2. Politics and the American Christian

Abstract

This chapter uses the American National Elections Survey, which uses thermometer scores to measure affinity or animosity toward fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, and atheists, to quantitatively explore whom progressive Christians and conservative Christians envision as their in-groups and out-groups. Progressive Christians tend to envision groups that are traditionally politically progressive, such as Muslims and atheists, as more acceptable than conservative Christians believe such groups to be. Progressive Christians also reject political conservatives as out-group members. Conservative Christians tend to reject Muslims and atheists, but they do not necessarily reject political liberals. This evidence suggests that progressive Christians tend to use political values to establish their social identity while conservative Christians tend to use theological values to accomplish that task. But another question is whether simply different political values drive this distinction or whether there are other underlying core values at play. To this end, more is occurring here than merely different priorities being placed on theology and politics by progressive and conservative Christians, and there is a need to use qualitative methods to gain a more holistic understanding of progressive and conservative Christian differences.