Results by title

"This investigation tries to understand why many Evangelical pastors were blamed for endorsing Trump when, in fact, most did not. This book joins other attempts by scholars and journalists to analyze the relationship between Trump and Evangelicals. Recommended.” —CHOICE

Tracing the digital narratives that shaped evangelical identity in a pivotal political moment.

As a political constituency, white conservative evangelicals are generally portrayed as easy to dupe, disposed to vote against their own interests, and prone to intolerance and knee-jerk reactions. In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin challenges this assumption and moves beyond these overused stereotypes to develop a refined explanation for this constituency’s voting behavior.

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the study of religion and politics and stems from the author’s personal interest in the ways her experiences with believers differ from how scholars often frame this group’s rationale and behaviors. To address this disparity, Martin examines sermons, drawing on her expertise in rhetoric and communication studies with the benefits of ethnographic research in an innovative hybrid approach she terms a “digital rhetorical ethnography.” Martin’s thorough research surveys more than 150 online sermons from America’s largest evangelical megachurches in 37 different states. Through listening closely to the words of the pastors who lead these conservative congregations, Martin describes a gentler discourse less obsessed with issues like abortion or marriage equality than stereotypes of evangelicals might suggest. Instead, the politicaleconomic sermons and stories from pastors encourage true believers
to remember the exceptional nature of the nation’s founding while also deemphasizing how much American citizenship really means.

Martin grapples with and pays serious, scholarly attention to a seeming contradiction: while the large majority of white conservative evangelicals voted in 2016 for Donald J. Trump, Martin shows that many of their pastors were deeply concerned about the candidate, the divisive nature of the campaign, and the potential effect of the race on their congregants’ devotion to democratic process itself. In-depth chapters provide a fuller analysis of our current political climate, recapping previous scholarship on the history of this growing divide and establishing the groundwork to set up the dissonance between the political commitments of evangelicals and their faith that the rhetorical ethnography addresses.

A new framework for showing why deservingness politics, more than ideology, has become the central battleground for social policy in a polarized age.

Why do Americans support some government programs but not others? In Deserving Americans, Chris Faricy and Christopher Ellis argue that the answer lies in identity, not ideology. Specifically, support for particular social policies depends on perceptions of whether beneficiaries of government assistance actually deserve the aid that they receive. As partisanship and social identity have converged, partisans increasingly view government aid as a vehicle for rewarding ingroups and punishing outgroups, creating a politics polarized on identity and who government should serve.

Faricy and Ellis show how these dynamics play out across a wide range of policy domains, from antipoverty to health care to family policy and more. Their findings help to clarify many of our current predicaments, yielding insights that explain trends in public opinion and partisan debates over public policy. Deserving Americans offers a powerful new framework for understanding how Americans view social policy—and each other.