Chapter 13 analyses how profound socio-demographic changes in America have contributed to a shift from the faith-driven culture wars of the twentieth century to a more secular identity politics between liberal cosmopolitans and populist communitarians in the twenty-first century. This trend appears closely linked to the rapid decline of American Christianity, which along with globalisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change has led to an identity crisis in parts of the white working class. Given the relative unresponsiveness of the traditional party system to this development, Donald Trump succeeded in capitalising on this crisis of identity through a ‘hostile takeover’ of the GOP by the alt-right, and a gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of the American right, which shifted from a faith-based social conservativism to a more identitarian and populist white identity politics.

Given the Trump administration’s ambiguous approach to religion discussed in the previous chapter, Chapter 15 explores how American Christians have reacted to it. It finds that although there initially appeared to be a certain level of religious immunity among practicing Christians against Trumpism, this religious ‘vaccination effect’ against national populism has since diminished and even reversed to the extent that, unlike in Europe, American Christians have become one of the populist right’s most loyal constituencies. American Christians’ ‘conversion’ to Trump appears, however, to be less the result of a shift in their attitudes than of supply-side factors. Specifically, a perceived lack of political alternatives as well as the inability and unwillingness of Christian leaders to publicly speak out against Trumpism seem to have contributed to this development.

Beginning in the immediate post-WWII moment and carrying on to the present, international law’s Human Rights and Development missions mirror the US Evangelical ethos that emerged and gained traction at a similar pace. Making no causal claims, this Chapter focuses less on the UDHR’s expressions of monotheistic beliefs and more on the actors and ethos that informed those expressions. Specifically, it explores how legal communicative strategies and ideas used by human rights and development champions parallel those deployed at the same time by dominant US Evangelical leaders. The communicative strategies, inter alia, recall the desperate straits of the ‘unsaved’ other, present information as good news (gospel) and as truth, appeal to Messianic notions of history, and offer salvationist promises to transform afflicted lives. And the parallels form some of the many rationalizing forces that can be viewed as an expression of quasi-religious faith in American approaches to social and economic governance, and a call for those approaches to be internationalized. Like the Kingdom of God, this faith must be true for everyone to be true for anyone, and truth knows no borders. In other words, it is international law as evangelism.

This essay emphasizes the centrality of evangelical women poets to the culture and development of early American poetics (including hymnody), which had lasting effects well into the nineteenth century. It makes three related claims. First, early evangelical poetry was a capacious lived literature that constituted one of the major aesthetic developments of the eighteenth century. Second, one of the momentous outgrowths of this eighteenth-century experiential Christian poetics was an early form of the Poetess, a trope scholars predominantly discuss as a nineteenth-century cultural form. And third, recognizing this longer development of the evangelical poetess resituates Phillis Wheatley Peters’ poetics within an antiwhite supremacist tradition produced by free and enslaved Black people. The essay argues for the necessity of broader and deeper engagement with various eighteenth-century religious poetics in order to braid them back together with the social forms and histories within which they arose and remained entangled.

The Reformed tradition, from the beginning, systematically refashioned medieval Catholicism according to what it believed to be the pattern laid out in the Bible and the early church. Reformed Christians saw Scripture as a comprehensive manual for Christian faith with relevance for political and social issues as well as strictly theological ones. Compared to other Christian traditions, they gave the Old Testament more direct relevance to life in Christian community and spoke of the entire sweep of salvation history as the story of one people of God – heirs of the same promises, subject to the same judgments. This habit powerfully influenced not only the theology of American Protestantism, but Americans’ sense of their identity as a nation. The polarity between the desire for “more light” and confessional Reformed orthodoxy defines the space in which all versions of Reformed Protestantism exist.

Protestants have played a role in shaping the political ideology of every major party in the United States and in formulating nearly every major public policy. Most American Protestants have believed that the US government should not create a religious establishment or endorse one religious denomination or sect to the exclusion of others; they have been suspicious of any religious organization’s attempt to control the minds or votes of its followers and impose its religious principles on others through public law; and they have also generally seen political activity as a moral enterprise, governed by broadly shared (Protestant-inspired) norms. These tenets of political behavior are so deeply engrained in the nation’s consciousness that their appeal has extended well beyond Protestant circles. But as uncontroversial as most of these tenets might seem to Americans today, their development was a contested part of the nation’s history.

This chapter explores the shifting landscape of American Protestantism and its relationship to American culture from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, focusing on such major themes as membership decline in mainline denominations, the growth and influence of evangelicalism, the use and impact of television and other forms of mass media, responses to political and social turmoil, debates over marriage and sexuality, and the rise of non-denominational evangelicalism and megachurches.

This chapter explores the relationship between religion and “the novel” by focusing on a cross-section of religious questions having to do with belonging (domestic, national, global) and identity. It begins with a consideration the Evangelical Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), moves to a cluster of novels that contemplated domestic religious differences in the form of Catholics and Jews, and concludes with a shift outside the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom and Ireland to examine early novelistic responses to overseas missionary movements, which raised challenging questions about empire, race, and religious community.

While Frederick Douglass’s fame as an ex-slave and man of letters is widely known over two continents, Europe and North America, his career as an evangelistic orator outside of the United States is far less familiar to Douglass scholars. With attention turned toward a religious consideration of Douglass’s career as local preacher, then international abolitionist in the revivalist tradition, this article connects Douglass to a specifically black form of prophetic performance against the Pharisaism of proslavery Christianity in the U.S. South. In increasingly agnostic and humanistic terms, Douglass voiced his antislavery jeremiad against American Christianity in a months-long public performance of revivalistic speech-making in Christian England and Ireland in 1845-47.

Micah Watson argues that an active conscience is the outgrowth of the evangelical mind. Evangelicalism is the form of Protestantism that relies on the truths of historical Christianity while navigating between mainline Protestantism and fundamentalism. For evangelicals, conscience is founded in the Bible, particularly the writings of Paul. It also flowered in the post-Reformation world, where it was taught that an active conscience signaled a person’s salvation. Conscience also led evangelicals to be active against all forms of sinfulness. In the United States, this contributed to the proliferation of voluntary societies, where Christians who were “saved for service” could exercise their consciences to spread the Gospel or stamp out perceived evils (like alcohol use). Watson traces the history of evangelical conscience into the twentieth century, and he describes voices like Carl Henry and others who sought harmony between the pious strand of evangelicalism, and adherents who were committed to social action. Later in the twentieth century, evangelicals sought peace in society more than saving it. Still, evangelicals continue to oppose perceived social evils, including same-sex marriage.

Some might question the rationale for including liberation theology in this book. It is rarely discussed in international relations, most scholars having left it to the subfield of comparative politics. Even there, it has played a subservient role in studies of democratic change in Latin America.1 As a movement of church renewal, its growth has been far surpassed by Pentecostalism and charismatic Catholicism since the 1980s.2

The third part of this book deals with the emergence of Protestantism, and the various approaches to the question of justification that emerged within the various evangelical movements in the first three decades of the sixteenth century. Chapter 11 deals with the important question of whether there can be said to be a single or coherent ‘Reformation’ doctrine of justification. The chapter surveys the evidence, which suggests that a number of approaches to justification emerged within evangelical groups in early sixteenth-century Switzerland and Germany, with varying attitudes towards the perceived importance of the doctrine, and how it was to be framed. Initially, the concept of justification was not understood forensically, tending to be seen as primarily transformational. The chapter tracks the growing consensus across evangelical movements which led to consolidation of the view that justification by faith was of central importance, and that it was to be understood as a change in status rather than a change in nature. These points are addressed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.