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Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament

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As a progressive Catholic and self-avowed liberal, I was prepared to dislike this book. I anticipated shallow proof-texting of the sort found in nearly all books written by evangelicals--just proof-texting in a different direction. Instead, I found calm, reasoned discourse that systematically dismantled the myth of the modern theocracy sought by so many Christian conservatives today.

I share with another reviewer the suspicion that those who accuse Dr. Balmer of anger have not read his book. The text is anything but angry. It is, in fact, rather self-effacing. The author clearly sets out the limits of his own knowledge and does not claim for himself any particular "gifts of the Spirit" that sharpen his insights or validate his positions. He writes with gentleness and compassion about people who consistently behave dishonestly and who pervert the spiritual values to which they claim exclusive right yet one never senses that he is out to exact revenge on political or religious enemies. Though he deals with political issues from beginning to end, Dr. Balmer's book is more a cri de coeur than a polemic.

Dr. Balmer invites people to think. Alas, several of the reviews on this site amply demonstrate that many will not.

Randal Balmer writes as one who has a love/hate relationship with evangelicalism. He loves the passion for the gospel, and loves the history of the evangelical movement. However he is greatly troubled by the rise of the religious right, their abandonment of traditional evangelical values and their claim to speak for the Christian community. This book is a needed corrective.

Balmer first examines the nature of evangelicalism and its history, showing that it has not always been in bed with the republican party. He shows how evangelicalism shifted to the Republican Party during the Carter Administration, and tells tales from the inside about how the focus shifted from the attack on the evangelical subculture due to government tring to revoke the tax emempt status of Bob Jones University, to abortion, simply seeking to find an issue the movement leaders could coalesce around. He examines the retreat of Baptists from their traditional position (best stated by Roger Williams and John Leland) in favor of seperation of church and state to a community that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

Balmer writes as an endangered species-an evangelical who is socially/politically liberal because he takes scripture seriouslly. He attacks the selective literalism of the religous right and calls us to take the call of scripture to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God seriously.

Advice-read with an awareness of where you are in the hermaneutic circle and this can be a quite useful book. It places Balmer in the company of Jim Wallis (God's Politics) as an important voice of the christian left.

Speaking as both an evangelical and a professor of American history, Randall Balmer offers an insightful and penetrating look at the underbelly of the Religious Right and how this group has become champions of their own socio-political agenda instead of messengers of the "Good News." Balmer provides an in depth and thoughtful historical analysis as to how the Religious Right came to dominate the evangelical wing of the Church. This committed Christian speaks with authority and conviction as one, who has traveled the country and witnessed firsthand the devastation this new group of evangelicals has wrought upon the faith.

In addition to his credentials as a professor of American religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, Randall Balmer writes as an insider who was born, raised, and educated within conservative evangelicalism. In addition to affirming his evangelical identity, he also declares himself a political liberal. Balmer has written elsewhere how and why he remains grateful for his Christian heritage despite significance ambivalence (Growing Pains; Learning to Love My Father's Faith, and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America), but in his most recent book his ambivalence turns to acerbic vilification.

Evangelicalism's marriage to conservative politics, Balmer says, has poisoned public discourse, distorted the Gospel so that it barely resembles the message of Jesus, betrayed its nineteenth-century forbears who were in the vanguard of progressive causes like abolition, and alienated a sizeable number of fellow-evangelicals who have tired of explaining to their friends that their Christian faith "does not mean that we take our marching orders from James Dobson or Karl Rove." After a brief introduction he devotes successive chapters to the religious right's litmus tests --abortion, homosexuality, first amendment disestablishment (including the "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore), school vouchers and public education, creationism, and the environment. Throughout his book Balmer argues that the right has often acted not out of moral principle but for political expedience. For example, school vouchers go overwhelmingly to religious schools and to wealthy people; would right wingers lobby for the issue so hard if vouchers were given only to families whose household income was below a certain threshold? Or again, if evangelicals really cared about abortion, why have they done so little about it, even though they have controlled the White House and Congress, or why have they been so silent about specifics (jail a doctor who performed an abortion?)? Instead of "pandering for power," Balmer calls evangelicals to the renunciation of power, for true religion, he believes, flourishes at the fringes. Instead of creating their own intellectual, cultural, and social ghettos, evangelicals ought to seek the common good of all society.

I happen to agree with Balmer on many issues, but his book suffers from its polemical tone. In the last few pages, for example, he disses the "minions" and "bloviating preachers" of the religious right who, he is sure, will vilify him for his brave honesty. His patronizing style, though, only plays into the hands of the people he might have reached, and so decreases his readership and entrenches stereotypes on both sides. Balmer also neglects material that does not fit his simple narrative. I appreciated his argument that most evangelicals did not object to abortion because of Roe v. Wade, but some important figures like HOJ Brown and Francis Schaeffer surely did, and very early on. Intelligent design has problems, but that does not mean Marsden is wrong about hostility toward the faith in secular universities (at least according to my friends at Stanford), or that eminent scholars like John Polkinghorne do not have good things to say about the anthropic principle. Some of his anecdotal examples strike me as fringe, even if scary. At one point he does give credit where it is due, acknowledging the important, if late, change of mind among some evangelicals about environmental concerns; he even suggests that environmental causes might be the wedge that separates conservative believers from conservative political ideology.

I regretted Balmer's sarcastic tone because we need the right to read people like him, and like the more balanced treatments of similar material by Jon Meacham (American Gospel), Jim Wallis (God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It), and pastor Gregory Boyd (The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church). Unlike Balmer, the latter two books affirm that the Gospel judges all political ideologies, left or right. I wish Balmer success in his mission to "slay the dragon of the religious right," and I agree with him that our country would be better for it. But his chances for success would have improved if he had avoided sarcasm and sanctimony.

First, I want to express a bit of frustration. I understand that many reviewers are not actually reviewing the books they rate. I understand that they haven't actually read the books, but are bashing what they imagine the book says instead of what it actually does. But why do those members of the Religious Right when reviewing a book critical of the Religious Right fall back on the tired, inaccurate, irrelevant statement that the author is "angry." The charge against those critical of the Right almost seems to be that it is all about the supposed anger, never about the host of substantive and serious charges they make. Charges of "anger" always try to relocate the debate away from some very questionable positions on the part of the Religious Right and onto some supposed emotional state of the writer. But the truth is, there is no anger in this book and anyone reading it would know that. If Randall Balmer is angry, I would challenge critics of the book to provide quotes that illustrate this. Please provide a page number. In fact, the tone of the book is more sadness and regret than anything else, sadness that so many evangelicals have abandoned so many of their historical positions and their outsider status (which allowed them to criticize the dominate culture) to become instead a culturally embedded and dependent civil religion. The other side of the coin is this: if anyone comes to this book hoping for an angry denunciation of evangelicals, one will go away disappointed.

My background and experience is incredibly similar to Balmer's and I have experienced most of the same frustrations he has. I am a former Southern Baptist (I left for more a more mainstream Baptist denomination after the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a statement at their annual convention that wives should be subservient to their husbands). As a child nothing gave me more pride as a Baptist than the story of Roger Williams and the role Baptists played in making the disestablishment clause a part of the Constitution and a formative principle of American life. Balmer does a great job of getting at the pride many Baptist's felt by his discussion of First Baptist Church of Dallas minister George W. Truett's (W. A. Criswell's predecessor) passionate advocacy of the wall between church and state. I was also proud of the denominations strong embrace of the doctrine of the priesthood of the believers, which entailed that Baptists were not supportive of creeds and refused to hold church members to doctrinal statements. One's beliefs were instead a matter between the individual Christian and God as he or she read the Bible. Today, however, Southern Baptists are passionately trying to destroy the wall between Church and state and, although Balmer doesn't bring this up in his book, Baptist colleges and institutions are driving people out of various positions by forcing them to sign affirmations that they believe all the doctrines laid out in the Baptist Faith and Message statement of beliefs. The Southern Baptist Convention has abandoned nearly everything that made it vital.

Randall Balmer is clearly a deeply devout, somewhat conservative Christian. What so many today fail to realize is that traditionally being theologically conservative actually entailed social beliefs that resulted in what today would be considered progressive political action. Evangelicals were at the forefront of issues in the 19th century such as abolition, women's education, health reform, poor relief, prison reform, the expansion of public education, and a host of other issues. As Balmer correctly points out, William Jennings Bryan, a deeply devout man, was one of the foremost liberals of his age (the Scopes trial tends to obscure his political career and beliefs as a whole). Balmer's lament is focused not merely on the fact that evangelicals have abandoned so many of their historic positions, but have embraced a wide range of profoundly destructive new ones. The problem is not merely that these new positions are harmful to American society, but they will ultimately prove to be destructive to the churches. Although many in the Religious Right are obsessed over the threat that external elements pose for them, in fact the greatest dangers are within the Religious Right: the growing and almost willful embrace of ignorance, a loss of compassion and understanding, the abandonment of centuries' old religious principles, and the lust for political power and the inevitable compromise and cultural accommodation that results.

More and more Christian and evangelical thinkers have been coming out against the hegemony of the Religious Right. The brute fact is that while the Religious Right is very influential, most Christians are not members of the Religious Right (fundamentalists might not regard most Christians as Christians). But even significant numbers of evangelicals are breaking ranks. Especially on environmental issues, as Balmer points out, Christians are speaking out against the dogmas of the Religious Right. Does this presage the beginning of the end of the solidarity of the Religious Right? That would be premature. But we know from a host of public opinion polls that most evangelicals are, in fact, far closer to Democrats on most non-cultural issues. The Republican party has fanatically worked to keep evangelicals in their camp by exploiting wedge issues. As Thomas Frank has pointed out, the result has been that evangelicals across the country vote time and again for a political party that enacts policies inimical to the vast majority of evangelicals, all because of vague promises to deal with cultural issues.

Balmer's book is divided into five chapters dealing with five crucial issues. Each chapter is strengthened by Balmer's analysis of the historical context of each issue. But though he is primarily a historian, what is most compelling about his chapters is the way he confronts the logic of the Religious Right. Moreover, unlike pundits on the Right, he doesn't construct a straw man to argue against, but takes the strongest position of those he is confronting. (When was the last time anyone ever saw a Bill O'Reilly do that? His method is, instead, to absurdly distort some statement or event, and then make something that is absurd due to his distortion absurd. One yearns for the days of William F. Buckley, who did indeed take the strongest case of his opponent.)

The first chapter deals with the way that issues of sexuality have been employed in recent decades by the Religious Right. He notes first that the Religious Right has been amazingly selective in the issues it has chosen to embrace. For instance, although Jesus never uttered a word about either homosexuality or abortion, but a great deal about divorce, the Religious Right has instead focused on the two issues Jesus never addressed instead of the one that he did. In part this was a cultural accommodation on the part of the Religious Right to the growing number of divorces individuals in their churches. Interestingly, the Bible says nothing at any place about abortion (even though it was widely practiced in Palestine and elsewhere during the entire Biblical period--see John Riddle's EVE'S HERBS on Harvard University Press for a history of abortion in the ancient world). The most fascinating part of the chapter--and indeed perhaps of the entire book--is Balmer's explanation of how abortion became THE issue for the Religious Right. He does that by deconstructing the Abortion Myth. According to Religious Right leaders, opposition by evangelicals began immediately on the day Roe v. Wade was decided in favor of Roe and the other claimant in the case. But in fact, Roe v. Wade was greeted with near silence by evangelicals and the best known evangelical Southern Baptist pastor in the United States, W. A. Criswell, actually wrote a editorial strongly supporting the decision (Criswell was long Billy Graham's pastor). What in fact caused the creation of the Religious Right and its involvement in politics was the threat to pull Bob Jones University's tax-exempt status because of school policies that violated civil rights laws. The fear was that if the federal government could intervene in the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones U. (even though it is an outrageously racist institution), all of them might be vulnerable. Balmer learned of this at a meeting of leading Religious Right leaders, and though he was shocked to hear it, he had this confirmed by multiple of the most famous leaders of the movement in America. He also documents the rather late espousal of homosexuality as a wedge issue.

The second chapter deals with a chapter close to my own heart and that I've already noted above: the abandonment of the principle of the separation of church and state by Baptists. I won't say more except to say that for a couple of decades I have been horrified to see Southern Baptists abandon the central part of their own heritage. Chapter Three covers the school voucher movement and the growing emphasis on home schooling, twin developments that could not only destroy education in America but could generate a new underclass as public education is increasingly weakened. Balmer doesn't deal with the tremendous economic harm this could eventually have on America, but economic development always depends on an educated populace. The final two chapters deal with the natural world, first in Chapter Four by taking a new look at the intelligent design movement and then in Chapter Five by looking at a fissure developing among evangelicals as more and more Christians refuse to embrace an exploitationist ideology as taught by industry and advocated by Dominionist religious thinkers.

There are many, many very good books being published to counter the unbiblical and anti-democratic ideas of the Religious Right. Michele Goldberg's KINGDOM COMING is one and evangelical minister Gregory Boyd's THE MYTH OF A CHRISTIAN NATION are two superb ones. But I would put this extremely good book by Randall Balmer up there with any of them. Every evangelical concerned about the future of religion in the US should read it, as should anyone concerned with the health of the nation.

Interesting that readers would focus on Ballmer's stance on abortion and disregard both his larger point about abortion as well as the larger focus of the book. Ballmer happens to think abortion is a bad thing, but that the country would be worse off if the procedure was criminalized. His point is that issues like abortion and homosexuality are what the Christian right focuses on when neither receives all that much attention in the Bible, especially compared to issues related to poverty and compassion.

Helping the poor is mentioned over and over again in the Bible yet the Christian right is all in favor of huge tax breaks for the most well off in American society. As Ballmer states, we can have an argument about whether the public or private sector is better poised to aid the disadvantaged in our society, but the passages about the plight of the poor seem to have been redacted from the version of the Bible that conservative evangelicals take with them to church every Sunday.

The book shines the bright light of hypocrisy on those who, as the prophet Isaiah said in speaking for God, "come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me."

Prof. Randall Balmer wrote this book to show how the Religious Right distorts the faith and threatens America. It is a powerful insider book for all Americans because he is a professor of American religious history, an evangelical Christian and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

His five chapters cover abortion, separation of church and state, school vouchers, creationism and intelligent design and the environment. He elaborates in great details how the Religious Right hijacks and dictates the Republican Party in advancing their agenda with good historical background information so that readers can apprehend. If uncheck, this books warns that Religious Right would turn American from democracy to theocracy.
This book helps readers to ask the following questions
1. What will happen if abortion becomes illegal?
2. What will happen if the Ten Commandments Judge Moore becomes Supreme Court Judge?
3. What will happen to American student standard if public education collapses?
4. What will happen to American cutting edge technologies if creationism and intelligent design replaces science courses?
5. What will happen to American son, grandson and their grandson if Religious Right disregards the environment with a short sight benefit?

As America becomes more pluralistic in culture and religion, especially in the internet age of global village, we need to learn to understand and appreciate our differences to live in a harmonious world to fulfill the Christmas wishes: Thy Kingdom Come, Peace on Earth, Goodwill among Mankind.

I have to admit like one other reviewer that supporters of President Bush will not like this book. Neither will anyone in the Religious Right will like it, but this is perhaps one of the most searing indictments that I have read concering the evangelical movement in America and how a small minority have hijacked it to acheive political gains.
Balmer, himself an evangelical Christian writes his book as a historical survey about the evangelical movement in America , and how unfortunately since the early 1970s, has begun to become more political, leaning to the right. By the 1980s, the religous right has become a force to be reckoned with, influencing the ascendancy of the Reagan-Bush era, the Contract with America, and now the Bush-Cheney era that is in it's twilight.
As a conservative Christian, I have to admit that there are issues that the religious right presents, that any God fearing Bible believing saint would accept; I am pro-life, and am opposed to same-sex marriage. Balmer, however does a brilliant job of showing how the religious right have used these very hot button issues to motivate Christians to vote for the GOP, while at the same time neglecting other important aspects that any Christian that believes in Scripture must follow. Jesus never mentions homosexuality nor abortion in the New Testament, and Paul does address the former in Romans and in other epistles, ( I do not say that they should not be addressed, if we as Christians are to fulfill the divine commission given to us to preach the gospel to every person) but the Lord and the Apostles as well as the prophets of the Old Testament speak about caring for those less fortunate (Does the tax cuts and the refusal to raise the minimum wage in the midst of Congress giving themselves a pay increase fulfill this command?) and exercising proper stewardship of what God has entrusted us with (Does big business and neglect of the environment do this?)
I think instead of reviewing Balmer's book, I wound up preaching. I resonate with Balmer's book because it shares many of the views I have. I appreciate Balmer putting a glossary at the end of his work to dicipher the terms often used by the religious right, so that when members of the group use certain terms, the reader is aware of what they mean.
You may like this book, you may hate this book or dismiss it, but the issues that this and other works, such as Wallis' "God's Politics" and Bob Edgar's "Middle Church" cannot be ignored. The last time I checked, Jesus never was a registered Republican or Democrat.

If someone as understanding and gracious as Professor Randall Balmer, PhD had been my teacher when I was a student at Bob Jones University, I might still consider myself to be a Christian. Of course, if Professor Balmer had ever taught at BJU, he'd be escorted off the campus and banned forever midway through his first lecture. As it turns out, Dr. Balmer is a tenured Professor at Columbia University and has recently published a great work about the state of religion in America.. Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament is a refreshing breath of common sense from a devout, intelligent evangelical Christian who sincerely desires to see his fellow believers return to their rightful roots of Christ's teachings. Whatever happened to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless and caring for those who are ill? Professor Balmer properly sees an evangelical movement that has been hijacked by wealthy sinister conservatives who have no scruples about using Christ, the Bible or faith in general to line their pockets and reward their political allies.


I knew I was in for a treat by the time I reached page ten. He writes, "Selective literalism continues to serve an important function for the Religious Right. It allows them to locate sin outside of the evangelical subculture (or so they think) by designating as especially egregious those dispositions and behaviors, homosexuality and abortion, that they believe characteristic of others, not themselves." Finally, academia (and thanks to this book, the American reading public) is realizing what many of us have known for over a decade. Lives are being destroyed in Christ's name, and Christ must be really pissed off because he didn't come to earth to destroy lives. Yet that's what His "followers" are doing. Professor Balmer's book provides a well-written (and surprisingly succinct, especially for an academician) history of why and how America's Religious Right has veered far from its rightful course since 1980.


Over the last few years I've met many gay men and lesbians who've been driven out of their evangelical churches and homes and away from their supposedly Bible-believing families. Their stories are filled with pain and anguish as they struggled to resolve their inner turmoil only to have the people in their life turn against them in the name of God. Professor Balmer shines the light on the hypocrisy of the Religious Right's "ruse of literalism," i.e. why they take the Bible literally in some places but not in others? For example, why doesn't the RR condemn divorce, which the Bible condemns much more ferociously than either homosexuality or abortion? It's because too many evangelicals have been divorced themselves and the pastors know they'd lose their flocks if they preached against divorce.


More than any scholarly book I've read recently, Professor Balmer draws easy-to-understand distinctions: Abortion should be looked at from two perspectives, legal and moral, and should be treated differently by the government and religion. Religion is best when it works outside the structure of government, not from within. Alabama Judge Roy Moore's--who Prof. Balmer says "makes the Decalogue into a fetish"--points out that Moore's large granite monument of the Ten Commandments actually violates the Second Commandment because it has become the "subject of a perverse idolatry." These distinctions also apply to the issue of gay marriage: "marriage" as it exists in America today is a legal status that shouldn't be denied people because of a professed religious belief.


Professor Balmer's arguments are already so succinct it's difficult to summarize them but I'll try:


· The modern conservative coalition of the "Religious Right" and the republican party began in 1980 with the election of a divorced President, Ronald Reagan. (The "right" solidified when Bob Jones University lost its tax exempt status before the Supreme Court in 1983.) Because divorce could no longer be the scourge of the nation to unite the right, the RR decided to make abortion (and later homosexuality) the primary evil in America. The abortion scourge, however, required some historical revisionism as most evangelicals didn't initially condemn Roe v. Wade in 1973, hence the "abortion myth."


· The Baptists practically invented the idea of "separation between church and state" in the 1600s because the Baptists were such a persecuted minority back then. Now that they're the largest Protestant denomination, they've lost their connection to their roots as they try to turn America into a Baptist theocracy. Professor Balmer quotes Justice Hugo Black, "A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion."


· Wealthy parents who already send their kids to private schools have formed an unholy alliance with members of the RR to fight for school vouchers. The RR merely wants to use taxpayer funds for religious education. "The so-called `school choice' initiative is both a civil rights and a social justice issue, and real Christians, those who take seriously the teachings of Jesus, should be fighting against voucher programs and charter schools because they perpetuate divisions, rather than reconciliation, within society." Amen!


· "Intelligent design" is simply another attempt by Biblical literalists to infiltrate the last bastion to hold out against the Religious Right. "Try spinning the radio dial--the last line of defense against the Right, after the corporatization of media interests, the somnolence of mainline Protestantism, and the wheezing of the Democratic Party, is the academy." Professor Balmer's conclusion, though, is that academic institutions, like the government, shouldn't be used to perpetuate faith--the place for that is the church, and the family.


· The Bible commands us to be good stewards of the earth. True Christians should be interested in protecting the environment. Christians shouldn't simply give up on the earth because they believe that the rapture makes environmentalism meaningless.


Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament concludes with hope: "The Bible I read tells of freedom for captives and deliverance from oppression. It teaches that those who refuse to act with justice or who neglect the plight of those less fortunate have some explaining to do. But the Bible is also about good news. It promises redemption and forgiveness, a chance to start anew and, with divine help, to get it right. My evangelical theology assures me that no one, not even Karl Rove or James Dobson, lies beyond the reach of redemption and that even a people led astray can find their way home. That sounds like very good news to me. Very good news indeed."

True to his word, Balmer writes as a jilted lover. He wastes no time in launching into an account the Religious Right's fixation on abortion and homosexuality, which he sees as paradigmatic of what is wrong with the Religious Right. According to Balmer, their fixation is not a function of religious or moral conviction so much as a result of political expediency.

The social evil against which conservative Christians railed most vehemently was divorce until it was demonstrated that conservative Christians led the nation in divorce rate (they also abandoned evangelical Christian president, Jimmy Carter in favor of divorcee Ronald Reagan). "To get from divorce to abortion in the early 1980s, the leaders of the Religious Right resorted to a favorite evangelical redoubt, the RUSE OF SELECTIVE LITERALISM. The Religious Right simply ignored or explained away Jesus' admonitions about divorce and focused instead on a political issue that had traction at the time." (Emphasis added) 8.

"Selective literalism continues to serve an important function for the Religious Right. It allows them to locate sin outside of the evangelical subculture (or so they think) by designating as especially egregious those dispositions and behaviors, homosexuality and abortion, that they believe characteristic of others, not themselves. This externalization of the enemy is a favorite tactic of fundamentalists everywhere, be they Muslim fundamentalists of the members of the Religious Right." 10.

Other issues championed by the Religious Right strike Balmer as equally disingenuous and/or misguided:

Prayer in schools -- Jesus criticized those who made prayer into a spectator sport - "go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father."

Creationism -- Until the intelligent design creationists "can devise experiments consistent with the scientific method to test their claims, they should stop parading as scientists." 140. "Intelligent design is religion, not science and the proper venue for the propagation of faith is the home or the church, not the university." 138.

Home schooling -- "For much of the twentieth century, evangelicals found comfort within their subculture as a place of refuge from the outside world, which they came increasingly to regard as both corrupt and corrupting. The homeschool movement and the impulse to send children to religious schools merely represent an extension of that fortress mentality." 107.

Anti-environmentalism - "for decades, evangelicals have neglected the environment because it seemed to them unimportant in their grander scheme of biblical interpretation." 145. Now groups such as the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship which is a coalition of Religious Right leaders aiming to counteract the environmental movement, with support from James Dobson, Charles Colson among other high profile of the Religious Right, simply "echo the pro-business and antiregulatory sentiments of political conservatives." 154.

Torture - unconscionable silence. [Who Would Jesus Torture?]

Perhaps most disturbing of all is how "Leaders of the Religious Right [Dobson and others] have expressed their disdain for toleration and for pluralism itself." 90. "Their ideology, laced as it is with the rhetoric of militarism, represents a betrayal of the faith. The shameless pursuit of affluence and power and political influence has led the Religious Right into shady alliances and has brought dishonor to the gospel." 189.

Balmer is one of a growing number of evangelical Christians that are speaking out against the curse of a militant religiosity in America that calls itself Christian. It's about time.