Theology, Tragedy, and Farce: Protestants and Conservatism from the Puritans to the Proud Boys.

J. Russell Hawkins, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy. One is hard pressed to think of any contemporary Protestant conservatives who would qualify as important intellectuals, but the entire intellectual train of conservatism can be seen in the Protestant right-wing of the present day, albeit boiled down to simplified nuggets of conventional conservative wisdom. White Protestant conservatives of the civil rights era take center stage in J. Russell Hawkins's I The Bible Told Them So i , a study of white Southern evangelical resistance to desegregation. Later in the book, we begin to see the dissociation of Protestantism and conservatism, as conservative Protestants endorsed laissez-faire free-market capitalism, something that would have horrified their ancestors, and understood the state as the enemy rather than the guarantor of good Christian order. [Extracted from the article]