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evangelical (18), at the end of his book Balmer does point those interested in further reading to Daniel K. Williams’s God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012) (113). Williams’s book is a curious suggestion coming from Balmer, as it is a direct refutation of the canard Balmer is advancing—that twentieth century evangelicals were apolitical until the Religious Right came along in the 1970s. Williams is not a lone voice in the historiography on this point. Scholars such as Darren Dochuck have won prestigious awards for meticulously detailing how, contrary to Balmer’s memories, evangelicals in fact were politically active and organizing decades before the Religious Right emerged. Meanwhile, scholars such as Carolyn Dupont have demonstrated how southern white evangelicals were engaged politically to fight against civil rights reforms throughout the South as early as the late 1940s. Balmer’s failure to incorporate the work of scholars like Dupont into his analysis is particularly perplexing. For a book arguing that racism rather than reproductive rights motivated evangelical political action, scholarship demonstrating the longer history of a racialized evangelicalism would have bolstered Balmer’s argument. But this neglect raises another, and perhaps most consequential, problem with Bad Faith: its overly reductionist explanation of the rise of the Religious Right. While race unquestionably played a role in the political resurgence of conservative evangelicals in the 1970s, it by no means was the singular cause Balmer portrays it as being in this book. Evangelical Christians were upset that the federal government began intervening in their private schools, to be sure. But as scholars from Rick Perlstein to Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields to William Martin—the latter’s book also appears as suggested reading at the end of Balmer’s book—have exhaustively shown, evangelicals by the 1970s were also concerned about feminism, secular humanism, and gay rights. And yes, some were even concerned about abortion. But rather than putting his work in conversation with the burgeoning scholarship on this topic in a way that would more fully explain the rise and continuing influence of the Religious Right, Balmer has written an overly simplistic tale that, while making for a quick and accessible read, is simply unsupported by current scholarship. Bad faith indeed.