Erecting the Pulpit
Muscular Christianity from Teddy Roosevelt to Donald Trump
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Erecting the Pulpit
Narrated by:
Jennifer Woodward
Buy Now for £14.49
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Narrated by:
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Jennifer Woodward
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By:
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Amy Laura Hall
Examines a powerful yet overlooked form of Christian Nationalism—one that fuses faith, masculinity, capitalism, and political power under the guise of moral leadership. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s “Muscular Christianity” and tracing the conceit of faithful and fit male leadership through figures like Billy Graham and cultural institutions like National Prayer Breakfasts and modern mega-churches, and flourishing under the administration of Donald Trump, Erecting the Pulpit reveals how religious rhetoric has been wielded to sanctify power and divide communities.
Drawing on her firsthand experiences and years of conversations with participants—from Cowboy Churches to NASCAR chaplaincies and storefront churches with folding chairs to meetings with the parachurch group Young Life—theologian Amy Laura Hall examines the cultural and political forces that have made evangelicalism “ambient” while consolidating wealth and influence. At a time when politicians are expected to pray in public and religious themes shape public policy, Hall offers a vivid, incisive exploration of how religious expressions of faith in the United States have been strategically repackaged to sustain political and economic hierarchies and keep women subservient to men.©2026 Amy Laura Hall (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic reviews
In this pugnacious exposé, Hall incisively explores the evolution and influence of a form of Christian nationalism ... [and] persuasively reveals how muscular Christianity has remade the American religious landscape in ways both overt and subtle. Readers will find much to chew on.
In Erecting the Pulpit, Hall offers a courageous and impressively researched account of how faith, masculinity, and political power have been braided together across American history. Drawing on a lifetime of experience — from Cowboy Churches to elite divinity schools — Hall shines a light on evangelicalism with precision and moral seriousness. This is the book our moment demands: rigorously documented, theologically literate, and written with the clear-eyed passion of someone raised in a world where power masquerades as prayer. (Greg Grandin, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University, author of America, América)
Erecting the Pulpit is a powerful account of how faith, masculinity, and political power became intertwined in modern America. With clarity and insight, Amy Laura Hall traces the rise of ‘muscular Christianity’ and shows how its values of leadership and moral authority continue to shape public life today. This is an eye-opening and deeply relevant book. (Erica Edwards)
We have excellent accounts of authoritarian strongman politics—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the top voice among them, has mapped its seductions with precision—but the dominant literature on authoritarianism has a conspicuous blind spot: it largely fails to reckon with the religious machinery that makes the strongman not only legible but holy, indeed, messianic. Writing with the acuity of a scholar and the verve of a journalist, Amy Laura Hall, one of today’s leading voices in religious ethics, fills that gap with surgical force. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of "the religion of whiteness," we might say Hall has mapped, with unprecedented precision, the religion of white masculinity—its Victorian origins, its anti-labor reflexes, its prayer breakfasts and jumbo screens, its global authoritarian networks. This is the book that explains Trump 2.0 not as a grotesque interruption of American Christianity but as its most candid expression—the harvest of a very long and very deliberate planting. The dominant accounts of authoritarianism have left the pulpit out of the picture. Hall puts it back—and erects it, so to speak, in our faces. Indispensable. (J. Kameron Carter)
This book is an irreverent and deeply satisfying book, filled with incisive reporting, unexpected insight and dry wit. It is rare to find an academic book that is this much fun. (Carl Elliott)
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