UNHOLY

UNHOLY is a stunning feat of reportage that explains one of the central mysteries of the Trump era: the unholy marriage of Trump and the Evangelicals, as officiated by the alt-right.

Why did so many Evangelicals turn out to vote for Donald Trump, a serial philanderer with questionable conservative credentials who seems to defy Christian values with his every utterance? To a reporter like Sarah Posner, who has been covering the religious right for decades, the answer turns out to be far more intuitive than one might think.
In this taut and meticulously reported inquiry, Posner digs deep into the radical history of the religious right to reveal how issues of race and xenophobia have always been at the movement's core, and how religion has been used to cloak anxieties about perceived threats to a white, Christian America. Fueled by an anti-democratic impulse, and united by this narrative of reverse victimization, the religious right and the alt-right support a common agenda--and are actively using the erosion of democratic norms to roll back civil rights advances, stock the judiciary with hard-right judges, defang and deregulate federal agencies, and undermine the credibility of the free press. Increasingly, this formidable bloc is also forging ties with European far right groups, giving momentum to a truly global movement forecasted to last long after the Trump era.

Revelatory and engrossing, UNHOLY offers a deeper understanding of the ideological underpinnings and forces influencing the course of Republican politics. This is a book that must be read by anyone who has interest in the future of American democracy.

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations. Her investigative reporting - and more often than not on religious right in Republican politics - has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New Republic, HuffPost, and Talking Points Memo. Her coverage and analysis of politics and religion has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, VICE, Politico, and many other outlets. She graduated from Wesleyan University and has a law degree from the University of Virginia. She covered the 2016 presidential campaign, the rise of Donald Trump, and the rise of the alt-right as a reporter with the Type Investigations at The Nation Institute. Her October 2016 article for Mother Jones, co-authored with David Neiwert, "How Donald Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream," won a Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation.