Republican Theology: The Civil Religion of American Evangelicals

White evangelicals occupy strange property on the ideological map in America, exhibiting a pronounced commitment to the principle of limited government, and yet making a significant exception for issues relating to personal morality - an exception many observers take to be paradoxical at best.
Explanations of this phenomenon usually point to the knotty political alliance evangelicals built with free-market types in the late twentieth century, but sermonic evidence suggests a deeper and longer intellectual thread, one that has pervaded evangelical thought all the way back to the American
founding.
In Republican Theology, Benjamin Lynerd offers an historical and theological account of the hybrid position evangelicals have long affected to hold in American culture - as champions of individual liberty and as guardians of American morality. Lynerd documents the development of a resilient, if
problematic, tradition in American political thought, one that sees a free republic, a virtuous people, and an assertive Christianity as mutually dependent. Situating the recent rise of the New Right within this larger framework, Republican Theology traces the contentious political journey of
evangelicals from its earliest moments, laying bare the conceptual tensions built into their civil religion.


Author: Benjamin T. Lynerd
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 09/01/2014
Pages: 260
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.33w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9780199363568

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2015 pg. 1405

About the Author

Benjamin T. Lynerd is the Montesquieu Forum Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Political Thought at Roosevelt University.

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