Daniel K. Williams

Dr. Daniel K. Williams
Born	estimated 1975
Education	Brown University, Providence, RI Ph.D., History, 2005. Dissertation: “From the Pews to the Polls: The Formation of a Southern Christian Right.” Advisor: James T. Patterson M.A., History, 2000 Case Western Reserve, Cleveland, OH B.A., History and Classics, 1999 summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
Occupation	Historian
Employer	University of West Georgia (Carrollton, GA)
Title	Assistant professor
Website
westga.edu/~dkwillia/

Daniel K. Williams is an assistant professor of History at the University of West Georgia and the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. He blogs at Politico.

He was also an adjunct professor at Rhode Island College (2001-5) and University of Rhode Island, College of Continuing Education(2003-4), both in Providence, RI. He was a summer school instructor (2005) and teaching assistant (2000-4) at Brown.

Publications

(partial list)

• Williams, Daniel K. (2010). God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-534084-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=tfkBh3hL0x4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=God%E2%80%99s+Own+Party:+The+Making+of+the+Christian+Right&hl=en&ei=kqiTTKvrLcLflgfR-PSjCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2010-09-17. 
• Williams, Daniel K. (April 2010). "Jerry Falwell’s Sunbelt Politics: The Regional Origins of the Moral Majority" (Fee). Journal of Policy History (Cambridge University Press) 22 (02): 125–147. doi:10.1017/S0898030610000011. ISSN 0898-0306. http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0898030610000011. Retrieved 2010-09-17.  One month before Election Day in 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College, where he advocated the restoration of classroom prayer in public schools. While it was not the first time that Reagan had spoken at a fundamentalist Christian college, many analysts were still skeptical about the genuineness of Reagan's commitment to the newly formed Christian Right. Some predicted that Reagan's newfound alliance with Falwell and his Moral Majority would likely dissipate as soon as evangelicals discovered how little they had in common with the Republican Party. "Evangelicals as a whole are likely to find their relationship with the secular Right to be rather frustrating," political scientist Corwin Smidt wrote at the beginning of the 1980s. "Evangelicals are primarily concerned with certain social issues. As secular conservatives focus on economic issues and ignore social issues, Evangelicals are likely to become somewhat impatient with such conservatives, and new alignments and political strategies may become evident."¹

But a quarter century later, white evangelicals remained firmly committed to the Republican Party, despite Smidt's prediction to the contrary. After voting Republican in every presidential election from 1980 through 2004, they continued the trend in 2008 by supporting John McCain over Barack Obama by a 3-1 margin, providing nearly 40 percent of McCain's total popular vote. 2 Far from balking at the Republican Party's focus on economic issues, as Smidt had predicted, the Christian Right became an ardent defender of the GOP's proposals for tax cuts and increased defense spending. Political analysts who had predicted the collapse of the evangelical alliance with the GOP were puzzled. They understood why evangelicals embraced the GOP's stance on abortion, but why had the Christian Right become a reliable proponent of...

References

External links

Daniel K. Williams, Curriculum vitae

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Name	Williams, Daniel K.
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