The Nature of the Religious Right

Pogue carefully delineates the backtracking of many conservative evangelicals on environmentalism, even as he presents the valiant but unsuccessful efforts of the Evangelical Environmental Network's Ron Sider and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, among other evangelicals, to forestall this abandonment of environmental stewardship.

~The Chrisitan Century

This book offers an important, persuasive corrective to the history of religious conservatism. Pogue argues that Evangelicals' dogmatic opposition of environmentalism is historically contingent rather than an inevitable result of theology and political ideology. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Pogue documents a doctrine of "Christian environmental stewardship" that was clearly articulated among prominent Evangelicals beginning in the late 1960s and shows how this environmentalism was purged from the religious Right only in the early 1990s. Though the book's accounting of evangelical theology, particularly the analysis of "the natural" and a land-based nationalism, will not particularly surprise scholars, Pogue successfully shows how these ideas might have been compatible with early conceptions of stewardship long before being deployed to oppose actions protecting the environment. The book also offers lessons for the environmental movement, noting that the first Earth Day activists' critique of Christianity helped lay the groundwork for Evangelicals' eventual rejection of environmentalism. Required reading for historians and analysts of the conservative movement, the religious Right, and/or the environmental movement.

~Choice