out. The feedback loops from warming are so complex that it is impossible to predict specifically what, where, and when catastrophe will strike. Also it is not at all clear what humans may do to mitigate climate change. There are only two thing they seem to all agree on:  1) it is now virtually impossible to limit global warming to 2 degrees celsius, which is and has been for the last 25 years the point at which scientists say global warming will become a climate catastrophe; and 2) life on the earth because of climate change will become much more challenging, dangerous, and chaotic than it is now regardless of what we do; it will only be less bad if we do something than if we do nothing.

This book is well researched and the sources are carefully documented, but it is not one for the faint of heart. If you are a climate change or science denier this book is not for you; likewise if you are a white evangelical who subscribes to the likes of televangelist and Trump adviser Robert Jeffress (he claims that it is absurd to think that God would allow human beings to impact earth’s climate) you won’t believe it. On the other hand if you want to lean what human life is likely to be in another 50 years as a result of global warming I encourage you to explore what this author and his sources have to say. One down side of this book is the authors writing style. He uses very long and complex sentence structures which make it hard and tiring to read. Regardless, it is worth sticking with it to the end.

BELEIVE ME: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump – John Fea

John Fea is a professor of American history; he is also a practicing evangelical Christian. He takes the title of his book, “Believe Me”, from one of Trumps most commonly used expressions. Whether it is about building a wall or claiming he is protecting Christian heritage, and in spite of his disdain for the truth that refrain has been constant. And to most Americans’ surprise 80% of white evangelical Christians believed him; they likely were the constituency that put him in the White House.

The author tracks the history of white American evangelical Christianity from the mid-seventeenth century when Puritans first arrived, through the rise of Donald Trump. The central theme he proposes is that throughout that entire time period fear has been the key driver of these generations of white evangelical Christians. Universally they seem to have always longed for society to remain static and see any signs of social or political progress as something to be feared.

Professor Fea argues that the embrace of Donald Trump is the logical outcome of this long-standing white evangelical approach to public life which is defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of governmental power, and the nostalgic longing for an America that has passed, or never existed to begin with.

The author contrasts the civil rights movement with the militant white evangelical rhetoric we hear from those vying for political power today, individuals like Jerry Falwell Jr, Robert Jeffress, and Paula White, to name just three. The civil rights movement was about people of color demanding to be treated equally; the current white evangelical movement seems to be about demanding that everyone else yield to those white evangelicals’ right to manipulate the federal government to fit their agenda and belief system. In short they have abandoned the tenets of their faith in favor of political influence. The author observes that that has not worked well so far; and he speculates that a “faithful presence” might be a better strategy than casting aside Christian values to gain a “seat at the table” of political power.

I believe the author sincerely recounts the history of the white evangelical movement and its presence today. I appreciate his observations from a historian’s perspective. I do not share his “fear” explanation for that history, however. I grew up in that dysfunctional religious environment. From my personal experience I think white evangelical Christians, as a class, are driven more by intolerance than fear. In many case, as exemplified by the likes of Robert Jeffress and other powerful national white evangelical leaders, they tend to fan the flames of division, separation, and hate to advance political objectives.