The Campaign for (White) Christian America: Lauren R. Kerby in Conversation with Jeff Sharlet

As the 2020 presidential election nears, Lauren R. Kerby and Jeff Sharlet discussed the politics of white evangelicals in the U.S. today. Kerby's book, Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation's Capital and Redeem a Christian America, offers a starting point for this important conversation about how race, nationalism, and Christianity become entangled for many white evangelicals through what they learn from their leaders about American history. Their political commitments are baffling to many observers, but this conversation will explore how white evangelicals’ relationship to the nation offers a key to understanding their continued allegiance to Donald Trump. Lauren R. Kerby is a lecturer on religious studies at Harvard Divinity School and the education specialist for the Religious Literacy Project. She earned her PhD from Boston University. She is the author of Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation's Capital and Redeem a Christian America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Jeff Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of seven books including the national bestseller The Family, recently adapted into a Netflix documentary series of the same name, and This Brilliant Darkness. Sharlet is an editor at large for VQR and a contributor to publications including Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and GQ, for which his reporting on anti-LGBTQ+ crusades in Russia won the National Magazine Award. Full transcript here: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2020/10/07/video-campaign-white-christian-america-lauren-r-kerby-conversation-jeff-sharlet