An (Evangelical) Voice in the Wilderness: The Modern Roots of Evangelical Engagement with American Politics

今天，福音派几乎完全与美国政治的右翼联系在一起。在以压倒性多数支持罗纳德里根总统当选后，乔治W。布什和唐纳德特朗普，并公开倡导，并在某些情况下实现了社会保守政策，包括堕胎，避孕，性教育，同性婚姻和妇女权利，该协会并不令人惊讶。20世纪70年代末，所谓的宗教右翼势力崛起，似乎福音派和共和党之间的联系几乎是不可避免的。然而，看看20世纪40年代和50年代，福音派和共和党之间的联系远非清晰。通过他们新成立的组织，全国福音派协会（成立于1941年），美国福音派在那几十年里与民主党和共和党的政府同样密切地合作。这个项目揭示了一段历史，在这段历史中，与主流的流行言论相反，宗教和党派政治既不交织在一起，也不是不可避免的。政党政治的缺席实际上暴露了福音派活动核心的关键矛盾：他们与政府的接触，同时他们对政教分离的坚定公开支持。将福音派的政治参与从对共和党的支持中解放出来意味着他们的活动不能简单地被辩护为对一个党的支持的合法表达;他们更深层次的动机暴露了。因此，该项目利用这段无党派政治参与的时期来探索，不受党派关注的影响，福音派如何以及为什么与政府接触，以及他们如何以分离主义立场合理化他们的活动。因此，该项目不仅讲述了本世纪中叶福音派运动的历史，也加深了对当今充满政治色彩的福音派运动根源的理解。该项目探索美国福音派与政治之间现代关系根源的核心是两个关键主题。首先，该项目准确地追溯了福音派在他们最关心的领域施加的影响：无线电广播，基督教教育，传教活动和海外宗教自由。福音派对这些领域成功的看法使他们相信，继续与政府接触是有益的，也是重要的。因此，该项目将分析福音派在多大程度上成功地影响了政策，以及在当时和随后的几十年中产生了什么样的后果。第二，该项目评估了福音派活动在本世纪中叶的法律的和宪法后果。今天，福音派指责美国最高法院坚持政教分离的立场，歧视有信仰的人。然而，这些决定，从避孕到同性婚姻，都借鉴了20世纪40年代和50年代基本裁决中确立的基本原则，这些裁决在一定程度上受到了倡导分离的新兴福音派运动的例子，论点和修辞的影响。在揭示和分析福音派对20世纪40年代和50年代美国公共生活中关于教会和国家的辩论的贡献时，该项目不仅详细了解了这些早期裁决的意义，而且还探讨了近年来这些裁决被重新解释和被滥用的方式。通过分析20世纪中叶20年来福音派与法律和政府接触的性质、程度和意义，该项目不仅提供了对这20年的理解，而且还探索了当今福音派运动的根源，而这一运动中的许多人目前不愿意承认。

Today, evangelicals are almost exclusively associated with the right wing of American politics. Having supported in overwhelming numbers the election of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, and openly advocated, and in some cases achieved, socially conservative policy on issues including abortion, contraception, sex education, same-sex marriage, and women's rights, the association is unsurprising. The rise of the so-called Religious Right in the late 1970s has made it seem that the connection between evangelicals and the Republican Party was all but inevitable.Look to the 1940s and 1950s, however, and the connection between evangelicals and Republicans was far from clear. Through their newly-formed organisation, the National Association of Evangelicals (founded in 1941), American evangelicals in those decades worked equally closely with the administrations of both Democratic and Republican Parties. This project uncovers a history in which, contrary to dominant popular rhetoric, religion and partisan politics were neither intertwined nor inevitable.The absence of party politics in fact exposes the critical contradiction at the heart of evangelical activity: their very engagement with government at the same time as their emphatic public support for the separation of church and state. Untethering evangelical political engagement from support for the Republican Party means their activities cannot simply be defended as a legitimate expression of support for a Party; their deeper motives are exposed. The project thus uses this period of nonpartisan political engagement to explore, untainted by partisan concerns, how and why evangelicals engaged with government and how they rationalized their activities with their separationist stance. As such, the project speaks to the mid-century history of the evangelical movement but also to a deeper understanding of the roots of today's politically-charged evangelical campaigns.Central to the project's exploration of the roots of the modern relationship between evangelicals and politics in the US are two key themes. First, the project traces exactly what influence evangelicals exerted in those areas of most concern to them: radio broadcasting, Christian education, and missionary activity and religious liberty abroad. Evangelicals' perception of success in these areas convinced them that continued engagement with government was beneficial and important. The project will thus analyse the extent to which evangelicals were successful in influencing policy, and with what consequences both at the time and in subsequent decades.Second, the project assesses the legal and constitutional consequences of evangelical activity at mid-century. Today evangelicals accuse the US Supreme Court of discriminating against people of faith by adhering to a position of separation of church and state. Yet those decisions, from access to contraception to same-sex marriage, drew on fundamental principles established in the foundational rulings of the 1940s and 1950s, rulings which were, in part, influenced by the examples, arguments, and rhetoric of the newly-emergent evangelical movement which advocated separation. In uncovering and analysing evangelicals' contribution to the debates about church and state that played out in American public life in the 1940s and 1950s, the project provides not only a detailed understanding of the significance of those early rulings, but explores the ways in which those rulings have been reinterpreted and, arguably misappropriated, in more recent years.In seeking to uncover, explore, and analyse the nature, extent, and significance of evangelical engagement with law and government in the two decades in the middle of the 20th Century, the project offers not only an understanding of that twenty year period but also an exploration of the roots of today's evangelical movement that many in that movement are currently unwilling to acknowledge.