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Written as a series of letters in 2001, 2002, and 2020, this book argues that America has been specially blessed by God but that the nation has rejected its spiritual heritage by removing God from the public square. The 1962 Supreme Court decision barring sectarian prayer from public school classrooms is presented as the watershed of a long spiritual decline, downstream of which has come a rise in violent crime and premarital sex. Compounding the matter, eleven years later, the Court effectively made abortion legal, which, in Ervin’s view, makes Americans complicit in state-sanctioned murder. The result, he writes, has been the deaths of some fifty million unborn babies, an atrocity without parallel that merits the swift judgment of God. Ervin is hopeful, though. He believes that the people of America are, by and large, decent Christian folk and that it’s time to take our nation back from unelected elites.
For historians and sociologists, Ervin’s book presents a fascinating window into the views of many Christian evangelicals in the late 1990s and 2000s. Much of what he writes may be familiar to anyone who spent time in churches during that era, which gives the book, at times, a sheen of nostalgia for wood-paneled basements and Sunday potlucks. What sets the book apart from similar works is Ervin’s periodic departure from conservative orthodoxy. For instance, he resists partisanship, writing that he prayed with hope for President Bill Clinton. His suspicion of both political parties foreshadows the right-wing populism of recent years. There are some factual errors within the text. However, on the whole, this is a warm-hearted, endearingly idiosyncratic book.