In this book, David E. Settje takes for granted that Christians in America judge their nation's government and political officials by moral and theological standards. So common is such moral reasoning, based on historic Christian convictions, that few scholars stand back to wonder about the anomalies involved. A nation founded without an official religion or government agencies to differentiate better faith communities from worse ones regularly receives criticism from America's churches for veering from Christian norms. Settje is not unusual in refusing to pull back the curtain on Protestant estimates of Richard M. Nixon's deceit during the Watergate Scandal. That is too bad.
The timing of this book so close to the presidency of Donald Trump might prompt readers to think the author had the forty-fifth president in mind when conceiving of the churches and Watergate. In point of fact, as he acknowledges in the introduction, in 2005 Settje started research “hardly knowing” what was coming. Although the parallels drawn between Trump and Nixon and the churches’ responses are obvious, Settje's purpose is to discern when Protestantism “became so enmeshed in partisan politics.” Charting Christian assessments of Watergate functions as part of an answer to that question.
For evidence, Settje turns to the official documents (and in-house church magazines) of five denominations and the periodicals of ecumenical mainline and evangelical Protestants. This scope allows the author to follow the statements of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS), the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the United Church of Christ. The ecumenical publications he used were Christian Century (mainline) and Christianity Today (evangelical). Settje, who teaches at Concordia University Chicago, may appear to feature American Lutherans more than others thanks to his institutional affiliation. But one of several strengths of the book, along with examining denominations (and thereby recognizing the importance of institutional religion), is making Lutherans, a large but often ignored sector of American Protestantism, part of the conversation.
In addition to using this source material, Settje organizes his analysis around the Watergate timeline. The story begins in June of 1972 to take the temperature of Protestant perceptions of Nixon prior to the scandal. It then follows the news of the break-in, obstruction from the White House, judicial investigation, and congressional inquiry, up to the conclusion of the narrative with Nixon's resignation. That strategy is to blame for a weakness in the book, namely, a somewhat mechanical story, chapter by chapter, of breaking news followed by church reactions. Had Settje devoted chapters to each denomination and ecumenical magazine, he would have let religion set the agenda. Instead, the book reads as a chronology of Watergate with the churches always in a position of response.
The point that emerges has less to say about the origins of Protestant political polarization than it does about the way the Left-Right political spectrum corresponds to the liberal-conservative Protestant theological divide. Settje follows the script of many scholars and journalists of identifying liberal theology with left-of-center politics, and conservative theology with right-of-center politics. But those categories deserve a lot more unpacking and this book was a chance to do it, say, by contrasting the theology of the LCMS with that of mainstream evangelical views at Christianity Today, or by looking at the ways that holiness teaching in the black church differs from the mainstream liberal theology of Christian Century. The same goes for politics where conservative and liberal do not adequately capture the dynamics that may fuel assessments of a figure like Nixon. Aside from the immorality of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Nixon's critics and supporters may have had different ideas about the privileges of the presidency, the Vietnam War, the escalation of homegrown terrorism (e.g., the Weather Underground), or even his economic policies. As it stands, Protestants in Settje's rendering either tried to explain away Nixon's lapses or used Watergate to confirm existing biases. The last nine words of the book are “they put morality first and politics a distant second.”
That is a fair conclusion but it also deserves elaboration. For well-educated Christians who were not some odd sect but fully carrying on their lives and churches in the normal channels of American society, to let morality set the course for their political analysis is to highlight American Protestant myopia. Instead of learning any lesson in Christian realism, whether from Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr, American Protestants into the 1970s, as Settje makes clear, continued to judge their nation and its leader according to Christian categories. That sort of finding should render contemporary versions of white Christian nationalism in America unsurprising. At the same time, the pervasiveness of such nationalism should qualify as amazing for anyone who thinks it is a problem only for the Religious Right.
