Sharlet: D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power, offers this helpful corrective to a recent post in which I wrongly described him as conservative:

Thanks for your recent post about my thoughts on the future of the Religious Right. I have not yet read Bivins’ book, but I agree with the book’s premise. As I’ve written before, social movements don’t need a god to succeed, but they do need a devil. American evangelicalism has long succeeded as a movement because of the unity that has emerged from common enemies. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was atheistic communism (as your work has documented), but as historians such as John Boles have shown, slavery provided a similar rallying cry for 19th century evangelicals (on both sides of the abolitionist movement) as did Catholicism in the 17th and 18th centuries.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s fair that you described me in your most recent post as a “more conservative” scholar. I suppose if one studies elites, that can lend itself to such a descriptor in terms of the content of one’s work. But I work very hard to be centrist in my analyses and examples, shaped in large part by my mentor, Bob Wuthnow. That’s how I would prefer to be seen, and for my next research project—where I’m looking at the networks, upbringing, and motivations of top leaders in this country—I will bring that same sensibility to my research and my writing.