My monograph, Prefiguring the Past: Conservative Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building on the Right, is under advance contract with the University Press of Kansas as part of the Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law series. Employing archival research and focusing on a two-decade period that ranges from 1965-1985, my book reevaluates the origins and aims of the New Christian Right (NCR), and I argue that the movement was–and continues to be–motivated not by backlash, as scholars and pundits alike contend, but by a fundamental rejection of the tenets of liberal democracy and a desire to radically alter the American political landscape. In short, I propose a fundamental reconsideration of how we understand Right-wing Christian political organizing and activism. 

In the process of examining the development of the NCR, I revisit the relationship between the New Right (an ostensibly secular radical conservative movement led by a group of conservative Catholics) and the largely Protestant movement termed the Christian Right. In doing so, I draw new attention to the influence of conservative Catholic thought on the development of the NCR. A central contention of the book is that the New Right should not be read as a secular movement, but rather as one that reflected the conservative Catholic worldview of many of its most influential activists.

I also show how these groups built an enduring and powerful political coalition by instrumentalizing a shared identity of victimhood to stitch together a plurality of right-wing single issue groups. My work demonstrates that the discourse of victimization served two purposes: On one hand, it helped forge a shared and collective identity among conservative Catholics and Protestants, which was necessary for the political mobilization of the broader NCR movement. On the other hand, it helped obscure the radicality of the NCR by framing the movement’s aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive. 

Rather than understand the New Christian Right as a reactionary movement, I argue it was motivated by the desire to enact a proactive supremacist political agenda that was – and continues to be – dependent on manufacturing an imagined past and prefigurative present for its success, a process I term prefigurative traditionalism. As of September 15th, 2022, a complete manuscript draft has been submitted to the press.

I apply the framework of prefigurative traditionalism to other manifestations of the Christian Right, including the Christian Identity and Quiverfull movements, in a forthcoming book chapter, titled “Tomorrow’s Past Today: The Prefigurative Construction of Christian Right Belonging.” The chapter will appear in an edited collection of essays stemming from the American Examples (AE) collaborative working group and published by the University of Alabama Press. AE brings together a diverse cohort of early career scholars to foster an interdisciplinary and supportive community of scholars whose work focuses on religion in America, and I was fortunate to participate as part of the 2021 cohort. I remain in community with my AE cohort and look forward to interdisciplinary collaborations in the future.