The 1960s left us with some striking images of American universities: Berkeley activists orating about free speech atop a surrounded police car; Harvard SDSers waylaying then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Columbia student radicals occupying campus buildings; and black militant Cornell students brandishing rifles, to name just a few. Tellingly, the most powerful and notorious image of campus protest is that of a teenage runaway, arms outstretched...

By tracking the political evolution of such influential leaders as Patrick Buchanan, Michael Novak, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, and importantly their constituencies, Heineman reveals the profoundly religious nature of contemporary conservatism. His book offers look at the social history of moral politics over the last three decades and the still-tremorous aftershocks of the New Deal.