Diane Winston’s Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision addresses a puzzle of Ronald Reagan’s rise from a struggling president with a 35 percent approval rating into a lasting symbolic touchstone for Republican success. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the interplay among media, religion, and politics in 1983, this book illustrates how Reagan succeeded in [religious] “righting” the country under the most unlikely of circumstances. In doing so, Winston provides valuable insights into how religious right movements coalesce and reproduce their strategies, which are still in use decades later. Righting the American Dream poses a challenge to any treatments of similar movements that fail to center religion and news media ecosystems when examining alt-right and religious right movements in American politics.

Winston claims that Reagan’s political platform centered a religious national worldview, termed an American religious imaginary, which he used to alter the informational ecosystem in favor of a more evangelical vision of American identity. While Winston notes there have been varied and diverse religious imaginaries throughout American history – from civil religion to American exceptionalism, etc. Reagan’s American religious imaginary comprised a clustered set of religious, economic, and political beliefs, which had the ability to shape national identity through adherence to norms about how to live a “normal” or “correct” American life (2). Reagan’s vision was nothing new, but his innovation was to center morality and religion in his rhetoric. In doing so, he was able to weave together conservative economic and exceptionalist messaging into a cogent, more digestible platform for public and pundit consumption.

Of course, ideologies in a vacuum have no power to shape a nation. Through Winston’s chapters, she skillfully uncovers how Reagan’s disciplined messaging was chronically reproduced, often word-for-word, by the bulk of US news media organizations at the time. The result, Winston argues, is that the country changed what it thought was appropriate to discuss in the realm of politics, as well as how they talked about politics. Reagan, with the assistance of the news media, steered American’s new “normal” toward the religious right’s direction. Public discourse converged, and the parameters of public debate, typically set by the news media, were set by Reagan himself with little adjustment from journalists or news media outlets (9).

The book starts with an examination of the relationship between religion and the news media in the US, which is followed by the inclusion of helpful overviews of the US historical (Chapter 2) and religious contexts (Chapter 3) preceding Reagan’s presidency. Chapter 3 has the advantage of demonstrating the grassroots nature of Reagan’s appeal among the nation’s evangelicals, which offers a nice balance to an otherwise elite-centered argument. Meanwhile, Chapter 4 takes the classic top-down approach to documenting Reagan’s religious strategy of persuasion, highlighting the 1983 cases of the Cold War and the AIDS crisis to highlight Reagan’s approach to proselytizing evangelical Protestant language to attract religious insiders unbeknownst to secular outsiders who are unfamiliar with these forms of “God talk.” The book’s remaining chapters examine the history surrounding different cases in support of Winston’s argument, including an overview of Reagan’s masterful manipulation of a foreign policy issue – specifically, the press coverage with the US mission in Grenada (Chapter 5), and Reagan’s greatest success in reshaping the country’s overarching policy mood on a domestic issue, his fight against the welfare state (Chapter 6). Throughout the book’s chapters, Winston skillfully details how the US news media was complicit in the normalization of the new religious imaginary, with grave consequences for race and gender relations, shared definitions of citizenship, and notions of who is responsible for the well-being of a nation.

It is impossible to read Righting the American Dream without applying its insights to the growth of the Tea Party and Christian nationalism movements in more recent decades, making her contribution highly applicable to contemporary US politics. Furthermore, Winston succeeds in delivering a compelling answer to how a once-unpopular national leader was able to change a nation’s cultural attachments by using the news media to market Christian conservatism to a skeptical US public. Some critics would argue that Winston’s cases omit important alternative factors driving Reagan’s desired policy outcomes, while others would claim that the American religious imaginary is perhaps more appropriately characterized as a form of civil religion or Christian nationalism. However, these minor critiques do not detract from the book’s strength, which lies in its centering of the news media, a crucial factor often missing from the scholarly discussions of religious ideologies and social movements in American politics.

Winston’s chapters provide answers to big questions of interest to political scientists, as well as political communications and religion scholars, about the news media, religious narratives, and their role in democratic backsliding. For scholars of religion and politics, Winston’s book provides a compelling historical analysis that lays bare the foundation upon which the Christian nationalism movement was built in American politics. I highly recommend this book to scholars of religion and politics, media and politics, or American journalism, as it offers an accessible reading for undergraduate classes and pairs nicely with other contemporary treatments addressing the relationship between religion and journalism.