Excerpts: “In this sense, his view of government departs significantly from the Augustinian/Lutheran view and looks more like the extreme version of Calvinism that informed everyday life in Puritan new England or the medieval Catholic view of government that burned heretics at the stake” (p. 126).

“Another religious-liberty issue that concerns many of the court evangelicals is the clause in the IRS tax code commonly referred to as the Johnson Amendment. The Johnson Amendment is a part of the code that forbids tax-exempt organizations such as churches from endorsing political candidates” (p. 141-142).

“In the end, the practice of nostalgia is inherently selfish because it focuses entirely on our own experience of the past and not on the experience of others” (p. 159).

“The historian Christopher Lasch once wrote this: ‘Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hopes implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to most who lack it'” (p. 184).

“Hopelessness causes us to direct our gaze backward toward worlds we can never recover. It causes us to imagine a future filled with horror. Tyrants focus our attention on the desperate nature of our circumstances and the ‘carnage’ of the social and cultural landscape that they claim to have the power to heal” (p. 185).

Fea, John (2018). Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.