The Restless Evangelicals by Caleb Stegall

The Restless Evangelicals

Caleb Stegall on Finding the Common Good in an Augustinian Republic

Newsweek proclaimed 1976 the “year of the evangelical.” The following thirty-odd years saw Evangelical Christians become a political force, playing a key role in the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, the 1994 GOP Congressional take-over, the impeachment battles of the late 1990s, and the two-term presidency of George W. Bush.

The year 2008, however, will likely be remembered as the year the Evangelical political consensus—which had cohered so strongly around family values, industrial capitalism, and American exceptionalism—fell apart.

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Caleb Stegall is a lawyer and writer in Perry, Kansas. His forthcoming book on the history of prairie populism and the future of American regionalism is due out from ISI Books in 2009. He and his wife Ann have five boys and attend Grace Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Kansas, where Stegall serves as a ruling elder.

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