Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hogue, Andrew P

Titel

Stumping God: Reagan, Carter, and the Invention of a Political Faith

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• For more than three decades, American presidential candidates have desperately sought the conservative Evangelical vote. With an ever broadening base of support, the Evangelical movement in America may now seem to many a very powerful lobbyist on Capitol Hill. This was not always the case. This volume deconstructs the 1980 presidential election, in which Ronald Reagan would defeat Jimmy Carter and John B. Anderson, and uncovers a disproportionately heavy reliance on religious rhetoric - a rhetoric that would be the catalyst for a new era of presidential politics. Until 1980, the idea that conservative politics was somehow connected with conservative theology was distant from the American imagination. Hogue describes the varying streams of influence that finally converged by the Reagan-Carter election, including the rapidly rising Religious Right. By 1980, candidates were not only challenged to appeal rhetorically to a conservative religious base, but found it necessary to make public their once-private religious commitments. References.