Postwar America, 1945–1970s

Chapter 6 examines the modern conservative movement and how the alliance of secular political elements with previously apolitical evangelicals slowly took shape during the thirty years following World War II. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) served to provide some of the conservative movement’s essential historical and philosophical scaffolding, while Carl F. Henry’s Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) encouraged evangelical political engagement. Oil tycoon and committed Presbyterian J. Howard Pew played a key role in galvanizing evangelicals by subsidizing Christianity Today and then linking them with political conservatives, being himself a former Liberty Leaguer and a fervent anticommunist. The presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964 stimulated evangelical political action and helped secure the essential union of more secular and openly religious conservatives. The Supreme Court’s controversial Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973 served to bolster this alliance by providing a moral issue that allowed some convergence and collaboration.

The Antebellum Era and Civil War, 1800–1865

Several antebellum conservatives sought to dismantle the Lockean foundations of American political thinking in favor of a political vision that affirmed the divine origins of government. Evangelical conservatives such as Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen were among the first to advance the “America as a Christian nation” argument that became a favorite of conservatives in the latter part of the twentieth century. By the 1830s, New England evangelicals, such as Connecticut Congregationalist pastor Lyman Beecher, came reluctantly to accept church disestablishment at the state level as best for both Christianity and society. During the Civil War, conservatives North and South built upon the work of their antebellum forerunners and stressed the essential place and role of Christianity. Two examples of this movement in the North were the campaigns to amend the Federal Constitution with an explicit reference to Christ and the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s coinage.

The Success and Failure of the Religious Right, 1970s–2010

Chapter 7 explores the successes and failures of what came to be called the Religious Right during the last third of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Evangelical Protestantism contributed significantly to the moralism of the movement while lending apparent biblical sanction to already well-established conservative political positions such as limited government and free market economics. Participants in the Religious Right drew selectively from theologians such as Rousas John Rushdoony and Francis Schaeffer, but a nontheological pragmatism ultimately came to characterize the movement under television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the emergence of the Tea Party movement confirmed how conventional conservative concerns about deficits and creeping socialism had successfully displaced ethical issues. This nontheological pragmatism can help explain the high levels of support for Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy by white evangelicals.

The Colonies, 1607–1763

The Puritans conserved older medieval views in their holy commonwealth conception of church–state relations and in their prioritizing of the common good. Governor John Winthrop articulated a thoroughly conservative defense of social hierarchy and of the state as a divinely ordained moral agent. Meanwhile, many of the towns they first founded in the seventeenth century were extraordinarily stable and homogenous communities. Economic development and the religious upheaval of the Great Awakening threatened some of this social conservatism. Consequently, some criticisms of the revival represented the first examples of a coherent colonial conservatism. These critics fretted about local clerical authority and the threat posed to social cohesion by individualism, or what some termed the danger of the “private Christian.” Despite some differences, colonial Southerners shared much of the stress on hierarchy and deference that characterized their New England cousins.

Introduction

This work attempts to take a long view of the evolving relationship between certain Protestants and conservative politics. It is primarily a book about American Protestants but it is also about political conservatism. My purpose is to demonstrate the ways in which conservative thought has been formed by religious views associated with different strands of orthodox Protestantism. Secondarily, I also seek to show the ways that Protestants have been influenced by conservatism. This book seeks to answer three interrelated questions within the context of an overview of American history from the colonial period to the recent past. One, what has religion—in particular, Protestant Christianity—done for conservatism? Two, what particular components of these religious beliefs and of conservative thought allowed their convergence in various periods? Three, what effects has this interaction had on American conservatism and on some forms of Protestant Christianity?

Conclusion

Among the most significant outcomes of the complex relationship between evangelicals and political conservatism has been to make orthodox Protestants simultaneously both less distinctively Christian and less genuinely conservative. Since the late nineteenth century, evangelicals have drawn from the newer sort of classical liberal “conservatism” whose principles owe more to the Enlightenment than to Christian theology. Further, their unreflective activism and increasingly nondoctrinal pietism has made it easy for evangelicals simultaneously to compartmentalize their faith, while still becoming more active politically. Evangelicals’ perspective on public life thereby became more secular as it became more partisan and utilitarian. The choice to support candidate Trump in 2016 highlighted evangelicalism’s lack of a theological basis for political engagement. The preceding chapters show that this deficiency had deep historical roots.

The Early Twentieth Century, 1900–1945

Chapter 5 examines the first half of the twentieth century, focusing initially on the judicial and political critics of Progressivism. Although conservatives such as Justice David Brewer drew upon Christian elements in articulating their judicial theory, it was in a limited and circumscribed way. Similarly, political conservatives such as Elihu Root substituted a constitutional formalism and veneration of the Founders for the more theological approach of the Gilded Age dissenters. Meanwhile, leaders such as Presbyterian scholar John Gresham Machen helped draw evangelicals away from the older theocratic approach toward more libertarian views regarding politics and the state. Conservative responses to the Great Depression included Fundamentalists who viewed the New Deal apocalyptically and organizers of the Liberty League who warned of a coming totalitarianism. The modest connections established between Liberty Leaguers and evangelicals foreshadowed the deeper alliance that would profoundly shape the post–World War II conservative movement.

The Gilded Age, 1865–1900

Richard Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that became dominant during the last third of the nineteenth century was different from its predecessors in several respects, including in its secularism. Some popular preachers still attempted to accommodate laissez-faire principles and socially conservative evangelical Protestantism. A few conservatives refused to accept much of the new conservatism. These Protestant clerical intellectuals (both northern and southern) dissented from conservatism’s new orientation and offered a social theory still rooted in Protestant theology. This chapter highlights where these old-fashioned dissidents differed from their fellow conservatives and seeks also to describe their alternative conservative vision. Their story serves to clarify just how significant a shift occurred among conservatives during the Gilded Age and illuminates the last gasp of a more theocratic tradition among American Protestants.

Revolution and the Founding Era, 1763–1800

By the eve of the American Revolution, Loyalists were some of the most consistent defenders of the hallowed Christian commonwealth ideal, including the principle of social hierarchy. Among Patriots, certain Christian beliefs were also employed by conservatives such as John Dickinson and John Adams to apply the brakes to the more radical implications of the Revolution. Although the new Federal Constitution’s secular character rankled some conservatives, under the emerging First Party system, many High Federalists still stressed the political value of religion. Meanwhile, the radicalism of the French Revolution prompted conservatives to use explicitly Christian arguments to answer Enlightenment challenges to orthodox belief while painting their political opponents as infidels. By the turn of the nineteenth century, evangelicals were becoming more individualistic and less committed to the larger social and institutional project of conservatism.