There are 80 million born again Christians of voting age in the United States, including George W. Bush. Jesus Christ is a personal friend of every one of them. They know that Jesus wants them to vote Republican. Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Evangelical Christians have constituted one of the most powerful interest groups in the USA. Their money and their energy have helped to drive a socially conservative agenda to the centre of American national life. They wield veto power over the Republican party’s presidential candidates and decide the outcome of elections across vast areas of the political landscape. And they have begun to play an important role in America’s foreign policy.
Despite a history of robust anti-Semitism, they have built a powerful alliance with the Israeli right. From financial aid to Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories to the religious rhetoric of the War on Terror, Evangelical leaders are blithely creating a world fit for Apocalypse. Their brand of Christianity is the fastest-growing social movement in the slums of Africa and Latin America. Barbara Victor explores the changes in the American political system that evangelical Christianity has already wrought and the changes it is likely to bring in the years ahead. She reveals a complex and contradictory political process in which secular neo-conservatives have allied themselves with fundamentalists to pursue an agenda of aggression overseas and repression at home. It is a process in which religious sentiment miraculously transforms into money and political advantage, in which private virtues become public vices, and the founding principles of a free republic are attacked by self-declared patriots.