Protestants and American Conservatism: A Short History. By Gillis J. Harp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 323 pp. $42.95 (original) (raw)

BOOK REVIEW: Political Theology Protestants and American conservatism: A short history

Political Theology, 2019

This article reviews the book, "Political Theology Protestants and American conservatism: A short history," by Gillis Harp, detailing the rigor of the historical research and noting an unresolved issue at the core of the book: the nature of American conservatism itself. Over American history, it has been associated with a Christianity-grounded emphasis on community with a substantial role for the state in regulating civil and spiritual life--contra a secular, Lockean, contractarian/individualist liberalism wary of the state. Yet it has also been--and is now--associated with just such an individual freedom, contractarianism, and a small-government wariness of state interference, sometimes with religious justification, sometimes with none.

Fundamentalism et al: Conservative protestants in America

Annual Review of Sociology, 1998

Since the rise of the religious right, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying conservative Protestantism. Not only do conservative Protestants (CPs) make up at least a quarter of the US population; they differ from many Americans in gender-role attitudes, childrearing styles, political orientation, and other ways as well. In fact, religious factors often predict people’s political views better than do either class or gender, even though the latter two have received far more attention in the scholarly literature (Manza & Brooks 1997, Kellstedt et al 1996b). Unfortunately research in this area has been hampered by imprecise measurement and poor understanding of the various movements grouped together as CPs. This has muddied statistical results, stifled theoretical development, and blinded researchers to promising areas of analysis. Thus, in this chapter we first discuss the history and distinctive qualities of the various CP movements, then we use these insights to propose better survey measures, and finally we apply this knowledge to several substantive areas (i.e., gender-role attitudes, childrearing styles, tolerance, the .culture wars,. the religious right, and the reasons for the religious vitality of CP groups).

The Implicit Legacy of American Protestantism

The heritage of a nation founded by devout Puritan Protestants has had wide-ranging effects on U.S. culture and, as experimental evidence suggests, continues to exert an implicit influence on the feelings, judgments, and behaviors of contemporary Americans. The United States is distinguished by a faith in individual merit and traditional values uncommon among economically developed democracies, both of which have been traced, in part, to the moral ideals of the founding Protestant communities. Calvinist Protestantism has further profoundly shaped American workways, including the moralization of work and the manifestation of professional norms that prescribe impersonal and unemotional workplace interactions. The implicit influence of traditional Protestant beliefs extends not only to devout American Protestants, but even to non-Protestant and less-religious Americans.

Residual and Resurgent Protestantism in the American Media (and Political) Imaginary

International Journal of Communication, 2017

This essay seeks to introduce more substantive attention to religion into the field of media studies. It argues that religion persists in culture and politics, as demonstrated by political upheavals in the North Atlantic West, and that media scholarship lacks critical theoretical and conceptual resources to address that fact. The essay calls for careful historicism and, as a heuristic, interrogates American Protestantism as a cultural, political, and media project. It references emerging scholarships to suggest ways that Protestantism is expressed as a politics in relation to the public and domestic spheres.