The Shadow Gospel

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A novel account of the culture wars and Evangelical influence in the United States that traces the 80-year rise of a quasi-religious anti-liberal demonology. When people talk about the chaotic, increasingly precarious political landscape in the United States, they often blame polarization and the culture wars. In The Shadow Gospel , Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway tell a very different story. Analyzing eighty years of densely overlapping religious and secular messages preaching the dangers of liberalism, the book argues that the fracture and chaos in U.S. politics isn’t the result of a clean split between left and right. Instead, it’s a split between the shadow gospel’s quasi-religious anti-liberal demonology—the vague sense that an evil leftist force is threatening to destroy American society—and the people accused of being the liberal devil. A shadow gospel framework helps contextualize the violence of January 6, 2021, the