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When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Harry Truman issued a memo recognizing the Israeli government within eleven minutes. Today, the U.S. and Israel continue on as partners in an at times controversial alliance - an alliance, many argue, that is powerfully influenced by the Christian Right. In The Fervent Embrace, Caitlin Carenen chronicles the American Christian relationship with Israel, tracing first mainline Protestant and then evangelical support for Zionism. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, American liberal Protestants argued that America had a moral humanitarian duty to support Israel. Christian anti-Semitism had helped bring about the Holocaust, they declared, and so Christians must help make amends. Moreover, a stable and democratic Israel would no doubt make the Middle East a safer place for future American interests. Carenen argues that it was this mainline Protestant position that laid the foundation for the current evangelical Protestant support for Israel, which is based primarily on theological grounds. Drawing on previously unexplored archival material from the Central Zionist Archives in Israel, this volume tells the full story of the American Christian-Israel relationship, bringing the various players - American liberal Protestants, American Evangelicals, American Jews, and Israelis - together into one historical narrative.

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

Using Demeterio’s modified ideological spectrum, this article examines the dominant political ideologies reflected in the pastoral statements of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) under the administrations of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Through a hermeneutic lens grounded in a two-dimensional spectrum, progressive–retrogressive and libertarian–authoritarian, the analysis reveals that under Marcos Sr., the UCCP adopted a conservative and authoritarian position. From 1973 to 1975, its pastoral statements issued general appeals for peace and human dignity, while avoiding direct criticism of the regime. However, by the mid to late 1970s, the UCCP began to exhibit signs of quiet resistance. In contrast, during the administration of Marcos Jr., the UCCP’s stance became more assertive and prophetic. These statements directly addressed issues such as human rights violations, environmental justice, and the defense of historical truth. In Demeterio’s spectrum, this contemporary position aligns with moderate progressivism, occasionally leaning toward radical progressivism, particularly in its advocacy for grassroots movements and democratic participation. This study is therefore significant as it illustrates the ideological transformation of the UCCP, from conservative restraint to active resistance, and underscores the capacity of religious institutions to evolve from passive complicity into agents of prophetic resistance.

The 1960 presidential election, won ultimately by John F. Kennedy, was one of the closest and most contentious in American history. The country had never elected a Roman Catholic president, and the last time a Catholic had been nominated—New York Governor Al Smith in 1928—he was routed in the general election. From the outset, Kennedy saw the religion issue as the single most important obstacle on his road to the White House. He was acutely aware of, and deeply frustrated by, the possibility that his personal religious beliefs could keep him out of the White House. This book tells the fascinating story of how the Kennedy campaign transformed the “religion question” from a liability into an asset, making him the first (and still only) Catholic president. Drawing on archival research, including many never-before-seen documents, the book travels inside the campaign to show Kennedy's chief advisors—Ted Sorensen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Archibald Cox—grappling with the staunch opposition to the candidate's Catholicism. The book also reveals many of the Nixon campaign's efforts to tap in to anti-Catholic sentiment, with the aid of Billy Graham and the National Association of Evangelicals, among others. The alliance between conservative Protestants and the Nixon campaign, it shows, laid the groundwork for the rise of the Religious Right.

The introduction of Protestantism into the Middle East by American missionaries in the nineteenth century met with limited success while the responses and internalizations of local converts proved incredibly diverse. The two resultant theological descendants are Palestinian Christian Zionists and Palestinian Liberation Theologists. The article provides a short history of these two movements and highlights influential voices through interviews and media analysis. This article argues that hybrid religious identifications with nation and place has transcended, in some cases, political struggle for territory.

Greenberg examines the role religious institutions play in their local communities as agents of political mobilization and as intermediaries between the individual and the state. She argues that religious institutions serve as an important source of political information, resources, and incentives to engage the political process.

[...]troublesome to stalwart drys, Methodists and leaders of other mainline Protestant churches were increasingly joining efforts of the Episcopalian-led North Conway Institute along with other organizations that advocated responsible moderate drinking and a public health approach to alcohol problems. Though certainly dialed back, temperance was not abandoned by the Methodists, for the church continued to recommend abstinence (a stance reaffirmed at its 1980 General Conference) and frown on alcoholic beverage advertising.66 Conclusion While some Protestant churches in the 1950s were hesitant to engage in political advocacy on other social questions, they were willing to enter the fray and urge their congregations to act politically-passing petitions to Congress from pew to pew, raising money to send delegations to Washington, D.C., and providing updates on congressional committee developments in the Sunday church bulletin- on the moral issue of alcohol and its commercial promotion in mass society.

The findings in this study indicate that Catholic and Protestant leaders like Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Rev. Samuel Rodríguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference drew on religious rhetoric, symbols, moral authority, interfaith religious coalition building, and the Bible in the 2005-2007 immigration reform debate and in their struggle for greater tolerance and inclusion of Latinos in U.S. civil society. Mahony and other Catholics also drew on Catholic social teaching and several strategies employed by César Chávez in their struggles for social justice.

This book analyzes the debate over the proper connection between religion and society that took place in southern New England during the fifty years after the American Revolution. It finds that a Christian social ideology, descended from the region's Puritan origins, endured and evolved during the era of the early republic, in contrast to interpretations that emphasize the individualization and secularization of American public life during the period. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the Congregational clergy articulated a corporate ethic that emphasized the superintendence of divine Providence over communal affairs and the importance of social morality for the survival of the new nation, although Baptists and other religious minorities dissented and called for the disestablishment of Congregationalism. By the early nineteenth century, the first party competition between Federalists and Democratic‐Republicans politicized and transformed the debate over public Christianity. Congregationalists became disillusioned with their prophecies of America's millennial role and soured on their partnership with the Federalist magistracy, while dissenters joined Jeffersonians in agitating for disestablishment. At the same time, however, the Congregationalists found cause for optimism amid the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The experience of Worcester County, Massachusetts was typical, where religious revivals and clerical networking at the grassroots fostered a new vision of the godly community. In the years after 1815 partisan acrimony declined, and the Congregationalists split into Unitarian and orthodox camps. As a result, an evangelical coalition of orthodox Congregationalists, Baptists, and others emerged that charted the way for renewed activism on the part of a Christian electorate and mobilized church. The transformed public Christianity of the 1820s and 1830s made a seminal contribution to the emergence of a variety of reform movements, such as temperance, Sabbatarianism, and antislavery.