Christianity and American Politics

Article by Tom Hercock. Edited by Liam Geoghegan. Additional Research by Helen Midgely.

The “religious right” is currently a familiar feature to outside observers of American politics. Since the 1980s, socially conservative Christian voters have been the bedrock of the election victories of Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes. The long “culture wars” over issues such as abortion and gay rights have been fuelled by their beliefs and activism. The supposed liberal bias of the public education system has also been a target – earlier this year, the education board in Texas, an elected body on which conservative Christians had gained a majority, enacted major revisions to the state’s History curriculum, including changes that emphasised the role of evangelical Protestantism in the founding of the United States.

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps easy to imagine that religion has been a permanent force in the development of America, and a conservative force at that. While the first is to some extent true, it is only true in spite, not because of, the Founding Fathers of the United States. And instead of always being a conservative force, religion has been at the root of many of the most progressive movements in American history, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement.

Although the Founding Fathers (the collective term for the fifty-five members of the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, who wrote the United States Constitution) included some conventional Protestant Christians, many, including some of the most notable like Thomas Jefferson are probably best described as deists. Jefferson believed in the existence of a Supreme Being but not that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Before being elected as President in 1800, Jefferson was the leader of a campaign to disestablish (remove tax revenues from) the Anglican Church in his home state of Virginia. However, Jefferson’s most significant achievement on religious matters was being the inspiration for the sections of the First Amendment of the US Constitution that dealt with religious freedom. This stated unambiguously that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’. Almost uniquely for the late eighteenth century, the United States did not place any religious restriction on holding office. One of the earliest foreign treaties made by the United States, with Tripoli (Islamic Libya) in 1797, contained this striking passage: ‘As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion...it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquillity of Musselmen [Muslims]’, showing that American leaders were once keen to deny the relation of Christianity to the United States, in a way that is ironic when compared to the modern day!

Nothing was this easy of course – when running for the presidency, Jefferson was (unsuccessfully) attacked by his Federalist opponents as an “infidel” who would destroy American churches. In a society where most of the population believed in one form or another of Protestant Christianity, it was inevitable that religion would play a role in the public sphere. What was not, and is not inevitable, in spite of the current influence of the religious right, is that it should necessarily be a right wing influence. Some of the most significant and progressive changes in American history have been won by movements with religious roots. The most prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement were ministers like William Lloyd Garrison, and that movement was strongest in precisely the areas where evangelical Protestantism was most widespread: the northeastern states of New England. The antislavery appeals made by the abolitionists relied as often upon Christian brotherhood as republican arguments based on the Declaration of Independence. Later, as American industrial cities boomed around the turn of the twentieth century, it was preachers of the “social gospel”, such as Jane Addams and Walter Rauschenbausch who tried to help the urban poor through the “settlement house” movement, and sought reform of the economic system in order to provide greater welfare to the “losers” from capitalism, justified on Christian grounds. And it was from the organisational and ideological basis provided by the black church that the civil rights movement came in the 1950s, as can be seen most clearly in the career of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Barack Obama, another liberal figure who has emphasised his Christian faith in defining his politics, wrote that stripping the words of American progressive heroes of the religious lexicon robbed their ideology of much of its meaning: ‘Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to the “judgements of the Lord” or King’s “I Have A Dream” speech without reference to “all of God’s children”’. Obama’s 2008 election victory, defeating the activism of the conservative religious right, was just the latest chapter in the strange political career of American religion – a career unwanted by Jefferson but one which has often been as beneficial to the left wing as to the right.

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Though America is constitutionally a secular nation it is actually a fundamentally religious country: in 2004 the US Census Bureau stated that only 13% of Americans did not define themselves as a member of a religious community.

Religious issues – from most commonly the Judeo-Christian perspective – affect all aspects of American life and politics.

In 2004 the Pew Forum poll showed that 72% of Americans agreed that “the president should have strong religious beliefs”.

The Religious Right or Christian Right is an extremely successful lobbying force in the United States and has had many guises.

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