Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want

But just how unified is the supposed constituency of the Christian Coalition? And who exactly Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. by Christian.
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Christianity is not elective, democratic society. You go back to the Constitution, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, they're very humanistic--nothing different from what was being produced elsewhere in the world at the same time. In tones that revealed little nostalgic hankering for a Christian-governed past, they maintained simply that America may or may not have been Christian, depending on the definition of the word.

Many interviewees focused on the percentage of true believers in the past, as did one Evangelical Free man from Minnesota: Was there ever a majority of Christians? I don't think we ever were a majority Christian nation, but I think we've had a higher percentage. That's where there is a difference. But I think culturally we may have had more of those boundaries. I would ask, did they call themselves Christians, or did they actually behave in a Christian manner? Certainly a lot of the beginning documents had 'In God We Trust' and that kind of stuff, but did they act any more Christian than our society does today?

I don't know if I can necessarily call it a Christian nation. But I do believe there were some Christian men who came along and helped put it together. Thus this significant minority of evangelicals do not possess a strong image of a Christian American past that can serve as a model for what today needs to be "reclaimed," or the supposed loss of which can be used to explain contemporary national troubles. For them, Kennedy's exhortation to "reclaim America for Christ" would not make much sense.

The message of Kennedy's conference would also not make sense to some evangelicals who do think that America was once a Christian nation, since they also believe that America still is a Christian nation. Theirs is not an image of a Christian past tragically lost through apostasy or the attack of secular humanism. They are actually quite sanguine about contemporary America's religious identity.

Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want - Christian Smith - Google Книги

Most of the people are Christians; it's just that they're not very vocal about it. But like I said, if our backs were up against the wall and we had to take a stand, I think you'd see it. So in that respect I would say, yeah, because a lot of other countries don't have that freedom.

Our government I would guess is largely Christian, and I think the way everybody is talking these days it seems as if it's very conservative Christian actually. I think [now] we're becoming, you know, a nation of Christians, I mean, I hope that we are. I can see it happening. Some of the things they do within the world seem like they have a Christian attitude about it, and the country seems like it is always willing to help other countries and come to their aid.

It seems like there are some Christian values that are still kind of a thread going through things. A Baptist man from Minnesota, for example--a self-declared lifetime evangelical--argued: To be honest with you, I don't think I want it to be a Christian nation. I would rather have it populated by Christians who are practicing their Christianity, and then you can call it whatever you want.

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But again, the label of "Christian" is always frightening when you label a country, because then you are talking about cultural things. And that's a big problem, especially when one travels overseas--to recognize that the American way is not the only way practiced by Christians, like in the former Soviet Union or in the Third World. So labeling countries as Christian I think is problematic. We asked him, problematic in what way? He replied, "If you label the U. Many of the policies we practice are not Christian, and to say that they are is deceptive.

Did he agree or disagree with that? There has always been sin in this country and corruption, so I've always been bothered by people who talk about the good ole days and going back. We live in the present, and need to do what we can do in the present. And many of them conveyed that they wish it somehow still were. What is most interesting, however, is to pay close attention to what these evangelicals mean by "Christian nation.

The meaning that evangelicals most frequently gave to the idea that America was once a Christian nation was that it was founded by people who sought religious liberty and worked to establish religious freedom. Nearly 40 percent of the evangelicals we interviewed discussed this while describing what "Christian America" meant to them. They came to worship God in their own way. It was founded on the right to worship as you wanted to, and not in a state-mandated manner. Constitution contains a lot of biblical themes.

When we asked him to explain, he said, "Freedom, the concept of freedom. That is one of the reasons why America was started: This is just a descriptive way of recognizing that many of America's earliest colonists were committed Christians--a simple empirical fact. More subtly, it also legitimizes the presence of religious concerns in American public culture, which most evangelicals think is important. A second, more striking implication of this definition is the importance it places on religious pluralism and toleration.

When evangelicals think of "Christian America" this way, they are not laying the discursive groundwork for the legitimation of Christian social domination. If anything, they are tapping a historical tradition of freedom and choice that reinforces the value of religious pluralism and liberty.

Perhaps ironically, this meaning of "Christian America" functions more to bolster liberal toleration than religious dominion. The second most frequently mentioned meaning of "Christian America" was that the majority of Americans of earlier generations were sincere Christians who put their beliefs and morals into practice more faithfully than Americans do today. This meaning is somewhat related to the "religious freedom" definition, and evangelicals mentioned it nearly as frequently--about 35 percent of the time.

Usually these responses were based on fairly romanticized views of history. One Presbyterian woman from Maryland observed, "Just reading history, I believe that everything was done in prayer and under God's influence, rather than a personal interest. Some, such as one Lutheran man from Oregon, focused on the centrality of church life in the past: More people were into God's Word and the church, you know, before television.

Your whole social life centered around church activities. They did their chores on Saturday night, and Sunday was the Lord's day. Sunday had a true meaning. As a Baptist woman from Massachusetts explained, "We were in the early days much more religious and devout and clean-living than we are today. For some evangelicals, it does do this. Especially when it is linked to a belief that contemporary national problems drugs, crime, school failure, etc.

They offer it simply as a matter-of-fact, empirical description of the past. They have no intention to use it to build a case to re-Christianize America; they are only answering an interview question with what they consider a factual answer. Probably the majority do recall fondly a bygone era of simple faith and moral consensus--whether with historical justification or not--and in an ideal world they would like to have that again.

But very few evangelicals are this naive. Even the more romanticizing ones know full well that the past cannot be resurrected, that the world is different now. As a nondenominational woman from Michigan observed: The people who founded this country believed there was a Creator God, and many of the institutions--Harvard, Princeton, and so on--were started by Christian people.

Not that everyone who has immigrated here is a Christian. Now we've become more of a melting pot. To try and go back and to force Christianity upon these institutions I don't believe can occur now. Even among the evangelicals for whom the "majority of faithful Christians" definition of "Christian America" does logically support a Christian Right agenda, not many are seriously prepared to act on that idea for very long.

For a more basic and compelling evangelical logic inevitably intervenes.

Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want

In the evangelical worldview, the only valid way to regenerate that bygone Christian era--for more people to become devoted Christians and practice their beliefs and morals in a way that will revive America--is for more people to decide personally and voluntarily to follow Christ. No evangelical thinks you can externally manufacture faithful Christian living, especially not through political means.

They maintain, rather, that Christian faithfulness only comes through believing the gospel and "committing one's life to Christ as personal Lord and Savior," and that this is accomplished through conversion of one individual at a time. In the evangelical worldview, the logical consequence of this meaning of "Christian America" is that Christians must invest in more evangelism, revivalism, and church planting. For political activism can never produce a majority of faithful Christians; only an individual and personal "saving knowledge of Jesus Christ" can.

This helps to explain why, although Christian Right rhetoric does hold a certain initial appeal for some evangelicals, in the long run it cannot and does not mobilize strong, sustained evangelical political activism. The third most regularly mentioned meaning of "Christian America" was the belief that the basic laws and structures of the U. About 30 percent of the evangelicals we interviewed suggested this meaning. Though people often were not particularly articulate about which laws and structures embody which principles, the view was somewhat widespread and similarly articulated nonetheless.

A Presbyterian woman from North Carolina, for example, noted, "America was established as a Christian nation; politically the foundation was to be a Christian nation. We were established to have the Bible as the center, as our guidebook, and to recognize it as an important part of our country's life. The first leaders of this country were Christian, and [so were] the things that they wrote. Isn't this an unvarnished admission that what evangelicals want is essentially a Christian-based state?

But though this interpretation may be accurate in the case of some, most evangelicals do not even want Christianity to be America's established religion--much less want America to be a formal Christian state.

See a Problem?

They fully believe in the American system of liberal, representative democracy. A careful reading of our interview discussions reveals that many interviewees defined "Christian nation" in terms of representative government and the balance of powers. A Bible Fellowship man from Pennsylvania, for example, claimed that "The idea of having a balanced government with the three branches--the executive, legislative, and judicial--that original theory was something that was derived from a scriptural passage.

She answered, "Biblical principles on right and wrong, our judicial system--just the whole idea of democracy and republican form of representative government. It was pretty radical back then, and a lot of it came straight out of the Bible. The people who began the country set it up under the principles of the Bible, which is a very good heritage and legacy to pass down. It allows us to have, for one thing, an understanding that people are evil, so we need other people to help kind of keep us on track.

So there's checks and balances established on a real good foundation. Because there was an understanding that there should be no king but Jesus, they set it up so that any person would have a difficult time taking over. So [it was Christian] I think from the standpoint of the setup of government. Most of these evangelicals, then, appear to be baptizing the American system of government with Christian legitimacy more than seeking to reconstruct American government according to specific and exclusionary Christian principles--whatever those might be.

Even so, we should remember that not all conservative Protestants agree with this idea either. More than a few evangelicals would concur with the self-identified fundamentalist man from Oregon who said: I don't consider Christianity to be a governmental form. Not all of our forefathers were Christians.

Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want, by Christian Smith

In this book Christian Smith shatters many of the stereotypes that the media and academics hold about American Evangelicals. In it he draws on a series of interviews that he and his colleagues conducted over a three-year period as part of a much larger research project of American evangelicals. It compliments his book on evangelicals that is far more quantitative in nature.

Specifically, Smith explores how evangelicals think about pluralism, politics, education and gender roles. He concludes his book with a chapter looking at the results of recent surveys on evangelicals. What Smith finds is that evangelicals embrace a wide variety of views that are higly complex and not reducible to a single stereotype. As an example, while evangelicals embrace language that hold husbands up as the leaders of their families, in practice they are just as egalitarian as everyone else.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the evangelical subculture. Smith offers a far more nuanced and complex view of evangelicals than many commentators and academics have led us to believe.

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Every time I have a reason to dip into this man's "scholarship" I am amazed at the simple superficiality of it. One must grant him a certain cleverness in knowing how to strike chords that will get people to think his point-of-view is useful as a balancer. But as to real analysis of anything, he starts with demonstrable falsehood. Though he praises the editors, it is clear that they were none too busy or concerned. You can sum all of this up with a statement from his Conclusion: But one should point out that Christian Smith somehow imagines that the entire legal system of the United States, grounded as it is in aspirations of "strong objectivity" are somehow to be re-visioned by visionary academics like him, as being nudged-out out by "imaginative narratives.

Rather, even on a continuum of scholarly views of the relationship between the Founders of this country and Enlightenment notions of "universal rationality", no one responsible would account for it by way of a "lingering" "imaginative narrative". By contrast we are dealing with the Founding aspirations of this country in its very core ethos.

If one conceives of that as merely "lingering" then that shows some basic presumption of hostility to the very ethos of a free society as embodied in that Founding aspiration. That all this should be delimited in a book about what Evangelicals want, sheds oblique light on current conundrums of people like Perry and Bachman. This book is poor scholarship, but no doubt would be a good primer for those characters. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

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Evangelicals may dislike gays. And be none to fond of the Jews, really. Oh, and women should be in the home. My take on this: They're not totally crazy, dangerous and stupid as a group. I speak in generalizations , just sorta crazy, dangerous and stupid! Feb 12, Randy Reed rated it liked it. Its interesting to read a book that's really a first shot a evangelicals.

In Smiths point was that Evangelicals should not be feared and that they were really not so different than the rest of us. Perhaps by focusing on a more national sample rather than focusing on the places where Evangelicals Its interesting to read a book that's really a first shot a evangelicals. Perhaps by focusing on a more national sample rather than focusing on the places where Evangelicals could develop a culture like the South, Smith missed the more reactionary trajectories that have come to dominate it.

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