The Religious Right has not always existed. White evangelicals have not always been the guardians of far-right immigration policies and patriarchal models of the family. In the 19th century, they were often progressive activists fighting for labor rights, abolition, and women’s suffrage. As the example of Jimmy Carter shows, they were a visible and influential part of American politics into the 1970s. How did they transform into the scions of Christian nationalism? Brad explores this history with Professor Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College on the initial episode of The Orange Wave: A History of the Religious Right Since 1960.

For access to the full series, click here: https://irreverent.supportingcast.fm/products/the-orange-wave-a-history-of-the-religious-right-since-1960

Randall Balmer is the John Philips Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth College. He earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before coming to Dartmouth in 2012. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008.

Suggested Reading: 

Randall Balmer, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (2014)

Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America (2006), Chapter 1.

Mark Noll, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and Finney, Chapters 6 and 7.