Producing the Christian Right: Conservative Evangelicalism, Representation, and the Recent Religious Past

This essay explores how conservative evangelical Protestants have been represented by both sociologists and journalists of American religion through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right” beginning in the late 1970s. By exploring both popular and academic analyses of conservative Protest...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Rolsky, L. Benjamin (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: MDPI [2021]
Dans: Religions
Année: 2021, Volume: 12, Numéro: 3
Sujets non-standardisés:B Christian Right
B Religion
B Journalism
B Culture Wars
B Politics
B History
B Evangelicalism
B theory and method
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Description
Résumé:This essay explores how conservative evangelical Protestants have been represented by both sociologists and journalists of American religion through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right” beginning in the late 1970s. By exploring both popular and academic analyses of conservative Protestantism as understood through terms such as “the Christian Right” and “the Electronic Church”, one is able to identify a set of intellectual assumptions that characterize the study of American evangelicalism and politics in the recent past. In particular, this essay suggests that studies of conservative evangelicalism as understood through “the rise of the Christian Right” tend to reveal as much about their interpreters as they do their respective evangelical subjects. The essay first identifies what these barriers and limitations are by exploring the social scientific literature on conservative evangelicalism at the time. It then foregrounds news reports and academic studies of “the Christian Right” in order to connect journalistic and academic inquiries of the conservative Protestant to the emergence of the evangelical. It then suggests a number of historical and methodological avenues for future research on American evangelicalism and politics that foreground self-reflexivity, interdisciplinarity, and the close reading of conservative texts.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contient:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel12030171