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One Nation under God: Making Historical Sense of Evangelical Protestantism in Contemporary American Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2007

SIMON P. NEWMAN
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Abstract

Commentators noted the role of the religious right in the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004. This essay suggests that such assessments are ahistorical and flawed, and illustrates the ways in which evangelical Protestantism has shaped American political life. Examples of the intersection of religion and politics include Jefferson's election in 1800, John Brown's trial and execution, Abraham Lincoln's Civil War leadership and William Jennings Bryan's radical democratic politics. The essay concludes by arguing that if American-studies teaching and research marginalizes religion it fails to comprehend a vital component of American society and culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2007 , pp. 581 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Gibson, David, “Religion Plays New Election Role: God's Comeback Changes Interplay between Hopefuls,” Chicago Tribune, 12 Nov. 2004, 12Google Scholar.

2 Dana Milbank, “For the President, a Vote of Full Faith and Credit: Evangelical Christians Shed Their Reluctance to Mix Religion and Politics on Election Day,” Washington Post, 7 Nov. 2004, A7.

3 Anderson, Lisa, “Faith Takes a Key Role in Political Landscape,” Chicago Tribune, 4 Nov. 2004, 1Google Scholar; James Sterngold, “Bush Reaches Out/Moral Issues: Dems Caught by Surprise,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Nov. 2004, A1.

4 Lampman, Jane, “A ‘Moral Voter’ Majority? The Culture Wars Are Back; Exit Polls Stir a Debate Over the Role of Morals – and Religious Values – in the Nation's Politics,” Christian Science Monitor, 8 Nov. 2004, 4Google Scholar.

5 Glen Johnson, “From Left, Religious Figures Make a Push,” Boston Globe, 27 Nov. 2004, A1.

6 Elizabeth Bryant, “Faith's Influence on U.S. Politics Alienates Secular Europe; Bush Victory Seen as Widening Divide,” Washington Post, 6 Nov. 2004, B7.

7 Gary Wills, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” New York Times, 4 Nov. 2004, A25.

8 Harris, Paul, “US Election: How Bush Tapped into a Well of Faith,” Observer, 7 Nov. 2004, 16Google Scholar.

9 Peter Riddell, “On God There is a Moral Divide between Britain and US,” The Times, 10 Nov. 2004, 17.

10 “Political Attitudes,” Populus Poll for The Times, 5–7 Nov. 2004. Comparative data taken from exit poll of US elections conducted by National Election Pool for CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and Associated Press on Nov. 2, 2004. http://www.populuslimited.com/the-times-political-attitudes-071104.html.

11 Wills, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.”

12 The Gallup Poll, 2–4 May 2004; CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 1–2 April 2005; Newsweek Poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, 2–3 Dec. 2004. Results of all of these polls drawn from PollingReport.com, at www.pollingreport.com/religion.htm.

13 Lisa Anderson, “Faith Takes Key Role in Political Landscape,” Chicago Tribune, 4 Nov. 2004, 1; Thomas L. Friedman, “Two Nations under God,” New York Times, 4 Nov. 2004, A25.

14 Murrin, John M., “No Awakening, No Revolution? More Counterfactual Speculations,” Reviews in American History, 11 (1983), 161–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Historians of religion have made this point repeatedly, yet many other historians all but ignore this work in their own research and writing.

16 Secularization theory is an outgrowth of modernization theory, which concerns the processes whereby society becomes modern and cultures are transformed from simple to complex societies. Modernism entails the affirmation of values, ideas and material things judged to be modern, and the rejection of outdated and outmoded beliefs and practices. See Nils Gilman, “Modernization Theory, the Highest Stage of American Intellectual History,” in David C. Engerman, ed., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 47–75. For a discussion of the development of secularization theory see Swatos, William H. Jr. and Christiano, Kevin J., “Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,” Sociology of Religion, 60 (1999), 209–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alan Aldridge, Religion in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

17 See Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

18 Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005). In contrast, evangelical preacher Jim Wallis has argued that Christianity in general – and evangelical Protestantism in particular – has been misused and abused by the right in American politics, and just as harmfully has been ridiculed and ignored by the left: “The religious and political Right gets the public meaning of religion mostly wrong – preferring to focus only on sexual and cultural issues while ignoring the weightier matters of justice. And the secular Left doesn't seem to get the meaning and promise of faith for politics at all – mistakenly dismissing spirituality as irrelevant to social change.” Rather than calling for a separation of church and state that keeps religion separate from politics, Wallis calls for a more honest use of religion in American politics, arguing, “It is time to take back our faith.” Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the American Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (San Fancisco: Harper Collins, 2005), 3–4.

19 The late Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court William H. Rehnquist argued that “the ‘wall of separation between Church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history … It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.” While Chief Justice Rehnquist's was a minority opinion, based on historical research that largely ignored James Madison's writings about the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, his larger point that church and state have historically been far from separate remains valid. See Judge William H. Rehnquist, Dissenting Opinion, Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 US 38 (1985) 106.

20 See Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

21 There is no single accepted definition of evangelical Protestantism in contemporary America, although there is somewhat more agreement on historical development. Beginning with the religious revivals of the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, evangelical Protestantism emerged as the major form of Christianity in the United States. Believers, ministers and leaders actively sought to reshape American society according to their beliefs, and although weakened somewhat by the influx of non-Protestant immigrants in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth, evangelical Protestantism remained the most powerful religious presence in America. In the early twenty-first century evangelical Protestantism can define those who hold certain key beliefs, or it can refer more to an organic social movement and religious tradition. Thus Americans as diverse as black Baptists and Mennonites can all be labelled evangelical Protestants, despite their enormous differences. For the purposes of this essay, a definition of some characteristics of evangelical Protestants might include an absolute faith in the Bible as the revealed Word of God and as the ultimate authority for religious belief and morality, the belief that all people must be “born again” through their decision to repent of their sins and accept Christ as their Saviour, and the conviction that these first two tenets should be expressed through activity designed to reform society in order to bring it into line with Christian injunctions. See, for example, David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005); Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1991); George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1991).

22 Mathews, Donald G., “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly, 21 (1969), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. John Murrin has noted that while approximately half of French clergymen refused to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy during the French Revolution, nearly all American clergymen supported the American Revolution. See Murrin, “Religion and Politics in America from the First Settlements to the Civil War,” in Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 19–43, 34.

23 Nathan O. Hatch, “The Democratization of Christianity and the Character of American Politics,” in Noll, 92–120, 95. See also Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 195.

24 Gordon S. Wood. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 471–566.

25 John Murrin, “The Great Inversion, or Court Versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816),” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 368–453, 425.

26 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 213.

27 Ibid., 95.

28 Ibid., 95, 96. For the standard account of the erosion of deferential and the rise of democratic policies see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

29 Hatch, “Democratization of Christianity,” 97–98.

30 Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6.

31 Ruth Bloch, “Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution,” in Noll, Religion and American Politics, 44–61, 57. See also Abzug.

32 In the Notes Jefferson questioned the literal truth of Noah's Flood, as well as proposing fundamental differences between blacks and whites that implicitly denied the brotherhood of men. On Jefferson, religion and the election of 1800 see Schulz, Constance B., “‘Of Bigotry in Politics and Religion’: Jefferson's Religion, the Federalist Press, and the Syllabus,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 91 (1983), 73–91Google Scholar, and Robert M. S. McDonald, “Was there a Religious Revolution of 1800?” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 173–98.

33 From the Gazette of the United States, reprinted in Washington Federalist, 26 Aug. 1801, as quoted in Schulz, 77.

34 Republicus, “To Professors of the Christian Religion throughout the United States,” Washington Federalist, 24 Dec. 1802, as quoted in Schulz, 83.

35 Milbank, “For the President, a Vote of Full Faith and Credit.”

36 Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, 1 Dec. 1862, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 5, 537; James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 5.

37 Clark, Elizabeth B., “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History, 82 (1995), 463–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 467.

38 Garrison, William Lloyd, “The American Union,” The Liberator, 10 Jan. 1845, 5Google Scholar.

39 William Lloyd Garrison, “Address to the Colonization Society,” 4 July 1829, quoted in Abzug, 143, 142.

40 The “Golden Rule” is based upon Christ's injunction to treat others as one would wish to be treated. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 24–25.

41 Ferguson, Robert A., “Story and Transcription in the Trial of John Brown,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 6 (1994), 37–73Google Scholar.

42 Brown, quoted in Reynolds, 331.

43 Ibid., 222–4.

44 Garrison, ‘John Brown and the Principle of Nonresistance,’ The Liberator, 16 Dec. 1859, reprinted in William E. Cain, ed., William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 156–59, 159.

45 Carwardine, Richard, “Abraham Lincoln and the Evangelical Roots of American Political Culture,” United Reformed Church History, 6 (1997), 16–33Google Scholar, 27.

46 Abraham Lincoln, Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, 19 Nov. 1863, newspaper version, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7, 19, 20.

47 Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8, 332–33. The scriptural quotations are: “let us judge not, that we be not judged,” Matthew 7:1; “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh,” Matthew 18:7; “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” Psalms 19:9.

48 Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address.

49 Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 38.

50 William Jennings Bryan, “The Prince of Peace,” in Speeches of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1909), 268.

51 D. G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 26. For an excellent assessment of Bryan see Lawrence Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan. The Last Decade, 1915–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

52 This point is made by George M. Marsden in “Afterword: Religion, Politics, and the Search for an American Consensus,” in Noll, Religion and American Politics, 385–86.

53 Wills, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.”

54 Hart, 84.

55 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey Claflin Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago, 2000), 282.

56 For some examples of discussions of the work revising secularization theory see Hadden, Jeffrey K., “Towards Desacralizing Secularization Theory,” Social Forces, 65 (1987), 587–611CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warner, R. S., “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm in the Sociology of Religion,” American Journal of Sociology, 98 (1993), 1044–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawrence A. Young, Rational Choice Theory and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1997).

57 Milbank, “For the President, a Vote of Full Faith and Credit”; Wills.

58 Simon Schama, “We and America Are Family, but God Comes between us,” op-ed, Sunday Telegraph, 4 Sept. 2005.

59 Milbank.

60 James Sterngold, “Bush Reaches Out.”