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To Whom It May Concern:Below is a book review for Seth Dowland’s book. Please feel free to contact me with whatever questions you may have. I enjoyed doing this and would be more than willing to review more books.Benjamin TollLake Superior State Universitybtoll@lssu.eduFamily Values and the Rise of the Christian Right by Seth Dowland. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 280 pp. $45.00.Moving beyond party politics, Dowland articulates the recurring importance of family politics in the American political arena. While many who study the Christian Right start with its more obvious rise in the 1970s, Dowland looks back to the history of values in American politics and the ownership of family values rhetoric by the Christian Right starting in the 1960s. The main premise of the book is that while individual issues come and go from the political arena, family values have become (p. 9) and remain (p. 228) an important component of American politics today.In order to make this case, the book is broken into a discussion of the political issues facing three broad areas of the family for conservative Christians (p. 17): children, mothers, and fathers. Enrollment in private, Protestant schools more than doubled from 1970 to 1980 (p.23). Christians were unhappy about Engel v. Vitale (1962), but they were equally unhappy about forced busing, the lack of respect for authority, and the general sense that secularism had invaded America’s schools. Thus, Christian schools (chapter 1) and homeschooling (Chapter 3) became prominent ways for those in the Christian Right to fight against a shifting culture. Christians also fought against textbook changes that were deemed un-American. A growing disdain for experts (p. 63), coupled with rhetorical strategies making those who are not entirely in agreement with you out to be liberals (p. 57), paved the way for long battles over what was in textbooks for public school children across the nation (p. 58). The second section of Dowland’s book focuses on the role of women in the family values movement. Ironically, given its salience in electoral politics among the Christian Right today, abortion is one issue that Evangelical leaders were ambivalent on for much of the 1970s (p. 119-122). Dowland then moves onto gender roles through a discussion of the ERA and gay rights. Finally, Family Values looks at the increased role of Evangelicals in the military as well as defending a muscular foreign policy in the 1980s (p. 194), and concludes through a discussion of the mostly apolitical Promise Keepers movement in the 1990s. Dowland’s work elucidates the underbelly of the Christian Right movement and clarifies the importance of many topics to this group, but a weakness of this book, for a political science audience, is the book’s lack of overt connection to politics or political science research. For instance, Dowland’s discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment places emphasis on its failure on the Christian Right when Jane Mansbridge’s Why We Lost the ERA points to a more complicated picture. Another example is the final chapter on the Promise Keepers. This group rose quickly to prominence in the 1990s among Evangelical Christians, but, as Dowland states, the Promise Keepers were intentionally apolitical (p. 209) and took positions that challenged conservative orthodoxy on race relations (p. 216). One may also argue that Family Values also has too strong of a focus on leaders in the Christian Right movement, with very little connection to how this impacted mainstream Evangelicals and conservative Christians in the United States. For a movement that is largely anti-intellectual (if one buys Mark Noll’s thesis in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind), this book focuses almost exclusively on elite leaders of the Christian Right. Even with these two minor critiques, this is a very useful addition to our understanding of the Christian Right in American politics. For those with minimal background knowledge of this movement, this book can help expand understanding and aid in the creating testable hypotheses, but it also provides great case studies for those with a deeper knowledge of the Christian Right.Benjamin T. TollLake Superior State University ................
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