Rejecting culture-wars evangelicalism cost McCain the 2000 primary

Evidence

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN WAS A REPUBLICAN WAR hero who attended a Southern Baptist megachurch, but he had never embraced culture-wars evangelicalism. In 2000, when running against George W. Bush in the Republican primary, he had denounced those who practiced “the politics of division and slander” in the name of religion, party, or nation, and he urged voters to resist “agents of intolerance,” by which he meant men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The next day McCain lost the Virginia primary, and nine days later he withdrew his candidacy. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports Du Mez’s central method-contest: McCain shows the electoral penalty for not embracing militant evangelicalism, relevant to the reader’s chapter-1 framing question about whether this strand is definitive white evangelicalism.