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"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.

Dictators and the Higher Education Dilemma explores a powerful contradiction at the heart of modern authoritarian regimes: While universities are essential for producing skilled labor and projecting national progress, they also cultivate critical thinkers who can challenge state power. Drawing on Iran’s modern history, from the Pahlavi monarchy to the Islamic Republic, Saeid Golkar shows how dictators use universities not only to train technocrats and showcase development but also as tools for shaping ideology, suppressing dissent, and co-opting academics. In authoritarian systems, education becomes a double-edged sword, essential for growth yet dangerous when it empowers independent thought. Golkar reveals how regimes manipulate admissions, censor curricula, and reward loyalty to create compliant intellectuals and loyal elites. Blending personal experience with rich historical and political analysis, this book exposes the tactics used to turn universities into instruments of social control. It speaks to a growing trend worldwide, offering vital insights into the clash between authoritarian power and academic freedom from Iran to China, Russia, and beyond.

What role does religion play in the tech industry? Based on nearly one hundred interviews, Divine Meets Digital uncovers the ways tech workers engage with religion and make sense of their work through religious and spiritual worldviews. While most identify as nonreligious, they are far from antireligious. Instead, they navigate competing religious and nonreligious views, often distinguishing between what they see as the controversial elements of religion—such as belief in the supernatural in China and its politicized and dogmatic aspects in the United States—and its more noncontroversial aspects. In doing so, they justify their religious engagement by embracing religion's noncontroversial elements while distancing themselves from its controversial features. This book offers a powerful new lens for understanding one of the most influential industries of our time, inviting readers to better understand the people who live and work at the intersection between science, religion, and technology.

Divined Intervention provides an innovative institutionalist account for why religion enables political activism in some settings, but not others. Christopher W. Hale argues that decentralized religious institutions facilitate grassroots collective action, and he uses a multimethod approach to test this explanation against several theoretical alternatives. Utilizing nationally representative Mexican survey data, the book’s statistical analyses demonstrate that decentralization by the Catholic Church is positively associated with greater individual political activism across the country. Using case studies centered in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Morelos, the author shows that religious decentralization encourages reciprocal cooperative interactions at a local level. This then increases the ability of religion to provide goods and services to its local adherents. These processes then prompt the growth of organizational capacities at the grassroots, enabling secular political activism.

Because this theoretical framework is grounded in human behavior, it shows how local institutions politically organize at the grassroots level. Divined Intervention also offers an improved understanding of religion’s relationship with political activism, a topic of ever-increasing significance as religion fuels political engagement across the globe. The book further synthesizes seemingly disparate approaches to the study of collective action into a cohesive framework. Finally, there is some debate as to the impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods, and this study helps us understand how local institutional configurations can enable collective action across ethnic boundaries.

Methodism in the public and private lives of the politician

After more than forty contentious years in the public eye, Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the best-known political figures in the nation. Yet the strong religious faith at the heart of her politics and personal life often remains confounding, if not mysterious, to longtime observers. Even many of her admirers would be surprised to hear Clinton state that her Methodist outlook has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.” 

Gary Scott Smith’s biography of Clinton’s journey in faith begins with her Methodist upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she faithfully attended worship services, Sunday school, and youth group meetings. Like many mainline Protestants, Clinton’s spiritual commitment developed gradually throughout childhood, while her combination of missionary zeal and impressive personal talents has informed her career from the time of her pro bono work at Yale on behalf of children to the present.

Her Methodist faith has been very important to many of Clinton’s high-profile endeavors and in helping her cope with the prominent travails brought on by two presidential campaigns, never-ending conservative rancor, and her husband’s infidelity. Smith’s account examines Clinton’s faith in the context of work ranging from her 1990s pursuit of healthcare reform to a “Hillary doctrine” of foreign policy focused on her longtime goal of providing basic human rights for children and women--a project she saw as essential to United States security. The result is an enlightening reconsideration of an extraordinary political figure who has defied private doubts and public controversy to live by John Wesley’s dictum: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”