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"Christianity and politics United States History 20th century."
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For God and Globe
For God and Globerecovers the history of an important yet largely forgotten intellectual movement in interwar America. Michael G. Thompson explores the way radical-left and ecumenical Protestant internationalists articulated new understandings of the ethics of international relations between the 1920s and the 1940s. Missionary leaders such as Sherwood Eddy and journalists such as Kirby Page, as well as realist theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr, developed new kinds of religious enterprises devoted to producing knowledge on international relations for public consumption.For God and Globecenters on the excavation of two such efforts-the leading left-wing Protestant interwar periodical,The World Tomorrow, and the landmark Oxford 1937 ecumenical world conference. Thompson charts the simultaneous peak and decline of the movement in John Foster Dulles's ambitious efforts to link Christian internationalism to the cause of international organization after World War II.
Concerned with far more than foreign policy, Christian internationalists developed critiques of racism, imperialism, and nationalism in world affairs. They rejected exceptionalist frameworks and eschewed the dominant \"Christian nation\" imaginary as a lens through which to view U.S. foreign relations. In the intellectual history of religion and American foreign relations, Protestantism most commonly appears as an ideological ancillary to expansionism and nationalism.For God and Globechallenges this account by recovering a movement that held Christian universalism to be a check against nationalism rather than a boon to it.
eBook
Moral Minority
In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, theWashington Postpredicted that the new evangelical left could \"shake both political and religious life in America.\" The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong-evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? InMoral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way-organizationally and through political activism-to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.
eBook
American Catholic
American Catholic places the rise of the United States'
political conservatism in the context of ferment within the Roman
Catholic Church. How did Roman Catholics shift from being perceived
as un-American to emerging as the most vocal defenders of the
United States as the standard bearer in world history for political
liberty and economic prosperity? D. G. Hart charts the development
of the complex relationship between Roman Catholicism and American
conservatism, and shows how these two seemingly antagonistic
ideological groups became intertwined in advancing a certain brand
of domestic and international politics.
Contrary to the standard narrative, Roman Catholics were some of
the most assertive political conservatives directly after World War
II, and their brand of politics became one of the most influential
means by which Roman Catholicism came to terms with American
secular society. It did so precisely as bishops determined the
church needed to update its teaching about its place in the modern
world. Catholics grappled with political conservatism long before
the supposed rightward turn at the time of the Roe v. Wade
decision in 1973.
Hart follows the course of political conservatism from John F.
Kennedy, the first and only Roman Catholic president of the United
States, to George W. Bush, and describes the evolution of the
church and its influence on American politics. By tracing the roots
of Roman Catholic politicism in American culture, Hart argues that
Roman Catholicism's adaptation to the modern world, whether in the
United States or worldwide, was as remarkable as its achievement
remains uncertain. In the case of Roman Catholicism, the effects of
religion on American politics and political conservatism are
indisputable.
eBook
Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right
As Jimmy Carter ascended to the presidency the heir apparent to Democratic liberalism, he touted his background as a born-again evangelical. Once in office, his faith indeed helped form policy on a number of controversial moral issues. By acknowledging certain behaviors as sinful while insisting that they were private matters beyond government interference, J. Brooks Flippen argues, Carter unintentionally alienated both social liberals and conservative Christians, thus ensuring that the debate over these moral \"family issues\" acquired a new prominence in public and political life. The Carter era, according to Flippen, stood at a fault line in American culture, religion, and politics. In the wake of the 1960s, some Americans worried that the traditional family faced a grave crisis. This newly politicized constituency viewed secular humanism in education, the recognition of reproductive rights established by Roe v. Wade, feminism, and the struggle for homosexual rights as evidence of cultural decay and as a challenge to religious orthodoxy. Social liberals viewed Carter's faith with skepticism and took issue with his seeming unwillingness to build on recent progressive victories. Ultimately, Flippen argues, conservative Christians emerged as the Religious Right and were adopted into the Republican fold. Examining Carter's struggle to placate competing interests against the backdrop of difficult foreign and domestic issues-a struggling economy, the stalled Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, disputes in the Middle East, handover of the Panama Canal, and the Iranian hostage crisis-Flippen shows how a political dynamic was formed that continues to this day.
eBook
Faith in Freedom
In Faith in Freedom
, Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so
many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in
fact, the result of a strategic campaign of religious
propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the
nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations
of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the
resultant \"Christian nationalism\" of today were crafted by secular
elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of
the national motto, \"In God We Trust,\" revises the very meaning of
the contemporary American nation.
Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman,
and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising
executives, and military public relations experts, exploited
denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite
Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold
War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant
support for free economic markets, local control of education and
housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences
were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of
right-wing positions including anti-communism, the Jim Crow status
quo, and limited taxation and regulation.
Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American
religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of
three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light
on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides
that describe the American polity today.
eBook
God-Fearing and Free
Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country's mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism.
Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation's internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the \"American Century\" renewed the impetus to religion.
Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.
eBook
Robust Liberalism
Concisely critiquing the internal contradictions and practical limitations of the social contract theory espoused by John Locke and John Rawls, Timothy Beach-Verhey presents a covenantal theory for political life based on H. Richard Niebuhr's theology of radical monotheism. Beach-Verhey challenges sectarian interpretations of Niebuhr's theology and cogently demonstrates that a properly understood, theocentric, covenantal social theory can unite a diverse people in a shared polity. In so doing, he shows how such an understanding of both liberal democratic practices and Christian norms can provoke both the moral vision and the virtues that are required for robust, open, and engaged public life. Robust Liberalism makes a powerful contribution to contemporary discussion of American public discourse.
eBook