Coleman, “Actors of History?”

Coleman, Simon. 2011. Actors of History? Religion, Politics, and “Reality” within the Protestant Right in America. In Religion, Politics, and Globalization: Anthropological Approaches. Edited by Galina Lindquist and Don Handelman. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

From the first paragraph: “To a supposedly secular Europe, and even to skeptical anthropologists, the confluence of religion and politics in America remains a source of bemusement. Yet it shows no sign of disappearing – rather the reverse. In this chapter I expire the past and present of what has become the Christian, and more specifically the Protestant, Right in the United States . . . I hope to thereby capture some of the ways in which an over-hasty conflation of secularity with modernity cannot begin to deal with the ambiguities and accommodations involved in the expression of religious commitment within contemporary political, legal, and social arenas in the United States.”