White Evangelical Protestants Research Articles

The Variable “Catholic” Influence on US Presidential and Abortion Politics

We demonstrate that, in comparison to religious groups showing reliable, contemporary voting tendencies (e.g., white evangelical Protestants voting Republican, Jews and Muslims voting Democratic), Roman Catholics show far less consistency in supporting one major party over the other. After reviewing relevant literature Catholic public political preferences and behavior, we delve into a basic overview of the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. We then analyze historical periods when the impact of the church seems consequential, such as effects of the “Catholic vote”. We summarize scholarship and opinion surveys concerning Catholic political views and behavior over the last several decades, focusing on attitudes toward abortion in the wake of the Dobbs decision. We then highlight differences and similarities between Catholic rank-and-file and the church clergy and hierarchy, some of which are well known in the religion and politics literature. In sum, we find that unlike past or more contemporaneous takes on the impact of Catholics and Catholicism on politics and policy, there is no longer (if there ever was) a single, identifiable Catholic impact, even as the Catholic vote remains a demographic for which politicians compete.

Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions by Micah Alpaugh

Alpaugh’s Friends of Freedom provides an integrated narrative of the rise of social movements, political protest, and revolutionary mobilization in the eighteenth century in the United States, Britain, Ireland, France, and Haiti. The author contrasts his own work with that of Palmer, who undertook a similar project more than half a century ago in The Age of the Democratic Revolution.1 Like Alpaugh, Palmer argued that common ideals motivated eighteenth-century revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but as Alpaugh points out, Palmer’s account portrays the American and French Revolutions as “more simultaneous than interrelated” and has little to say about slavery or Haiti. Alpaugh answers these deficiencies, elucidating interconnections between events in various parts of the Atlantic World and highlighting the importance of abolitionism as a precocious protest movement that developed arguments and tactics that would later be adopted by revolutionaries in every place he examines.Alpaugh has overcome daunting challenges in producing this book. Drawing on material from archives in France, Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and engaging with scholarship in a range of historical fields, he has pulled his material together effectively, telling coherent stories and making his argument clear. The book operates on two scales. On the large scale it is divided into two halves, Part I emphasizing the influence of the American Revolution, and Part II tracing the widespread impact of the French Revolution, with French Revolutionary influences ultimately crossing the Atlantic to become manifested in the formation of U.S. party politics. Within this broad framework, the eight chapters in Part I and the five chapters in Part II tell smaller-scale discrete stories including, for example, the struggles of various Protestant groups in America to secure religious liberty and the campaigns of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. This structure allows Alpaugh to recount local developments clearly while emphasizing their Atlantic contexts.The book had to be divided in this way. The overall story is too rich, detailed, and intricate to be conveyed in a single uninterrupted narrative. But there is a noticeable tension between Alpaugh’s claims about interconnected Atlantic revolutions, giving primacy to the American and French Revolutions, and his smaller-scale efforts to recount local developments accurately in detail. The struggle for Protestant American religious liberty, for example, started long before the American Revolution, as did the transatlantic struggle over slavery. In both instances, while the American and French Revolutions changed the terms of argument in important ways, Alpaugh strains to acknowledge the diverse range of voices engaged in the long-running debates.In discussing abolition, Alpaugh emphasises the role of Quakers and white evangelical Protestants who championed new tactics and lines of argument to recruit allies in America, Britain, and France. Africans and people of African descent enter the analysis only mid-stream. On the twelfth page of his discussion of abolitionism in America, Alpaugh introduces Black abolitionists with a paragraph starting, “African-Americans advanced their own cause” (183). Similarly, in the chapter on abolitionism in Britain, Black abolitionists appear only after eight pages discussing white abolitionist leaders. “Blacks living in England,” he writes, “allied for the cause” (205). Black leaders figure more prominently in Alpaugh’s discussion of the Haitian Revolution, but he is emphatic that they were responding to events in France and French debates, and he criticizes historians who fail to center their analysis on the influence of the French Revolution.While Africans and people of African descent figure in the book’s narrative, many inhabitants of the Atlantic world who contributed to the tumult of the revolutionary era—indigenous Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin Americans—are left out. Alpaugh has demonstrated that Atlantic history is intrinsically liberating, releasing us from the confines of national narratives, but—especially if historians wish to work from archival materials—a fully inclusive, comprehensive history of the Atlantic World will almost always be out of reach.

Faithful Stewards of God’s Creation? Swedish Evangelical Denominations and Climate Change

Studies from the United States (U.S.) show that opposition to climate policy is strong among some Christian groups, especially White evangelical Protestants. Much of this opposition is channelled through organisations such as the Cornwall Alliance, which argue against climate measures on religious, economic and what they claim to be science-based grounds. In the present study, we investigated to what extent these convictions were present among Swedish evangelical denominations. Representatives from the Evangelical Free Church, the Pentecostal Alliance, the Swedish Alliance Mission, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church were interviewed to identify the denominations’ views on the scientific underpinnings of climate change and the moral implications of climate policy. Our data show that the denominations’ views differ markedly from those expressed by climate-oppositional evangelical groups in the U.S. The denominations held homogenous views on the legitimacy of climate science, expressed a clear biblical mandate for climate policy based on the notion of human stewardship, and believed that climate change was inextricably linked to poverty and, thus, had to be addressed. Our results point to the need for further studies on the factors behind acceptance and denial of climate science within and between faith-based and other communities in different countries.

Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era by Daniel R. Bare

Reviewed by: Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era Daniel R. Bare Curtis J. Evans Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Probably no religious groups in American history, with the exception of Puritans, have received as much attention and scholarship over the last decade or two as white evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. Beginning with George Marsden’s groundbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture, the scholarship has continued to flow. Two books serve as bookends of one era of this scholarship: Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997) and Matthew Sutton’s A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2017). Before Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism (2017) came out with its fuller treatment of black fundamentalism, Sutton’s book was the only synthetic account to take seriously the experience of African American fundamentalists. One of the most striking insights from Sutton’s book is how seemingly little shared theological positions between white and black fundamentalists mattered for white fundamentalists insofar as their political and civic responsibilities toward African Americans. White fundamentalists supported segregation, espoused and propounded racist and buffoonish caricatures of black religiosity, and almost universally rejected any attempt to reform American society according to a Social Gospel model that found a notable [End Page 128] and important following among black (liberal and conservative) and white (liberal) Protestants. Daniel R. Bare’s Black Fundamentalists stands squarely in the midst of this historiographical debate and argues that black Americans have been excluded from the scholarship on Protestant fundamentalism. He seeks to correct that lacuna by examining the ways in which some African Americans accepted self-identification as fundamentalists and adhered to a number of “fundamentalist” doctrines. Bare argues for the salience of theological doctrine as a marker of identity and as a “meaningful analytical category.” The latter argument is a driving force in his narrative, though its plausibility is less compelling as it lays out the details of what the fundamentalist label meant apart from opposition to certain modernist positions. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the details of the lives of these black fundamentalist leaders. They appear like spectral figures; we know almost nothing of their educational background and the kinds of church contexts in which they preached. Bare makes no significant mention of the Great Migration as a force in catalyzing these divisions within black Protestantism. Even when social context comes into play, Bare tends to misconstrue the power dynamics of racial oppression by insisting that “the different social and cultural circumstances facing black and white communities often led to substantially different social actions and applications, even among those who would commonly agree on the most important fundamentalist doctrines” (15). To speak of black confrontations with racism as merely “different social actions and applications” of theological doctrines indicates at best a serious misunderstanding of the harshness and circumscriptions of social existence for blacks, as though the two groups were equal in merely “applying” doctrines to the circumstances of their lives. Black Fundamentalists has five chapters and a helpful introduction that points out the ways in which race and African American fundamentalism have not been adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Bare makes a compelling case for the inclusion of African Americans in narratives of fundamentalism, but his specific doctrinal approach to black Protestants leaves a lot of missing parts. The first chapter uses African American weekly newspapers as a source for discussions about the prevalence of fundamentalism in black communities. Given the complicated, critical, and sometimes adversarial perspective that black newspapers took on black religious life, it seems doubtful that their claims about fundamentalism as a widespread phenomenon among black Protestants should be taken as the last word. Calling someone a fundamentalist was often a way to denigrate their entire religious perspective, and black newspapers and secular critics often resorted to this tactic (a point that Bare notes in respect to claims about what was best for black civic and political life). [End Page 129] Bare’s second chapter looks at the five fundamental doctrines across black Protestantism and compares black...

Religion and the 2020 Presidential Election: The Enduring Divide

Abstract 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.

위상의 정치에서 본 백인 복음주의 개신교도의 트럼프 지지

위상의 정치에서 본 백인 복음주의 개신교도의 트럼프 지지

Abrahamic Religions and Climate Change: Tradition and Political (In)action

This article examines the theological worldview of the white Evangelical Protestant demographic group in terms of its political expression in the United States of America. Specifically, the politics over granting asylum to climate refugees is examined together with a critical overview of Abrahamic history on the care of strangers and the treatment of refugees. Also examined are related questions on the epistemological reality of climate change within the academic community. This research is brought together to assess the impact and influence of white Evangelical Protestants on these controversies, and what can be done to counter the current political impasse that is blocking effective and meaningful climate change mitigation legislation and for granting asylum to climate refugees.

Affective solidarities or group boundaries? Muslims’ place in America’s racial and religious order

ABSTRACT Muslims in the U.S. have been politically targeted as a threat to the nation. Yet, little is known about how most Americans’ attitudes are formed toward this growing group. While often othered in terms of their religion, race-ethnicity, and national background, Muslims also constitute the latest minority group in America’s racialized landscape. This study draws on theories of race-ethnicity, intergroup relations, and religious exclusion to situate Muslims relative to existing intergroup relations in the United States. Using four waves of the American National Election Survey, the study finds little evidence for affective solidarities between America’s largest racial-ethnic groups and Muslims. Instead, intergroup boundaries tend to predict lower levels of Muslim favorability. Further, the study uncovers a religious dimension concentrated among largely White evangelical Protestants. Findings are discussed within the context of sociodemographic changes in the U.S., and the prospect for shifting colour lines in the wake of increasing immigration-led diversity.

Populism, Evangelicalism, and the Polarized Politics of Immigration

Past research has established that evangelical Protestant elites have increased their involvement in immigration reform efforts pursuing Biblical values of “welcoming the stranger.” This article confirms and updates these previous research efforts. Prior work has also established that, at the mass level, white evangelical Protestants hold the most conservative immigration perspectives of any religious group in the United States. This article examines reasons for this finding through analysis of Democracy Fund Voter Survey panel data. It demonstrates that partisanship, presidential voting, and right-wing cultural populist attitudes are the primary driving forces underlying white evangelical attitudes about immigration.

Examining Christian views toward the Affordable Care Act: The importance of race and denomination

While the majority of U.S. Christians opposed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, opinion was deeply divided by race/ethnicity and denominational group. Using national data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we analyzed variation in ACA support across Christian denominational groups and offered explanations for these differences. We found overwhelming support among African Americans, less unified but majority support from Hispanics, and majority opposition from non-Hispanic White Christians. Among White Catholics and Protestants, ACA support varied considerably, and views toward abortion policy statistically explained much of the difference in likelihood to support the ACA across denominational categories (comparing White mainline versus Evangelical Protestants, and white moderate versus devout Catholics). Differences in anti-Black racial resentment were substantial between White Evangelical and mainline Protestants, and helped explain some of the gaps in ACA support between these groups. We conclude that differences in ACA views by denomination can be explained by firmly held group beliefs that may be difficult to sway, even if the program is a technical success.

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie

Politics before God

America’s 2018 midterm elections provide an opportunity to assess white evangelical Protestants’ counterintuitive embrace of Trump. Reports of the President’s past infidelities, suspicious business deals, and possible electoral collusion with Russia appear to have done little to abate the support of America’s most socially conservative law-and-order voters - white evangelical Protestants. PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) data demonstrates though Trump never polled above 50 percent favourability with white evangelical-Protestants during the primaries, since his 2016 election the constituency has only grown more ‘Trump-drunk’ with a record 75 percent endorsing the President and his commitment to put ‘America First’. 
 Although America’s Christian right have long-standing Republican inclinations, evangelicals’ self-abasement under Trump remains difficult to understand. White evangelicals have migrated from a Christian movement guilty of overt partisan identification to a movement willing to corrupt their faith values and religious tradition for political opportunities. The effect, as Gerson (2018) notes, is a faith tradition now riddled with ‘political tribalism and hatred for political opponents, with little remaining of Christian public witness.’ Keller cuts deeper, saying ‘evangelical’ used to mean those who took the moral high ground, but now it’s nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite’ (Keller cited in Gerson, 2018). ‘With an end-justifies-the-means style of politics that would have been unimaginable before [Trump]’ (Jones cited in Coppins 2018a), it seems America’s evangelicals are putting politics before God. 
 Subsequently, this article reflects on four dimensions of Trump’s success with white evangelicals. First, it discusses howTrump and the GOP presented 2016 as the ‘last chance election’. Secondly it explores Trump’s ‘priestly rhetoric’ and evangelicals’ ‘priestly faith’ in him. Thirdly, what have white evangelical-Protestants achieved under Trump in return for their votes? Lastly, how has Trump changed American evangelicalism and the nation? Is nativism and tribalism consuming their faith-tradition just as it’s dividing the country?

God and Guns: Examining Religious Influences on Gun Control Attitudes in the United States

Mass shootings in the United States have generated significant media coverage and public concern, invigorating debates over gun control. Media coverage and academic research on gun control attitudes and reactions to mass shootings have paid little attention to the role of religion. Recent research sheds light on the complex relationship between religion and guns, including higher rates of gun ownership and stronger opposition to gun control among white evangelical Protestants. Using nationally representative survey data, this study examines the relationship between religious identity, gun ownership, and support for a range of gun control policies, including proposed remedies for preventing mass shootings. Compared with individuals from other religious traditions, evangelical Protestants are most opposed to stricter gun control laws and enforcement, even with statistical controls for gun ownership and demographic characteristics. Rather, they favor individualistic solutions and putting more emphasis on religious values in their social surroundings. I discuss how these findings reflect the cultural tools evangelical Protestants use to construct their understandings of social problems, including gun violence, and the broader implications for gun policy in the United States.

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf

<i>Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie</i> by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf

Fones-Wolfe, Elizabeth, and Fones-Wolfe, Ken.Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 288 pp. $25.00 (paper).

Fones-Wolfe, Elizabeth, and Fones-Wolfe, Ken.<i>Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie</i>. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 288 pp. $25.00 (paper).

Rethinking Operation Dixie

Rethinking Operation Dixie

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf

Book Review: Struggle for the Soul of the Post-War South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf

Book Review: <i>Struggle for the Soul of the Post-War South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie</i>, by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf

Faith and the Free Market: Evangelicals, the Tea Party, and Economic Attitudes

AbstractWe argue that concerted efforts by Tea Party leaders, Republican politicians, and leading Christian Right figures to establish and promote a connection between Christian faith and the free-market system has helped shift the economic attitudes of white evangelical Protestants in a more conservative direction. Our analysis of Public Religion Research Institute survey data finds that white evangelical Protestants express greater skepticism about an active role of government in society and believe economic growth is more likely to be spurred by a reduction in taxes rather than in public investments. Moreover, we find that identifying with the Tea Party has a conservatizing influence on their economic issue positions. While we find that partisanship, class, and in some cases, age, serve to modify the views of some evangelicals, by and large, evangelicals have come to embrace the conservative fiscal message promoted by both the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.