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Why Evangelicals Voted for Trump: A Critical Cultural Sociology: Cultural Sociology of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Abstract
Most white evangelicals viewed Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils. They were driven by concerns about abortion, religious freedom, and the Supreme Court. But a plurality preferred him to other GOP candidates. Why? Because they are white Christian nationalists. As such, they were attracted by Trump’s racialized, apocalyptic, and blood-drenched rhetoric. It recalled an earlier version of American religious nationalism, one that antedated the softened tones of modern-day “American exceptionalism” first introduced by Ronald Reagan. At the same time, Trumpism was stripped of the explicit allusions to Christian scripture that traditionally tethered American religious nationalism to Christian political theology. One way of reading Trumpism, then, is as a reactionary and secularized version of white Christian nationalism. I conclude by arguing that the proper response to Trumpism is not to double down on radical secularism but to recover America’s civil religious tradition.
... Recently, work on the racialization of Muslims (Gottschalk and Greenberg 2008;Love 2017;Saher and Embrick 2013) argues exactly this point: a religious distinction becomes racialized when it is tied to assumptions about bodily difference, and when it is linked to the deep racial formations that inform American discourse. This literature parallels long-standing discussion of anti-Semitic thought which have roots in evangelical Protestant eschatology (Cimino 2005;Gorski 2019) but also in shifting racial formations and the blurry boundaries of whiteness (Cousin and Fine 2012;Jacobson 1999;see Brodkin 1998). Religion is thus "raced" (Yukich and Edgell 2020) in the sense that religious outsiders are read through the lens of race, and because there is a presumed racial center to religious belonging (Perry and Whitehead 2015;Whitehead, Perry, and Baker 2018). ...
... In the contemporary United States, exclusionary nationalist claims about the boundaries of the nation (and thus about the religious, racial, and civic basis of belonging) have attached to both groups (Frankel 2013;Gerteis, Hartmann, and Edgell 2020;Perry and Whitehead 2015). Put differently, alt-right discourse and demonstrations like the Charlottesville rally involve claims about "otherness" -that is, about who does and does not belong in the American "we" (Braunstein 2017;Gorski 2019). Such reactionary nationalism is perhaps resurgent, but it is not new. ...
... As indicated in our theoretical discussion of symbolic boundaries and extremism, we are most centrally interested in the political context of such boundary-making, including politicized religion. We therefore included variables for party identification (Democratic and Republican identifications, with Independents, undecideds, and other political identifications as the baseline) and (Steensland et al. 2000) but it has been drawn into such boundary-drawing projects (Cimino 2005;Delehanty, Edgell, and Stewart 2019;Gorski 2019;Perry and Whitehead 2015). Recent studies have pointed to the political context of boundary-making rather than demographics or social status as drivers of politicized boundary-making, but these studies have also noted that such characteristics are correlated with such "othering" (Farley 2019;Manza and Crowley 2017;Smith 2019;Smith and Hanley 2018). ...
Drawing from recent work on “otherness” and social boundaries in America, we investigate anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish opinion among white Americans. After outlining the logic of the comparison, we use nationally representative data to analyze these forms of othering. Although anti-Muslim opinion is more extensive, the two track together empirically and share a cultural logic as connected forms of ethno-religious boundary-making. Latent class analysis shows that anti-Semitism is nested within anti-Muslim attitudes, with political and religious identifications as consistent predictors of opinion. We conclude with a reflection on politicized boundary-making and the relationship between extreme and mainstream views of the “other.”
... In addition to a focus on racism and White supremacy, research has explored how sexuality and gender were polarizing issues in the election due largely to Vice President Mike Pence's anti-LGBT+ attitudes and support for discriminatory policies (Blair, 2017), as well as what some have identified as the Trump voters' "possessive investment in White heteropatriarchy" (Strolovitch et al., 2017). Indeed, abortion and LGBT rights were well-documented issues for many Christian evangelical voters (Gorski, 2019). While many political psychologists and sociologists are primarily interested in attitudes and voting behavior, we (the authors) represent an interdisciplinary group of social scientists who are expressly interested in how beliefs about social categories may inform prejudicial attitudes (and vice versa) and the extent to which beliefs and attitudes may be associated with behavior, including voting. ...
Research has shown that beliefs about sexual orientation, including the naturalness, discreteness,
and informativeness of sexual orientation categories, are associated with varying levels of sexual prejudice. Less is known about how these and other sexual orientation beliefs may correspond with broader social and political attitudes, including party affiliation and voting behavior. The present study explored voting intention and political party affiliation, as well as other constructs not directly associated with sexuality, among a sample of emerging adults (N = 286) immediately prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Using a person-centered statistical approach, we replicated sexual orientation belief profiles found in prior research and observed significant associations between belief profiles and intentions to vote for certain candidates, as well as party affiliation, ambivalent sexist attitudes, and number of reported lesbian, gay, and bisexual friends. Notably, “born this way”-type beliefs in the innateness and immutability of sexual orientation did not significantly distinguish respondents’ support for presidential candidates or political party affiliation. We situate these results within existing research on essentialist beliefs and point to implications of these findings for ongoing research, clinical work, and advocacy for sexual minority rights.
This article introduces the concept of ‘iconic extensions’ and explores the phenomenon of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat as a highly recognizable and controversial political symbol in the United States of America. By focusing on audience engagement of wearers and critics alike, it expands the understanding of political discourse beyond the actions of individual leaders and emphasizes audience agency. Drawing on cultural sociological perspectives, the author argues that iconic extensions are materially condensed and accessible forms of iconicity that allow audiences to actively participate in the creation and dissemination of symbols. The creative adaptation of iconic extensions such as the MAGA hat facilitate memetic acts, reinforcing their iconic power. By examining textual and visual data from news and social media, the study identifies three key elements of iconic extensions with the MAGA hat as (1) a symbol of civil inclusion and exclusion, (2) an invitation to interact and a transformer of space and (3) a source of parody and satire. This research contributes to cultural sociology by integrating performance and iconicity with the idea of memetic audiences. Ultimately, this analysis sheds light on the MAGA hat as a site of conflict, highlighting the ways in which audiences actively engage with and shape the symbolic landscape of the US public sphere.
Simulations have become a staple of political science education due to their effectiveness and creative nature that contributes to learning success. In this contribution, we argue that simulations can also offer new insights not only into student engagement and active learning, but also into the sociology of political processes. In this case it is a political communication seminar, that included a simulation of presidential campaigns and an election in a fictionalized setting. This article shows that in a classroom setting the students are prone to reproduce existing electoral leanings and behavior. In the proposed simulation of elections in a fictional country of Genovia, the students naturally aligned around two candidates: a right-wing populist and an environmental activist who ultimately lost the elections. This article offers several insights into an online simulation format and breaks down the sociology of the surprisingly realistic representation of a Euro-American electorate.
Social scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location's income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. Testing our theories through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original data set of more than 102,000 sermons from more than 5200 pastors, we show that contact is only effective as a means of decreasing prejudice to the extent that actors—in our case, pastors—are ideologically capable of reconciling their potential role in economic inequality. White Evangelical pastors rarely preach about issues of poverty or racial justice overall, but the context of the preaching matters. We find that the greater the share of Black population there is in a church community, the less likely White Evangelical pastors are to mention issues of poverty or racial justice, and when they do mention it, they hold to ideological commitments that avoid blaming systems for racialized economic inequality.
This article problematizes the study of religious nationalism, which lacks conceptual, religious, and nationalist “seriousness.” These problems of “seriousness” obscure the nature of religious nationalism as they overstretch and do not do justice to the concepts of religious nationalism, religion, and nationalism, respectively. Seeking for the nature of and a path to religious nationalism, it is suggested that the later writings of İsmet Özel, a well-known poet and public intellectual in Turkey, make an emblematic case for a religious type of nationalism, demonstrating not only religious seriousness with his Islamist ideology but also a central orientation to the nation through his exclusive focus on Turkishness and Turkey. In so doing, this article introduces a wide range of categories to specify the ways in which religious nationalism is operationalized and to measure the patterns of religious nationalism in an attempt to overcome the problems of “seriousness.” It identifies and examines six main patterns in Özel’s thinking and shows their interactions: religio-national identity, exceptionalism, religious territoriality, civilizational othering, sectarianism, and anti-secularism.
Max Weber insisted that followers grant charismatic authority but he did not address the cultural prerequisites that enable leaders to acquire it from them. Prophecy is the royal road. When a prophetic tradition has taught people to expect saviors in times of crisis, believers are primed to award charismatic authority to someone who resembles their expectation. The case of Donald Trump illustrates the importance of prophecy on the bestowal of charismatic authority. Within the Republican Party, two distinct prophetic traditions validated Trump’s salvific mission, thus enabling him to acquire power of command. Adhering to Biblical prophecy, conservative Protestants identified Donald Trump as God’s agent in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ. Also within the Republican Party, adhering to developmental economics, secular conservatives identified Donald Trump as a heroic entrepreneur whose vigor would restore America’s greatness. Because of Trump’s striking resemblance to Batman, the comic superhero’s many fans also had prior ideational access to Trump’s salvific mission. In the United States, messianic prophecy of a tough-guy entrepreneur can derive from sacred culture, academic culture, popular culture, or from all three. The confluence produced a voter bloc primed to award charismatic authority to Trump.
Trump's unwavering support among white evangelicals seems a contradiction considering his seeming irreligiosity and well publicized moral transgressions. This contradiction raises an interesting question concerning whether Trump represents something of a unique case when it comes to white evangelical evaluations of elite religiosity, or whether his support among the group indicative of a new era of evangelical support for candidates that does not assess religiosity as it used to. Drawing on contemporary debates from the religious psychology and Christian nationalism scholarship, I use data from Wave 61 of the American Trends Panel (ATP) to test whether white evangelicals who encounter threats to their religious identities are more likely to view that God played some role in Trump's election. Overall, I find that white evangelicals consider themselves minorities as a result of their beliefs. Most importantly, these beliefs condition white evangelical beliefs about God's role in Trump's election. Specifically, I find that increases in threat perceptions lead to an increase in the probability of a white evangelical believing that Trump's election was part of God's plan. These findings provide a new vantage point for understanding why so many white evangelicals view Trump's election as a divine outcome despite the fact they are indifferent to his irreligiosity.
Recent research on homonationalism addresses the ideological and electoral combination of LGBTQ+ politics and radical-right populism. However, right-wing LGBTQ+ identities remain seemingly paradoxical, as right-wing Christianity-rooted conservatism is generally hostile to LGBTQ+ empowerment. Grounded in literature on populist radical right and its relationship with religion and sexuality, as well as social identity theory, we argue that right-wing LGBTQ+ people resolve identity tension by creating a positive group image. Analysing over 2,500 posts on a prominent (new/alt/populist) right-wing LGBTQ+ Reddit community, r/RightWingLGBT, we found right-wing LGBTQ+ users maintain a positive self-identity by positioning themselves against ‘degenerate, liberal, non-binary queers’, thus limiting themselves to narrow iterations of acceptable queerness which are congruent with hetero- and cis-normativity. Islam replaces Christianity as the primary anti-LGBTQ+ outgroup, which, alongside a normalisation and naturalisation of religious-rooted moral selves, helps to reconcile LGBTQ+ identities and right-wing populism and establish homonationalism as a bottom-up phenomenon.
The popularity of digital media has spurred what has been called a “crisis of authority”. How do female evangelical microcelebrities figure in this crisis? Many of these women belong to churches led by male pastors, have amassed a large following online, and are sought-after speakers and teachers. This paper analyses how gender, religious authority, and the digital sphere collide through the rise of female evangelical microcelebrities. Bringing together ethnographic data, textual analysis, and social media analysis of six prominent women, I emphasize the power of representation to impact religious practices and religious meaning. This article examines how evangelical women are performing and negotiating their legitimacy as the Internet and fluid geographical boundaries challenge local models of religious authority. Moving away from a binary perspective of “having” or “not having” authority, this paper considers the various spheres of authority that evangelical microcelebrities occupy, including normative womanhood, prosperity theology, and politics. Finally, by examining the social media content put forth by female evangelical microcelebrities, I interrogate the political stakes of evangelical women’s authority.
Objective: Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eventually recommended wearing masks in public to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the practice has been unevenly distributed in the United States.
Methods: In this paper, we model county-level infrequent mask usage as a function of three pillars of conservatism: (1) Republican political leadership (percentage of votes for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election), (2) conservative Protestantism (percentage evangelical Christian), and (3) right-wing media consumption (Google searches for Fox News).
Results: Our analyses indicate that mask usage tends to be lower in counties with greater support for President Trump (in majority Trump counties), counties with more evangelical Christians, and areas with greater interest in Fox News.
Conclusion: Given the effectiveness of masks in limiting the transmission of respiratory droplets, conservative ideological resistance to public health and recommended pandemic lifestyles may indirectly support the spread of the coronavirus.
While racial and political tensions have ebbed and flowed throughout American history, one thing makes the current moment distinct—the invasive presence of information through technology. Therefore, the polarization and bias of certain media outlets may exacerbate perceived differences between racial and ethnic groups, political parties, religions, and so forth, increasing tensions and the gaps between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Using qualitative data from a study of the Alt-Right, we analyze the relationships between perceptions of social concerns, feelings of status threat, perceptions of media and technology, and affiliation with the Alt-Right among White Americans. In general, we find three primary themes regarding Alt-Right affiliation for White Americans: (1) threats to us, (2) return to the good ole days, and (3) faux news. Our findings yield valuable insight into the complex relationships between internalized and institutionalized racial hierarchies and extremist ideologies for White Americans. Implications for policy and research are discussed.
Objectives: We test whether the association between state religiosity and distance travelled is moderated by population age during the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Methods: Mobility is operationalized as the state-level average median distance traveled from February 24 to May 4 across the contiguous United States. Shelter-in-place rates are operationalized as the state-level percentage of users staying home. State religiosity is measured with an index of aggregated religious identities, beliefs, and practices. Population age is indicated by the state percentage of adults aged 65 and older. We model population mobility using regression with state clustered robust standard errors. Results: We observe that religious states tend to travel more during the early stages of the pandemic. However, the behavioral risks associated with state religiosity are less pronounced in states with larger elderly populations. Discussion: We contribute to our understanding of the social patterning of pandemic mobility in aging populations.
Having an Anglican affiliation is known to be associated with support for leaving the European Union (EU) in Britain. Religiosity, conceived as strength of religious attachment, has received comparatively little treatment. We investigate religiosity via electoral, household, and attitudinal surveys, distinguishing the effects of “behaving” and “believing.” The association between religiosity and EU Referendum vote choice and position is identified before and after inclusion of values, attitudinal, and civic engagement measures. Consistent with established findings, in socio‐structural models Anglicans are more likely to support Brexit than religious Nones. More frequent church attendance is associated with being more pro‐Remain. The Anglican effect is primarily mediated by anti‐immigrant attitudes, authoritarianism, and salience of ethnic identity, suggesting a Christian nationalist aspect to Leave support. The attendance effect is mediated by warmer attitudes toward immigrants, and social capital. Notably, those exhibiting stronger orthodox belief tend to feature a stronger attachment to “Leave,” with this partly mediated by authoritarianism. To evaluate the net effect of religion on civic life, we should pay more attention to the cultural content of religious beliefs, and how they structure other values and attitudes.
When racialized knowledge is built into curricular expectations in schools, children are susceptible to beliefs that lead them to a hierarchical understanding of social relationships with particular groups. This article seeks to illuminate orientalist ideologies underpinning award-winning children’s literature. Utilizing racialized curricular expectations as an analytical tool, the article deconstructs Muslim stereotypes and their racial, gender, and religious representations in the following ways: (1) educational racial contract, (2) racial othering as racial selfing, and (3) racist empathy. This article calls upon district personnel, principals, and teachers to deeply interrogate curricula that racialize students and teach them ways to be raced.
Donald Trump's election to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 qualifies as one of the more shocking events in American political history. This article reviews the literature on the social construction of Donald Trump's political career. It finds prominent ideological laminations over racism, Islamophobia, nativism, sexism, Christianity, and right‐wing populism in Trump's discursive field. This article argues that Trump's discursive field comprises a juncture of stigma contests over the moral worth of numerous collective identities including men, women, racial minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Christians, and the middle class. Such stigma contests likely exacerbate recognition gaps created by neoliberal policies. This review suggests that scholars should continue to examine the connection between Trump's political career and stigmatization. Moreover, cultural sociologists should ready themselves to track the dialectical response to Trump and to assess the lasting impact on the American normative order.
Nursing, with its socially embedded theory and practice, inevitably operates in the realm of power and politics. One of these political sites is that of religion, which to varying degrees continues to shape beliefs about health and illness, the delivery of healthcare services and the nurse–patient encounter. In this paper, I attempt to complicate nursing's views on religion and politics in healthcare, with the intent of thinking critically and philosophically about questions that arise at the intersection of religion, politics and nursing/healthcare. These questions include the following: What is the domain of religion and politics? How (non)religious are the contemporary societies in which nurses practice? What are the variations and implications of secularism? How is religion entangled with other intersecting social relations of power? How does a political reading of religion and politics matter to the concerns of nursing?
How does the convergence of national and religious identities potentially fortify white racial boundaries in the USA? Focusing on openness to racial exogamy as an indicator of racial boundaries, we examine the link between Christian nationalism and white Americans’ views towards their hypothetical daughter marrying an African American, Latino, or Asian. Drawing on insights from social identity complexity theory, we argue
that the convergence of religious and national identities serves to reinforce in-group boundaries, thereby fortifying notions of white purity, and consequently, strengthening whites’ discomfort with potential race-mixing in marriage. Multivariate analyses of national survey data demonstrate that Christian nationalism is strongly associated with an increase in white Americans’ discomfort with a daughter marrying any racial minority,
and particularly African Americans. We demonstrate how the convergence of religious and national identities in Christian nationalism influences whites’ regulating of racial boundaries (evidenced in intermarriage attitudes) above and beyond the independent effects of political conservatism or religious exclusivism.
Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.
The obvious explanation for the unpopularity of Muslims in contemporary American society centers on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, we contend that feelings about Muslims are shaped primarily by a general sense of affect for groups that fall outside of the cultural mainstream and the personality and value orientations typically associated with such affect. Thus, the current structure of Muslim evaluations should not differ much from that before the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, Muslims may be distinctive in that, unlike most minority groups, they are associated with both positively viewed racial and religious minority groups and with negatively viewed cultural minority groups. Analyses of data from the 2004 American National Election Study and other surveys conducted between 2000 and 2007 strongly support our argument.
This article examines how the American civil response to September 11 profoundly transformed the core of American Muslim political identity for a generation. I outline the evolving contours of the American Muslim as citizens after September 11 through an analysis of the impact of race and religion on two relationships: state to citizen and citizen to citizen. The American political response to September 11 had both positive and negative impacts for domiciled Muslims. At the national level, this event has forced American Muslims into a period of institution building and active citizenship while the federal government's response has problematized the Muslim as a continuous potential security threat. One simmering question for the American citizenry in general concerns the loyalty of the American Muslim. In the future, the American Muslim political class will be engaged in a continued effort to write Muslims into the American narrative in the same way that previous immigrant groups have fought to reappropriate “Americanness.” The larger philosophical question in this process is how, in doing so, this group can prove its loyalty to the nation while maintaining a distinctive religious culture and heritage. What will be the future core of the maturing American Muslim as both a citizen of the republic and a servant of his or her god?
Les AA. tiennent a identifier le role de la violence dans l'organisation et la survie de certains groupes sociaux. Dans ces derniers, la cohesion s'accomplit dans un cadre de violence qui est une force sociale structurelle et non contingente, ou la religion est la verite pour laquelle on est pret a mourir, ou la societe est representee a travers des rituels de sacrifice du sang. L'expression la plus puissante de ce cadre religieux aux Etats-Unis est sans aucun doute le nationalisme. En surface, on nie les attributs religieux du nationalisme pour maintenir l'autorite meurtriere du groupe
This book deals primarily with the effect of whitness on race relations in the United States as they relate to labor and the American working class. Roediger argues that working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the US white working class. He urges a systemic analysis that examines both race and class without privileging one over the other, as many Marxists tend to do. He traces the history of whiteness' effect on the formation of a working class in the United States. White workers becames the standard of this class, and all other races were considered intruders, a view with origins in antebellum America and the tradition of slavery. Other "outsiders," however, were gradually accepted into white America's working class, such as the Irish. Roediger's study establishes the foundations for contemporary whiteness and discrimination in the American workplace.
One of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution.--New York Times Book Review “During the nearly two decades since its publication, this book has set the pace, furnished benchmarks, and afforded targets for many subsequent studies. If ever a work of history merited the appellation ‘modern classic,’ this is surely one.--William and Mary Quarterly “[A] brilliant and sweeping interpretation of political culture in the Revolutionary generation.--New England Quarterly “This is an admirable, thoughtful, and penetrating study of one of the most important chapters in American history.--Wesley Frank Craven © 1969, 1998 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
A fierce critique of civil religion as the taproot of America’s bid for global hegemony Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter A. McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive but radically changing faith that “God is on our side” has inspired U.S. foreign policy ever since 1776. The first comprehensive study of the role played by civil religion in U.S. foreign relations over the entire course of the country’s history, McDougall’s book explores the deeply infused religious rhetoric that has sustained and driven an otherwise secular republic through peace, war, and global interventions for more than two hundred years. From the Founding Fathers and the crusade for independence to the Monroe Doctrine, through World Wars I and II and the decades-long Cold War campaign against “godless Communism," this coruscating polemic reveals the unacknowledged but freely exercised dogmas of civil religion that bind together a “God blessed” America, sustaining the nation in its pursuit of an ever elusive global destiny.
In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism-shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential "errand"-has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century. By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation's patriotism-a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former "outsiders"-Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism's role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.
As colonists made their way to the northern British colonies in the early seventeenth century, they hoped their efforts would stand as a "citty upon a hill." In doing so, they often relied on the seemingly contradictory theological convictions of puritanism to organize colonial society. Complicating life in this new society was the fact that it included colonists from Europe, indigenous Americans, and enslaved Africans. This book investigates the ways these New Englanders used, constructed, and reconstructed their puritanism to make sense of their new realities. As they did so, they created more than a tenuous existence together. They also constructed race out of the spiritual freedom of puritanism. Revising the timing of the construction of race in America, this book contends that as New Englanders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offered spiritual redemption, they then found it necessary to define how they differed from one another, especially from Native Americans and Africans. The book explores how proponents of the New England variant of puritanism made race out of their offers of spiritual freedom, setting the stage for similar processes when physical and social freedom became more accessible to New Englanders of color in the generations following the American Revolution.
Most Americans say they believe in God, and more than a third say they attend religious services every week. Yet studies show that people do not really go to church as often as they claim, and it is not always clear what they mean when they tell pollsters they believe in God or pray. American Religion presents the best and most up-to-date information about religious trends in the United States, in a succinct and accessible manner. This sourcebook provides essential information about key developments in American religion since 1972, and is the first major resource of its kind to appear in more than two decades. Mark Chaves looks at trends in diversity, belief, involvement, congregational life, leadership, liberal Protestant decline, and polarization. He draws on two important surveys: the General Social Survey, an ongoing survey of Americans' changing attitudes and behaviors, begun in 1972; and the National Congregations Study, a survey of American religious congregations across the religious spectrum. Chaves finds that American religious life has seen much continuity in recent decades, but also much change. He challenges the popular notion that religion is witnessing a resurgence in the United States--in fact, traditional belief and practice is either stable or declining. Chaves examines why the decline in liberal Protestant denominations has been accompanied by the spread of liberal Protestant attitudes about religious and social tolerance, how confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular institutions, and a host of other crucial trends.
FOR MANY of those who observe it closely, the current state of conservative Protestantism in the United States is a source of considerable shock. For political liberals, the shock derives from the strength of the movement (Habermas 2006; Taylor 2006). They wonder why the United States is not a normal country, like, say, England or Holland, countries in which religious belief is much quieter, and churchgoing much rarer. For religious conservatives, on the other hand, it is the weakness of conservative Protestantism that is the source of shock. They wish the United States could become a Christian nation once again, a country aware of the providential link between public morality and national greatness (Barton 1992; Rushdoony 1978; DeMar 1995; Kennedy and Newcombe 2005). How can two sets of observers arrive at such disparate assessments of the same phenomenon? My goal in this chapter is to critique and move beyond these assessments by placing the folk theories and the phenomenon itself within a comparative-historical context. Any comparative and historical analysis necessarily takes a particular set of comparisons and a particular period of history as its starting point, and that starting point inevitably influences the questions that arise and the answers that result. This chapter is no exception to that rule, so I would like to be clear about my starting point, which is the Reformation era in western Europe, a period I studied intensively before becoming interested in modern America. Against that background, the title of this chapter is transformed into a question, even a perplexity: conservative Protestantism in the United States? Why the perplexity? There are several reasons. One is that the two traditions that constitute the theological and organizational core of conservative Protestantism at the moment-the Reformed and the Baptistare typically categorized as radical or even revolutionary within the early modern historiography (Baylor 1991; Hill 1962, 1975; Williams 1992). And not without reason: Calvinists have been variously credited with inventing capitalism, fomenting revolution, and promoting democracy (Camic, Gorski, and Trubek 2005; Gorski 1999, 2001, 2006; Marshall 1980, 1982; Walzer 1968); Max Weber accordingly described the Calvinist ethos as one of world mastery and world transformation, terms one does not immediately associate with political conservatism (Weber 2001; Weber, Gerth, and Mills 1964). As for the Baptists, they were tried and convicted of a variety of radical misdeeds, including antinomianism and free love and, later, of pacifism and sectarianism. How then, one wonders, does one start from the Puritan radicals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the seventeenth century and arrive at their theological descendants, the conservative Presbyterians of J. Gresham Machen's Westminster Seminary? Or start from the German Anabaptist revolutionary Thomas Müntzer and arrive at the American Baptist conservative Billy Graham? If the notion that some denominations of American Protestants are both theologically and politically conservative is one source of puzzlement, another is that conservative Protestantism should have come to be seen as something specifically and peculiarly American. In this case, we need only think back a century or so to see just how surprising this state of affairs really is. In 1900, when many of their European counterparts were still desperately clinging to the "marriage of throne and altar," American Protestants had long accepted the separation of church and state, at least as it was then understood (Gaustad 2003; Handy 1991; Rémond 1999). In some countries, such as Norway and the Netherlands, conservative Protestants were going so far as to organize political parties to protect their churches, their schools, and their families against the twin onslaughts of secularism and liberalism (Dunk 1975; Skillen and Carlson-Thies 1982); in Germany, on the other hand, to be Protestant was to be ipso facto conservative. Meanwhile, the temperance movement and other moral crusades championed by many Protestants in the United States attracted equal or greater amounts of support in certain parts of Europe (Gusfield 1986; Hurd 1994, 1996; Young 2006). It was not at all obvious then that the United States would eventually become the global center of conservative Protestantism. This raises an important question, the central question of this chapter: how and in what sense or senses did the majority of American Protestants come to see themselves as conservative? These are not easy questions to answer. What makes them so slippery is that the terms conservative and Protestant are not analytical or theoretical categories whose meaning can be fixed by definitional fiat. Rather, they are practical and political terms whose meanings are themselves sources and sites of conflict (Bourdieu 2000). Even within the narrower confines of recent American history, conservative is a polysemous concept, that is, contains multiple dimensions and layers of meaning not necessarily consistent with one another: small government and strong defense, conservation and free markets, strict constructionism and law and economics, biblical literalism and confessionalism, traditional values and libertarianism, and neoconservatism and isolationism. And the meanings become even more varied if we look at the longer sweep of American history. The boundaries of Protestantism have themselves been the subject of ongoing dispute. The old Protestant mainliners, dominated by the New England establishment, were hesitant to accept the holiness and Pentecostal movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into their confessional family. Today, the denominations to which these movements gave birth (for example, Nazarenes and Assemblies of God) are at the core of a new and conservative Protestant establishment (Roof and McKinney 1987). This is not to deny that terms such as conservative and Protestant can acquire relatively stable and widely shared meanings within a given context or community, nor that the words conservative Protestantism can serve as a rallying cry or source of solidarity amongst these groups. It is simply to emphasize that shared understandings of the term, to the extent they exist, are the result of considerable symbolic and organizational work, that the resulting constructions are not necessarily logically coherent or politically enduring, and that partisan attempts to project present meanings into the historical past should not be uncritically accepted. It is not possible to trace these shifts and accretions exhaustively or systematically in a single chapter. I instead enumerate several of the key turning points in the story and identify a few of the key mechanisms that underlie them. In so doing, I invoke cross-national comparisons, for the most part between the United States and the (predominantly) Protestant countries of northern Europe. For reasons of space, these comparisons will necessarily be rather brief and stylized. My goal, then, is modest: I do not pretend to provide definitive answers but instead to sharpen questions and develop hypotheses. My first task is to construct the object I wish to explain-conservative Protestantism. To do that, I first need to deconstruct two folk constructions of it.
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Barack Obama's critics question whether he believes in “American exceptionalism.” Evaluating this judgment requires some historical perspective and analytical clarity about the shifting and manifold meanings of the term. There are two main types of American exceptionalism: a “crusader exceptionalism” favored by most of Obama's GOP rivals, and a “prophetic exceptionalism” articulated by Obama. Both forms are rooted in the Bible, but they draw on different parts of it. Republican positions on foreign policy have become steadily more unilateralist, exemptionalist, and preemptive. For Obama, the “promise of America” is the possibility of equality, solidarity, and unity among people from around the globe.
Religious factors have been shown to influence whites’ attitudes toward interracial marriage, but this relationship has yet to be studied in depth. This study examines how religious affiliation, beliefs, practices, and congregational composition affect whites’ attitudes toward interracial marriage with African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Employing data from Wave 2 of the Baylor Religion Survey, I estimate ordered logit regression models to examine the influence of religious factors on whites’ attitudes toward racial exogamy, net of sociodemographic controls. Analyses reveal that, relative to evangelicals, religiously unaffiliated whites report greater support of intermarriage with all minority groups. Biblical literalists are less likely to support interracial marriage to Asians and Latinos. However, whites who frequently engage in devotional religious practices are more likely to support interracial marriage with all racial groups, as are whites who attend multiracial congregations. My findings suggest that the relationship between religion and whites’ attitudes toward racial exogamy is more complex than previously thought and that the influence of religious practices and congregational composition should not be overlooked.
This study examines how a desire to pass on religious heritage shapes whites’ attitudes toward interracial marriage for their children. Utilizing national survey data (Baylor Religion Survey 2007), I estimate ordered logit regression models to examine the extent to which whites’ desire to have their children and children's spouses share their religion affects attitudes toward their hypothetical daughters marrying blacks, Latinos, or Asians, net of other factors. Analyses reveal that whites who consider it more important that their children and children's spouses share their religion are less comfortable with their daughters marrying blacks, Latinos, or Asians. These effects are robust to the inclusion of measures for religiosity, political ideology, intimate interracial experiences, and other sociodemographic correlates. These findings suggest that, for whites, religious heritage has a clear ethno-racial component. The greater their desire for descendants to share the same religious views, the more whites would prefer that these descendants themselves be white, indicating that, for many white Americans, religious heritage is equated with whiteness. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for research on religion and interracial families.
The bicentennial of the American Bill of Rights offers an appropriate occasion to reassess its intellectual heritage. British radicals, I will argue, had a major impact on the principles enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including the rarely cited ninth amendment, so crucial for the resolution of such sociolegal issues as the rights to life and privacy and the place of religion in society. By radicals I mean those who sought fundamental changes in politics, religion, society, or the economy by striking at the root of contemporary assumptions and institutions.
In 1859 an influential theological quarterly asserted without fear of contradiction that postmillennialism was the “commonly received doctrine” among American Protestants; but by the early twentieth century, it had largely vanished, and Lewis Sperry Chafer, with only slight partisan exaggeration, could claim in 1936 that it was without “living voice”. In part, this change resulted from the defection of conservatives like Chafer to the expanding premillennial ranks, and several historians have told their story in detail. The disappearance of postmillennialism outside of premillennial quarters, however, has received scant attention. There—especially among the moderate to liberal Protestants with whom this article is chiefly concerned—the once dominant eschatology appears not to have suffered outright rejection but to have ebbed away. Although its remants endured as faith in progress, it gradually ceased to be a distinct biblically grounded eschatology.
How does religion affect one's attitudes toward immigrants? Scholars have shown that members of minor religious groups are less anti-immigrant than members of majority affiliations and that Evangelical Protestants are partic-ularly hostile. Other scholars have demonstrated that increased religiosity reduces immigrant animus. Here, we argue that religion affects immigration attitudes via a distinct religiously informed interpretation of America's national identity, which we call Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists believe that America has a divinely inspired mission and link its success to God's favor. Using social identity complexity theory, we argue that citizens who ascribe to this worldview should be least tolerant of those they perceive as symbolic threats to American national identity. We assess this claim using the 2006 Pew Immigration Attitudes Survey and the 2008 Cooperative Con-gressional Election Survey. Christian nationalism is a robust determinant of immigrant animus, whereas religious affiliation only affects immigrant animus when Christian nationalism is excluded.
When Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans' writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this long-awaited anniversary edition, Bercovitch has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging new preface that reflects on his classic study of the role of the political sermon, or jeremiad, in America from a contemporary perspective, while assessing developments in the field of American studies and the culture at large. © 1978, 2012 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
Ernest Tuveson here shows that the idea of the redemptive mission which has motivated so much of the United States foreign policy is as old as the Republic itself. He traces the development of this element of the American heritage from its beginning as a literal interpretation of biblical prophecies. Pointing to the application of the millenarian ideal to successive stages of American history, notably apocalyptic events like the Civil War, Tuveson illustrates its pervasive cultural influences with examples from the writings of Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Timothy Dwight, and Julia Ward Howe, among others.
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