Author: Lahr, Angela M.
Title: Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares : The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism
Description: New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. orig.boards. 24x15cm, viii,281 pp.. Minor rubbing. VG. ¶ The Religious Right came to prominence in the early 1980s, but it was born during the early Cold War. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, driven by a fierce opposition to communism, led evangelicals out of the political wilderness they'd inhabited since the Scopes trial and into a much more active engagement with the important issues of the day. How did the conservative evangelical culture move into the political mainstream? Angela Lahr seeks to answer this important question. She shows how evangelicals, who had felt marginalized by American culture, drew upon their eschatological belief in the Second Coming of Christ and a subsequent glorious millennium to find common cause with more mainstream Americans who also feared a a 'soon-coming end,' albeit from nuclear war. In the early postwar climate of nuclear fear and anticommunism, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism embraced by many evangelicals meshed very well with the "secular apocalyptic" mood of a society equally terrified of the Bomb and of communism. She argues that the development of the bomb, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with evangelical end-times theology to shape conservative evangelical political identity and to influence secular views...." - publisher's description.

Keywords: American Political History, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Millennialism, United States, Cold War, Christian Doctrine, Church Politics,