America and the Evangelicals: The Politics of God's Nation

The Constitution of the United States forbids the state from establishing any particular religion as a national church. On the level of its founding principles, it is a country in which politics and religion are supposed to be separate. And yet, it is said that few developed nations bring faith onto the front stage of politics as much as this one. The president places his hand on the Bible at his inauguration, speeches close with prayers to God, and with every election the proper place of faith becomes a point of contention. In a country that declared it would have no established religion, why does religion move politics so powerfully? Last time, we saw Europe shed blood to reach the separation of church and state. This time, the story of America, a country that inherited that ideal yet bound faith and politics together in an entirely different form.

A Country That Sought Freedom of Faith

At the starting point of the country called America was faith. In the seventeenth century, people who had not been permitted their own way of believing in Europe crossed the Atlantic in search of a land where they could worship God freely. The Mayflower party of 1620 is often told as a symbol of this. To them, the New World was not merely a place to relocate, but a promised land for building, from the ground up, a community based on faith. Thus America grew as a country that placed religion at the foundation of society from the very start.

In time, the country that had won its independence made one important decision. In the First Amendment, which took effect in 1791, it forbade Congress from making any law establishing a national religion or prohibiting the free exercise of belief. This was a provision meant to prevent any particular denomination from using the power of the state to hold down the others. Precisely because it was a country where many denominations lived together, the state must not take sides with any one of them. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson is said to have written in a letter that there ought to be a wall of separation between the state and the church.

Here the distinctive relationship between faith and politics in America took root. The fact that the state would not impose a particular religion meant, conversely, that people were free to believe and free to express that belief. So in this country, while politics and religion are separate as a matter of institution, within society faith speaks freely to politics. The wall of separation was not a wall to shut faith out of politics, but also a wall so that no faith could be crushed by the state.

The Great Current of the Evangelicals

Within American Christianity, those who place the Bible at the center of faith and prize the experience of conversion, of meeting God anew as an individual, are called evangelicals. This faith, also expressed as being ‘born again,’ is said to make up a large share of American Protestants. The evangelicals are by no means monolithic; their political stances and the intensity of their faith vary widely, and many among them devote themselves to serving the socially vulnerable. It is a world of breadth that cannot be spoken of as a single block.

A portion of these evangelicals stepped onto the front stage of politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the background, it is said, was a sense of crisis over the great changes in American society at the time. From the 1960s into the 70s, values surrounding sexuality and the shape of the family changed rapidly, and a perception spread among conservative Christians that morality based on traditional faith was being shaken. The most decisive of all was the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The Supreme Court’s recognition of abortion as a woman’s constitutional right provoked strong pushback from those who hold the beginning of life as sacred.

In 1979, the preacher Jerry Falwell and others launched an organization called the Moral Majority. This movement, which sought to mobilize the silent moral majority into politics, spread through television and radio and came to form the core of a political force called the Christian right. They raised themes such as opposition to abortion, the proper form of school education, and family values, and came to support parties and candidates who resonated with these. Faith was organized, became votes, and changed shape into a power that moves politics.

Faith That Became Votes

The influence of the Christian right showed itself clearly in presidential elections. In the 1980 election, many evangelicals, hoping for the restoration of a conservative society, backed the Republican candidate and are said to have become a major force supporting his victory. Thereafter, the evangelical vote became one of the indispensable bases of support for the Republican Party, and its movements drew attention with every election. When voters who share a faith come together in one direction, it carries a political weight that cannot be ignored.

Abortion in particular has remained a theme that still deeply divides American politics. The position that the life of the fetus should be protected, and the position that a woman’s right to decide about her own body should be protected. Each holds an earnest conviction, and the judgments split sharply. In 2022, the Supreme Court, through the Dobbs decision, overturned the Roe v. Wade decision of nearly half a century before. With this, whether to permit abortion came to be left to each state’s judgment, and while those who had long sought it received it as a great step forward, voices also rose strongly criticizing it as a rollback of rights. This single decision alone shows how deeply faith and politics are intertwined.

Such a relationship between religion and politics in America has both sides, for and against. There is a view that faith’s participation in politics carries the moral appeals of those without a voice into the public square and becomes a force that poses ethical questions to society. On the other hand, there is also a deep-seated concern that if values based on a particular faith are reflected too strongly in policy, people of different faiths or ways of thinking may find life harder and the divisions in society may deepen. Both views have their reason, and American society itself keeps swaying within this tension.

In a country that declared it would have no established religion, faith has, on the contrary, spoken the language of politics freely. It may have been a paradox unique to America, which carried freedom of belief through to the end. Whereas Europe sought to keep the peace of faith by keeping religion away from the state, America sought to embrace diversity by setting faith free. Carrying the same monotheistic tradition, the paths of the two diverged greatly. And this relationship between monotheism and the state, when the setting moves to the Middle East, will come to appear under a logic that is different yet again.