Saving History, by Lauren R. Kerby

I really enjoyed the approach Lauren R. Kerby to in researching her book Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation's Capital and Redeem a Christian America.  She tagged along on several "Christian Heritage tours," where tour guides take Christian groups around Washington, D.C., regaling them with stories of our nation's Christian heritage, highlighting historical and architectural tidbits that other tours overlook altogether.  In doing so, she aims to gain insight into the Christian Right and the political views of white evangelicals.  (Yes, she focusses obsessively on race, which is annoying.)

As a participant and observer, she reports the content of the tours from the tour guides, many of whom have written extensively on American history from a Christian perspective.  She also includes interviews with her fellow tourists, who come from around the U.S. but who are primarily white, middle-class Protestants.  In short, her assessment of the tour guides is that they are charlatans distorting the historical record, and that the tourists are gullible rubes.

Besides the tour guides themselves, Kerby gives some background on the Christian heritage movement, mentioning influential books by evangelical authors.  In terms of the history of the movement itself, this is helpful, except that she is dismissive of the whole genre, without really engaging their arguments.  Perhaps she saw this as outside the scope of her book, but it's unfair to the scholars who have written these books to dismiss them out of hand because she doesn't agree with their points of view.

She captures the dilemma of these books and the tours: conservative Christians view themselves as outsiders and insiders, founders and victims.  They identify with the founding generation, maintaining that the faith of the Founding Fathers is in line with contemporary conservative evangelicalism.  Yet in recent decades, their faith has been sidelined in favor of secularism and liberalism.  This perspective is easy to caricature, and is more nuanced than many popular presentations allow, but Kerby is content to dismiss it rather than to engage it.

This is not a central theme of the book, but, to me, she lost credibility in her analysis of the 2016 presidential election.  She repeats the widely-discussed figure that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump.  She favorably quotes those who say white evangelicals voted for him out of "fear, lust for power, and nostalgia for an imagined past" or "fear and resentment" or "racism, class anxiety, or misogyny."  She doesn't bother to mention what I believe to be the primary reason most evangelicals voted for Trump: he was running against Hillary.  Full stop.

Kerby's book is an interesting project but ends up being tainted by a strong bias against her subject matter.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!