Evangelicals and Politics in the Twentieth Century U.S.
Who are Evangelicals?
In religious terms, it refers to a focus on a belief system committed to an adherence to Biblical authority and spreading the gospel message.
In political terms, it refers to certain political orientation.
Although Evangelicals are from many backgrounds, they are often portrayed as white in the media. The question of slavery split American Christians, northern churches and southern churches. Christians used the same Bible to argue opposite sides.
The Scopes Trial in 1925 became a key moment for Evangelicals. From the 1920s until the 1950s, Evangelicals avoided politics. Something changed after the Second World War with the rise of Communism.
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Suggested Reading: Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics
“The conversion of African Americans was arguably the greatest contribution of the evangelical revivals to the future of American Christianity. “Early American white evangelicals’ commitment to evangelization set in motion perhaps the most remarkable change in American religious history: the nearly wholesale conversion of African Americans to some form of evangelical Christianity. That great transformation began in force in the mid-1780s, and by the early nineteenth century African Americans were converting at almost unparalleled rates,” writes Thomas S. Kidd. The conversion of black slaves, and attempts to evangelize them by whites, represented the first egalitarian contact between whites and blacks that moved relations between the two races beyond the level of master and slave. Evangelical revivals were the first instance of southern slave-holding whites looking at blacks as more than some sort of economic tool or resource on the level of livestock. The challenge for white evangelicals would be whether or not they could fully perform the egalitarian logic of the Gospel by dismantling the slave system on which the southern economy was built.” (Heltzel, pg. 17)
“The story of the black church is central to the white evangelical story because both are organic, independent, and interdependent movements within American religious history. Thinking historically about the relation between black and white evangelicalism in the formation of different streams of American political culture requires revisions in the way we think of the theological ideas, political practices, and legacies of evangelicalism.” (Heltzel, pg. 15-16)
