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。该协会以压倒性多数支持罗纳德·里根、乔治·W·布什和唐纳德·特朗普当选总统，在堕胎、避孕、性教育、同性婚姻和妇女权利等问题上公开倡导并在某些情况下实现了社会保守政策，这一点并不令人惊讶。所谓的宗教右翼在20世纪70年代末的崛起，使福音派和共和党之间的联系似乎几乎是不可避免的。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远不清楚。通过他们新成立的组织--全国福音派协会(成立于1941年)，美国福音派在这几十年里与民主党和共和党的政府进行了同样密切的合作。这个项目揭示了一段历史，在这段历史中，与占主导地位的流行言论相反，宗教和党派政治既不是交织在一起的，也不是不可避免的。事实上，政党政治的缺席暴露了福音派活动核心的关键矛盾：他们在与政府接触的同时，也坚定地公开支持政教分离。将福音派的政治参与与对共和党的支持分开，这意味着他们的活动不能简单地辩解为支持一个政党的合法表达；他们更深层次的动机暴露了出来。因此，该项目利用这段无党派的政治参与时间，探索福音派教徒如何以及为什么与政府接触，以及他们如何用分离主义立场使自己的活动合理化。因此，该项目讲述了福音派运动的世纪中叶历史，也加深了对当今充满政治色彩的福音派运动根源的理解。该项目探索福音派与美国政治之间现代关系的根源的核心是两个关键主题。首先，该项目准确地追踪了福音派在他们最关心的领域施加了什么影响：电台广播、基督教教育、海外传教活动和宗教自由。福音派教徒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和重要的。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十年中产生了什么后果。第二，该项目评估了本世纪中叶福音派活动的法律和宪法后果。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，从获得避孕措施到同性婚姻，借鉴了20世纪40年代和50年代基本裁决中建立的基本原则，这些裁决在一定程度上受到了新出现的倡导分离的福音派运动的例子、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年代在美国公共生活中上演的关于教会和国家的辩论的贡献时，该项目不仅提供了对那些早期裁决的意义的详细理解，还探索了这些裁决在最近几年被重新解释和挪用的方式。在寻求发现、探索和分析20世纪中期20年福音派与法律和政府接触的性质、范围和意义时，该项目不仅提供了对这二十年期间的了解，而且还提供了对今天福音派运动的根源的探索，该运动中的许多人目前不愿承认这一点。

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.