In Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie Martin asks the mind-boggling question of the 2016 election: How did Donald Trump secure the evangelical voting bloc that catapulted him to victory? After the release of the recordings of Trump admitting to sexual violence and assault against women, his candidacy was presumed to be doomed. However, as Martin indicates, Trump won the presidency largely because of the evangelical vote. The evangelical church body, which prides itself on strong morals and family values, supported a twice divorced philanderer who admitted to sexually assaulting women. In the wake of the 2016 election, many were confounded by this reality.To wrestle this issue, Martin conducts a “digital rhetorical ethnography” on the narratives of the evangelical church. She analyzes recorded online sermons from across the nation, transporting herself into church pews via the internet. What Martin discovers is a remarkably consistent and persuasive rhetoric of emotional narratives that allowed Trump to become the unspoken yet preferred nominee of the evangelical church. Further, Martin's research gives voice to a new, eXvangelical movement that has distinctly feminist roots rising out of the church post-2016.In her initial chapters, Martin develops a baseline for understanding the evangelical lens. This starting point includes founders’ rhetoric, the “Great Commission,” and the rhetoric of former President Ronald Reagan, all of which are leveraged to create a sense of evangelical Christian nationalism. Founders’ rhetoric follows the logic that founding fathers were Christian; therefore, God is and should always be at the center of the American experience. This God-centered-in-country belief, combined with the Great Commission (the Biblical command to “Go and make disciples of all nations”) empowers evangelicals to declare themselves rightful heirs to the blessings of America as intended by the founding fathers. Converting others to faith is thus the path to the American promised land and ultimately eternal life.Martin also discusses the church's use of the rhetoric of Reagan, whose message of protecting liberty, promoting hard work and family values, and maintaining a small government seemingly aligns with the founders’ rhetoric of God-centered-country and blessings. The pastors’ use of Reagan's claims evoked a sense of crisis, that the nation was on a dangerous path, and that Christians must fight to maintain the nation's greatness and prosperity while preventing moral decline. This message generated a longing for better times, for the ideal and imagined past state of static gender roles where race was subdued or even hidden. It created a deep desire to return to the family values that were believed to have been eroded by the civil rights movement and the old-fashioned morals that were believed to have been corrupted by Hollywood. This rhetoric also created a longing for evangelicals’ celestial home, where there would be no more sin, pain, or loss. Martin explains how such messaging helped solidify the intertwining of the founders’ rhetoric and the Great Commission, encouraging Christians to fight for their embattled church, their rightful American blessings, and their heavenly home.Martin claims that this foundational narrative creates an “esprit de finesse” that pastors repeatedly used in their sermons to inspire “true” believers to action, laying the foundation for the battle cry to “Make America Great Again.” Martin is careful to emphasize that no churches explicitly demonstrated support for either candidate or party; many of the pastors provided disclaimers such as, “I'm not going to tell you who to vote for . . . ” (80), or simply encouraged an “open embrace for political open-mindedness” (107), while using the pulpit as a platform to advance a moral-national ideology. Martin identifies distinct themes in these sermons: American exceptionalism, nostalgia, and active passivism.Throughout the sermons, Martin explores the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the church's embrace of America as the promised land. In their stories, pastors reinforce that simply existing in America is a blessing, and this birthright blessing requires good stewardship of your American bounty, including congregants’ time, talents, and treasures. Martin discusses how this storyline frames good Christians as those who make good choices and, in turn, make good Americans. To expound, good Christians are hard workers who live responsibly in a land of unlimited opportunity. This romanticization of hard work, frugality, and personal responsibility offers great reward both on earth and in heaven. It also sets up a distinct “other” against which good Christians (good Americans) must battle. This “other” is a group of lazy, fraudulent, non-Christians who abuse the system and take handouts from the government, thus stealing from the pot of American riches that belong to deserving Christians. This framework, without explicitly using the words, rhetorically aligns with the GOP's theoretical support of small businesses, personal responsibility, small government, and American opportunity for those who deserve it. By preaching this philosophy, pastors tacitly endorsed the Republican nominee as the presidential candidate.Martin also highlights the concept of nostalgia, specifically noting that pastors invoked the rhetoric of Reagan to remind white, low to middle class congregants of perceived better times. Martin recalls how Barack Obama's presidency, which inspired hope and change, was largely rejected by evangelicals. To evangelicals, gay marriage, protests against police brutality, and Hollywood's support of the liberal agenda were all signs of the nation's loss of Christian values. Martin describes how stories told in sermons framed recent decades as a period of slow social and moral decline: the 50s sustained a loss of innocence; the 60s a loss of authority; the 70s a loss of the meaning of love; the 80s a loss of values; the 90s a loss of faith; and with the Great Recession, the 00s brought a loss of security (90). Leading up to the 2016 election, pastors of megachurches invoked a rhetoric of nostalgia while telling stories that vilified hope and change and created a desire for a return to the safety of the past. A genuine loss of financial security, along with the narrative of moral decline and a call to return to better times created a sermonic storyline that America somehow needed to be made “Great Again.”The final rhetorical concept Martin analyzes perhaps provides the most insight. She calls this concept “active passivism.” In its simplest terms, active passivism can be described as a call to vote (active) while not worrying about the results (passivism). Martin writes how pastors used this frame to encourage voting as a civic duty and moral responsibility. Voting was situated as honoring the nation and those who have fought for freedom (a nod to the military, to Christian martyrs, and to Jesus Christ, himself). She shares how pastors acknowledged dislike for both candidates yet encouraged thorough review of the party platform in preparation to vote in alignment with one's faith. None of the pastors suggested that their rhetoric created a pre-disposition to one party over the other; all the pastors, instead, echoed that God is in control, so ultimately the election outcome does not matter. A phrase commonly used across the sermons told parishioners that they are in the world, but not of it, indicating that America matters, but not as much as heaven, their true home. This messaging gave congregants permission to vote for Trump, while explicitly denying the church's support for either candidate. Martin explains that, through active passivism, evangelicals were encouraged to actively use their agency by participating in the election, while effectively telling them to be passive about the results of their collective vote. This rhetoric ultimately absolved Christians from any responsibility for their voting decision.In her final chapter, Martin recalls the last weeks of the 2016 campaign when the notorious tapes that revealed Trump's bragging about physical violence and sexual assault were released (147). She notes that in response to these tapes, most churches in her study stayed relatively quiet or merely suggested forgiveness since the incident had happened in the distant past. The church's failure to address the GOP nominee's admitted assault prompted an unexpected response from a different pulpit that gave voice to a group within the church in a new and distinct way. Martin outlines how prominent Christian women such as Rachel Held Evans, Jen Hatmaker, and Beth Moore began to call out the immorality of the Republican nominee's character and the lack of courage shown by the pastors of the evangelical church by their obvious rhetorical silence.Martin provides examples of the messaging from the Christian women's platforms: Rachel Held Evans, a speaker and blogger, specifically targeted Trump's rhetoric against the oppressed and his exploitation of evangelicals to advance his own self-interests and personal gain.1 Jen Hatmaker, a well-known speaker and author, went beyond targeting Trump and directly labeled evangelical men as complicit in perpetuating sexual abuse by refusing to denounce it.2 Beth Moore, a Bible studies author, pushed further still by publicly demanding accountability for the transgressions of the church.3 In contrast to their rhetorical silence, Moore asked male church leaders to be forthright about structures and systems within the church that allowed for potential abuses, including “a culture that allowed women to be demeaned in the name of submission and abused in the name of obedience” (151).While Christian women leaders had previously exercised contained agency within the constructs of the church, women like Evans, Hatmaker, and Moore stepped outside of their lanes to bring new truth to the conversation. As Martin shares, their courage in explicitly denouncing evangelical systems and messages of misogyny disrupted the privilege of the church and the leaders within it. In addition, Martin points out how their bravery prompted social media discussions about sexual abuse both within and outside the church. Through their discourse, a new storyline emerged, that of suffering at the hands of patriarchy. Martin credits Hannah Paasch and Emily Joy as launching the #ChurchToo movement on social media, a movement that gave permission to those who experienced sexual assault within the church to share their stories. The sharing of these stories generated unification around a once-silent suffering, effectively challenging the evangelical misogyny deeply coded within the Christian church. Women online began to amplify the voices of those who had previously been voiceless—and not just the unborn—sparking what is now being called the eXvangelical movement, where women are driving a new rhetorical narrative while reclaiming, or renouncing, their faith.Telling the story of the collective message of the digital church leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Martin describes both the thematic pastoral rhetoric that has carried the evangelical church over the last fifty years and the emergence of an evolving narrative of evangelical feminism. She deftly synthesizes how the carefully crafted megachurch messaging moved congregants toward the Republican party without explicit partisanship. She illuminates how pastors both relied upon and exploited the beliefs of evangelicals by framing their messages in American exceptionalism, nostalgia, and active passivism. This layered rhetoric encouraged a faith-based unified calling to return the nation to its moral standing no matter the cost. It absolved evangelical Christians from their moral electoral responsibility, effectively bringing theology into the ballot box. Yet, as Martin uncovers, when asked to stand alongside Christian women who vocally condemned the Republican party nominee and his admission of sexual assault, the church stayed silent. This silence gave birth to a progressive feminism that emerged from the fray of the evangelical church. This feminism, born largely of the voices of women who courageously used their agency to move beyond the confinements of active passivism and act for the greater good, has sparked a movement that will continue to challenge not only the misogyny deeply coded within the evangelical church, but also the Trump-era rhetoric of the “alt-right.”4