The Cross and Reaganomics: Conservative Christians Defending Ronald Reagan . By Eric R. Crouse. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2013. vii + 195. pp. $65.00 cloth; $64.99 ebook.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Cross and Reaganomics: Conservative Christians Defending Ronald Reagan . By Eric R. Crouse . Lanham, Md. : Lexington , 2013. vii + 195. pp. $65.00 cloth; $64.99 ebook.Book Reviews and NotesIn The Cross and Reaganomics , Eric R. Crouse, a professor of history at Tyndale University College, Toronto, explores how theologically and socially conservative Christians debated and defended the economic and foreign policies of the Reagan administration. Crouse sets out to answer the question, "who were these Christian defenders of Reagan?" (3). His answer is neither sociological nor transparently theological. Instead, he focuses most of his attention on the evangelical popular press and its engagement with politicians, pundits, and economists. By focusing narrowly on internal Christian debates over free market economics during the 1970s and 1980s, Crouse carves out a niche in the crowded space of recent studies of the rise of the Religious Right.Through an introduction and six chapters, the text walks readers through a series of exchanges between Ronald Reagan's defenders and his critics. In the introduction, Crouse situates his text as a corrective to "the mainstream media," which "viewed conservative Christianity through the prism of explosive social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and pornography" (11). Chapter 1 seeks to reorient readers to conservative Christians' sophisticated intellectual engagement with free market economics and their eventual conversion to Reagan's supply-side model. Crouse parses the difference between supply-side economics and various rival systems such as the monetarism of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and the Austrian economic school of Friedrich von Hayek. Supply-side economics, or Reaganomics, sought to create "additional wealth rather than the transfer of existing wealth to business owners" (31). Supply-sider efforts to lower obstacles to individual productivity and emphasize personal responsibility matched long-held Christian beliefs about self-transformation.After laying the economic ground rules, chapters 2 and 3 outline tensions between Christian conservatives and Christian leftists, with each vying to claim a orthodox economic model. For Crouse Christian conservative is a broad category, encompassing "evangelicals, fundamentalists, conservative Protestants, conservative Catholics, Pentecostals, and other charismatic Christians" who "upheld capitalism and smaller government" (3). Crouse deploys Christian left to label any "socialist-leaning" Christian who fell to the theological or ideological left of the mainline Protestant churches (6). With these battle lines drawn, chapter 4 covers the economic recovery during Reagan's second term, while chapter 5 delves into the moral murkiness of Reagan-era military interventions in Central and South America. In the final chapter, Crouse triumphantly concludes that American Christian conservatives were not unthinking Reaganites, but rather clear-eyed pragmatists who rejected collectivism and regulation for the benefits of small government and the free market.Despite the title, Reagan plays only a minor role in the text, popping up occasionally as movie star, candidate, and president. …