Attitudes towards LGBT individuals after Bostock v. Clayton County: Evidence from a quasi-experiment

Do United States Supreme Court decisions on LGBT rights shape attitudes towards LGBT individuals among the mass public? In this paper, I conduct an empirical test of the effect of quasi-random exposure to the announcment of \textit{Bostock v. Clayton County} - a landmark case which held that that an employer who fires their employee because of their sexual orientation or gender identity violates Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act - on favorability towards LGBT individuals. Relying on data from Phase 2 of the Democracy Fund/UCLA Nationscape survey, I find that quasi-random exposure to the announcement of \textit{Bostock} engendered increases in favorability towards LGBT individuals among the wider American public. Subgroup analyses also indicate that the largest increases in favorability were among Democratic partisans and the religiously unaffiliated, while minimal changes in favorability were detected among those who are among the most likely to oppose LGBT rights, including Republicans and Evangelical Protestants. The findings speak to the validity of the legitimacy model and highlight the limitations of the backlash model in the post-\textit{Obergefell} era of public opinion towards LGBT rights.

Dry Patriotism: The Chiniquy Crusade

Between 1848 and 1851, thousands of French-speaking Catholics in the Province of Canada came forward in their parish churches to take the temperance pledge. As word of this conversion reached non-Catholics across North America, the reaction was one of pure astonishment. For several decades, evangelical Protestants had laboured long and hard to eradicate drunkenness; and now a Catholic priest was securing more converts in a single day than these earlier workers had won with years of steady effort. Contemporaries shook their heads and laid it down to the eloquent charm of Father Charles Chiniquy. Chiniquy in all likelihood helped to forge the new and lasting image of the church as guardian of the national destiny. His work embodied the new Catholicism championed by Bishop Bourget and Etienne Parent. This idea has stood the test of time; the full-length biography of Chiniquy published by Canadian historian Marcel Trudel in 1955 attributed the priest’s vast influence to “honeyed flattery” and other excesses of his oratory. In the 1840s Chiniquy’s promises of survivance won support for virtues more commonly associated with the Anglo-American, Protestant side of Canada’s heritage. Hoping to save itself, little Rome-on-the-St Lawrence crooked its knee to Samuel Smiles.

Battleground Europe

This chapter explores the transformation of postwar Europe into a spiritual battleground between ecumenists and evangelicals, Protestants and Catholics, and American democrats and Soviet communists. As the occupation of Germany matured, both ecumenical and evangelical Protestants sought to win over Germany as a new anti-communist partner in the heart of Europe. They likewise sought to establish their competing spiritual orders across the continent through ecumenical tours of reconciliation and evangelical revivals. The postwar activism of American Protestants extended far beyond just seeking to revive Europe’s soul. Both ecumenical and evangelical Protestants mobilized to create a Protestant bulwark against Soviet communism across the continent, as well as to counteract a postwar resurgence of the Vatican and Roman Catholicism. Under their watch, the struggle for the soul of Europe began.

For Christ and Country

The Second World War marked a landmark moment of transition for both ecumenical and evangelical Protestants in the United States. The arrival of war in December 1941 emboldened both groups of Protestants to make the case not only for armed intervention abroad but also for spiritual intercession. The pacifist isolationism of Protestant ecumenists faded as they embraced the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr and called for a new “American Century” of Protestant and democratic values. Meanwhile, fueled by an apocalyptic militarism, American fundmenatlists sought to use the war to reclaim a more prominent role in American politics and foreign affairs. As both groups of American Protestants mobilized “for Christ and country,” they also began to outline competing missions to remake the world, and above all Germany, out of the ruins of war.

Spiritual Conquest

This chapter examines the twentieth-century origins of Christian nationalism and Christian globalism in American Protestant missionary efforts and the First World War. It also asserts the prominence of American Protestant engagement with Germany in shaping both theological modes of engagement. Whether it was Germany’s autocratic ambitions or its liberal theology, a growing number of American Protestant ecumenists and evangelicals alike identified Germany as a major threat to their global mission. While ecumenists mobilized for war to build a new Wilsonian international order, evangelicals found inspiration in their premillennial apocalypticism to oppose Germany. The Great War and its aftermath then led both ecumenical and evangelical Protestants to see one another as rivals within their own nation. These events ultimately activated and refined competing forms of international engagement that would define America’s global mission in the decades to follow.

Religion and the 2020 Presidential Election: The Enduring Divide

Religion played a prominent role in the 2020 presidential campaign. Donald Trump overtly courted white evangelical Protestants and Catholics, while Joe Biden emphasized his Catholicism far more than any Catholic candidate in American history. Did religion play as important a role in electoral behavior in 2020? If so, how and why did religion affect Americans’ voting decisions? We take up those questions by analyzing the religious vote in 2020 and the reasons why particular religious and non-religious groups voted as they did. We find that the religious divisions in the 2020 electorate were quite deep, but they were mostly unchanged from those present in 2016. Moreover, some electoral differences between religious groups are based in factors such as racial resentment, support for limited government, and anti-immigration attitudes that are not typically associated with religion. However, a key explanation for religious voting in 2020 was an old standby: the abortion issue. The religion gap in American electoral politics represents an enduring divide. The only changes were at the margins—but where elections are close, margins matter.

Producing the Christian Right: Conservative Evangelicalism, Representation, and the Recent Religious Past

This essay explores how conservative evangelical Protestants have been represented by both sociologists and journalists of American religion through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right” beginning in the late 1970s. By exploring both popular and academic analyses of conservative Protestantism as understood through terms such as “the Christian Right” and “the Electronic Church”, one is able to identify a set of intellectual assumptions that characterize the study of American evangelicalism and politics in the recent past. In particular, this essay suggests that studies of conservative evangelicalism as understood through “the rise of the Christian Right” tend to reveal as much about their interpreters as they do their respective evangelical subjects. The essay first identifies what these barriers and limitations are by exploring the social scientific literature on conservative evangelicalism at the time. It then foregrounds news reports and academic studies of “the Christian Right” in order to connect journalistic and academic inquiries of the conservative Protestant to the emergence of the evangelical. It then suggests a number of historical and methodological avenues for future research on American evangelicalism and politics that foreground self-reflexivity, interdisciplinarity, and the close reading of conservative texts.

Toward a multifaith view of atonement

The meaning of the death of Jesus on the cross has been interpreted differently from the first century until today. Of the many theories proposed throughout Christian history, the dominant understanding, especially among evangelical Protestants since the Reformation and perhaps dating from Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, has been the penal-substitutionary view of atonement. Christ died to pay the penalty for human sin, so humanity can receive forgiveness by trusting in the efficacy of Jesus’s death on its behalf. This explanation is an objective theory that is “Godward focused,” understanding the work of Christ as a divine plan to satisfy what God requires: expiation for human sin. Other competing theories, however, reject this idea and propose more subjective views that are “humanward focused.” This article considers the reality of different, imperfect perspectives about matters as complex as the interpretation of God. It connects the writer’s affirmation of the plurality of religious experience with his having lived a quarter century in the multifaith milieu of Java. It touches on specific opposing theories of atonement, endorsing as more useful in our interreligious world the subjective approaches to understanding the cross. It advocates an intriguing argument for the plurality of end goals, or “salvations,” among the world’s religions. Finally, it uses the less dominant models of martyr motif and the moral example theory to investigate how the concept of atonement might be understood in the context of four major world religions other than Christianity, suggesting that acknowledgment of the legitimacy of different approaches to the Divine is a distinctly “Christian” way to live in a diverse world.