Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want?

by Tad DeLay, Clayton Crockett (Foreword)

What does the white evangelical want? In our moment of crisis and rage, this question is everywhere. Scholars ask from where its desires emerged, pundits divine its political future, and the public asks how we lapsed into social chaos. For their part, white evangelicals feel misunderstood while failing to see the direction of their ambitions. We must interrogate its aims not only through its past or current trends but also through the various fantasies by which it rejects and enlivens reality.

Against traces five zones of opposition: future, knowledge, sexuality, reality, and society. If climate change is the greatest threat civilization has ever faced, then a faith aiding collapse must face analysis. If it swims in assured forgiveness, it feels no shame for its sins against humanity. If it wants a king, it threatens democracy. If it veils xenophobia, it shall be ever more cruel. In a critical and accessible history of odd ideas, DeLay chronicles the past and sketches its troubling future. It might die, but what’s certain is that a faith built on nostalgia and supremacy won’t moderate. We live in dangerous times, so let us consider its justifications, turmoil, appetite, and catastrophe.

Genres: Theology, Nonfiction, Religion, Politics, Philosophy

192 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2019

About the author

Tad DeLay, PhD is a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary critical theorist. His books include Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (2024), Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? (2019), The Cynic & the Fool (2017), and God Is Unconscious (2015). He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Baltimore.

Reviews

[ellen grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is 30% about religion and 70% about white supremacy which is fine but just call your book something else. Also does a little “Fascism happened because people wanted Fascism”

[Justin Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tad Delay’s alphabet skips from E to G, because he is out of F’s to give.

Delay sees a world completely on fire. Whether it’s the climate crisis or the rise of fascism, the world has been set ablaze, and he knows who held the matches: White evangelicals.

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https://www.justinrphillips.com/blog/...

[Kelvin Pau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chilling, but important.

[John smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible important book about the most dangerous mass movement in the U.S.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delay is a thoughtful insider critic of the modern evangelical movement. As a philosophy professor and psychoanalyst, his contribution and critique are very important at the time. Delay focuses on the negative insertion of "against" that so consumes fundamentalist American nationalistic evangelicals and provides a variety of possible diagnoses to help readers think through some of the core structural issues within modern evangelicalism. At times his critique is a little too biting, but I think I'd much rather him err on that side than be too gracious simply for the sake of the book's focus. Perhaps a bit of that same evangelical rage is part of Delay's background as well. I know it is in mine and it is very hard to allow harbor space for dialogue at certain moments from both the left and the right. Delay thinks a bit through this process of dialogue and ultimately favors a form of personal censorship that hinges on others' well-being. That may go slightly too far, and perhaps I'd rather just chalk it up to discernment in conversation, but that's quite an idealistic assumption looking at the national conversation and religion right now.

[Cameron Fulks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very eye opening if heavy handed at moments