In Whose Image:
The Emergence, Development, and Challenge of African-American Evangelicalism

by Soong-Chan Rah
2016

https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/12925/Rah_divinity.duke_0066A_10056.pdf?sequence=1

Abstract

The current era of American Christianity marks the transition from a Western, whitedominated U.S. Evangelicalism to an ethnically diverse demographic for evangelicalism.

Despite this increasing diversity, U.S. Evangelicalism has demonstrated a stubborn
inability to address the entrenched assumption of white supremacy. The 1970s witnessed the rise in prominence of Evangelicalism in the United States. At the same time, the era witnessed a burgeoning movement of African-American evangelicals, who often experienced marginalization from the larger movement. What factors prevented the integration between two seemingly theologically compatible movements? How do these factors impact the challenge of integration and reconciliation in the changing demographic reality of early twenty-first Evangelicalism?

The question is examined through the unpacking of the diseased theological imagination rooted in U.S. Evangelicalism. The theological categories of Creation, Anthropology, Christology, Soteriology, and Ecclesiology are discussed to determine
specific deficiencies that lead to assumptions of white supremacy. The larger history of
U.S. Evangelicalism and the larger story of the African-American church are explored to
provide a context for the unique expression of African-American evangelicalism in the
last third of the twentieth century. Through the use of primary sources — personal
interviews, archival documents, writings by principals, and private collection document— the specific history of African-American evangelicals in the 1960s and 1970s is
described. 

The stories of the National Black Evangelical Association, Tom Skinner, John Perkins, and Circle Church provide historical snapshots that illuminate the relationship between the larger U.S. Evangelical movement and African-American evangelicals.

Various attempts at integration and shared leadership were made in the 1970s as African-American evangelicals engaged with white Evangelical institutions. However, the failure of these attempts point to the challenges to diversity for U.S. Evangelicalism
and the failure of the Evangelical theological imagination. The diseased theological
imagination of U.S. Evangelical Christianity prevented engagement with the needed
challenge of African American evangelicalism, resulting in dysfunctional racial dynamics evident in twenty-first century Evangelical Christianity. The historical problem of situating African American evangelicals reveals the theological problem of white supremacy in U.S. Evangelicalism.

 God in the Suburbs and Beyond: The Emergence of an Australian Megachurch and Denomination

Sam Hey

B Sc, Dip Ed (UTas), MA Theol (UQ)

2010

https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/365629/Hey_2011_02Thesis.pdf?sequence=1

Thesis abstract

The Pentecostal, charismatic and evangelical arms of Protestantism have provided some of the fastest growing segments of Christian religious activity in the United States, Australia and globally during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Much of this growth has been concentrated in a few very large megachurches (defined by scholars as churches with 2000 or more weekly attendees in one location) and new denominations formed as smaller churches became affiliated with them. Globally, the megachurch phenomenon is not exclusive to Pentecostalism. However, in Australia, almost all megachurch developments are Pentecostal, or charismatic and neo-Pentecostal offshoots. 

This dissertation examines the early life course biography of one of the first Australian megachurches, the Christian Outreach Centre (COC). It reviews events leading up to the founding of the COC in 1974 under a charismatic leader, and its growth and transition over its first 30 years and its development into a national and international denomination.

The thesis explores the COC’s development alongside other megachurches in Australia and specifically in Brisbane’s south east suburban ‘Bible belt’. It also investigates the COC’s capacity to establish itself in new locations within Australia and overseas. In addition, it examines the diversification of the COC as a provider of primary and secondary schools, tertiary education, counselling, political lobbying and social care activities.

The thesis proposes that the initial attraction of the COC megachurch and its affiliated churches reflected a market niche for a certain kind of religious experience, which was preserved through organizational development and response to social change in Australia during the late 20th century. 

It traces market opportunities for megachurch and denominational growth that arose because of increased tolerance of religious pluralism, suburbanization, generational change, inflexibility within traditional mainstream churches and acceptance of religious free market competition. 

The COC represents a local Australian expression of the global religious phenomena involving Pentecostalism and related late 20th century Christian revival movements and organisational developments. This thesis examines the features of Pentecostalism exemplified in the COC and assesses the contribution of the COC to the mission of Christianity and to the life of participants from critical, theological and social perspectives

 WHAT REAGAN SAID TO THE EVANGELICALS

THE RELIGIOUS RHETORIC OF RONALD REAGAN

By JOHN CHARLES RYOR

2015

https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:291331/datastream/PDF/view

ABSTRACT

 This dissertation examines the religious rhetoric of Ronald Reagan as part of a strategy to rebuild his political base following a disappointing level of support after his first two years in office. In particular, this examination will focus on a triad of speeches given to Christian Evangelicals within ninety days of a re-election Memorandum issued by Reagan Pollster, Dick Wirthlin.

 I will closely examine the texts of Reagan’s early 1983 speeches to the National Religious Broadcasters, National Prayer Breakfast and the National Association of Evangelicals.

In doing so I will show the way that the three speeches worked to convey the President’s agenda in language that was commonly shared not only by those three groups but also by President Reagan. I’ll argue that by using an intensified language of identifying symbols and linguistic nuances, the President was able to speak with a rhetorical urgency that was rooted in both the history of the Evangelical movement and Ronald Reagan’s personal religious experience.

Additionally, I’ll show how Reagan’s ability to linguistically identify with politically conservative Evangelical Christians was how he was able to successfully regain their confidence.

 The project will include original archival research from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and first person interviews with key Evangelical leaders who will assist in helping to better understand the context in which these speeches were given.

 The primary question asked and answered will be: “What did President Reagan say to rouse the support and attention of Evangelicals as part of a rebuilt coalition for his 1984 reelection?”

Thine is the Kingdom: The Political Thought of 21st Century Evangelicalism

by Joanna Tice Jen

2017

ABSTRACT:

Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self regulation; and 3) a theory of personhood wherein identity develops concurrently within the evangelical subculture and today’s (neo)liberal ethos. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that for the last fifteen years, an evangelical revival has been transforming the movement from a policy driven politics to an ontologically driven politics—innovatively pivoting it away from the Christian right. Whereas most secular observers focus on the internal contradictions of evangelicalism, my close reading and interpretation of devotional texts instead describes a series of creative tensions that work to strengthen religious belief, support a strategic revivalism, and catalyze evangelicalism as a new kind of socio-political movement.

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3019&context=gc_etds

"A Babe in the Woods?": Billy Graham, Anticommunism, and Vietnam"

 Hays, Daniel Alexander

(2017). Masters Theses

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/theses/2521

Abstract

This thesis focuses on famous evangelist Billy Graham's role in the Vietnam War, both as a public supporter and private advisor. It argues that, contrary to his self depiction, he was no "babe in the woods," no mere neophyte or bystander. Rather, America's most famous preacher was an active participant in promoting and even planning the war.

 Graham's evangelical theology, with his premillennialist beliefs, led to his intensely anticommunist worldview, where communism was the Antichrist. His public support buttressed the presidents prior to and during the Vietnam War and, sometimes, Graham even delved into policy recommendations for the war.

Graham's role in the Vietnam War spanned four presidencies. Beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Graham encouraged the president to strongly respond to the Vietminh victory at Dien Bien Phu. After openly opposing John F. Kennedy in the election of 1 960, Graham listened to the president's views on Vietnam and publicly derided communism. Graham grew increasingly intimate with both the presidency and the Vietnam War during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. At the requests of Johnson and his generals, the evangelist made two trips to Vietnam, returning both times strongly in support of the war. With his close friend Richard Nixon's ascendance to the presidency, Graham advised that Vietnamization was the key to victory in his "Confidential Missionary Plan for Ending the Vietnam War." 

In addition, while he publicly gave lip service to being apolitical, Graham organized massive events that provided veiled support for Nixon and the war in Vietnam.

This thesis builds on and contributes to the work done by historians on the influence of religion in American foreign policy, notably Jonathan Herzog and Andrew Preston. In addition, it details a side of Graham that is largely absent from or glossed over by the religiously oriented biographies of the famous evangelist

The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century

SALLEH, MOHD,AFANDI
(2011)
Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/669/

Abstract
The thesis discusses the role of the Christian Right in the US foreign policy
decision making process. The research revealed that the Christian Right has long
been fascinated with some international issues in general and US foreign policy in
particular. The Christian Right’s interest in international issues increased
markedly during years of the George W. Bush presidency.

 It successfully widened its activities from domestic social conservative issues to foreign policy issues by participating in, articulating and lobbying for its religious version of American foreign policy. 

In assessing the role of the Christian Right in US foreign policy making, this dissertation examines three aspects of US foreign policy, namely Israel, international religious freedom and global humanitarianism. Based on these aspects, the Christian Right is seen as skilled in framing and defining issues. 

The Christian Right seems effective in selecting and prioritizing international issues
that have a reasonable chance of being selected by foreign policy decision makers,
especially in Congress. Moreover, the Christian Right has shown its maturity in
seeking engagement and cooperation with other organizations, secular and
religious, in order to advance its international goals. 

Finally, in pursuing and conveying its international agenda, the Christian Right has adopted a more moderate and less overtly religious approach. Instead of using its traditional religious rhetoric, the Christian Right has successfully projected its foreign policy preferences into the conventional realist discourse of American foreign policy that is largely based on the objective of national interest and national security.

Nevertheless, this study does not, in any way, conclude that the Christian Right
was able to influence or determine the direction of US foreign policy and its
outcomes; however, it does suggest that the Christian Right did contribute and
have an impact on the formulation of some US foreign policy. 

As such, the research contends that the role of the Christian Right is similar to other interest group lobbies and that its perceived influence on US foreign policy should 

not be exaggerated. 

Finally, the research suggests that the emergence of the Christian Right as an actor in asserting its global agenda through US foreign policy can possibly provide an example of how religious beliefs and values can become a potential source of “soft power”. Together with the “climate of opinion” of the American public during the Bush administration, the “soft power” at domestic level could serve as a valuable new explanatory variable in understanding how the US foreign policy was formulated in the early 21st century

CREATING A CHRISTIAN AMERICA: 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROTESTANT NATIONALISM IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA 

by BLAKE WILLIAMS 

Bachelor of Arts, 2006 

Texas Christian University

Introduction

The United States, for the better part of its history, existed as a “Protestant Christian” nation. The creation and cultivation of this distinction began in the seventeent century with the immigration of English and Dutch Protestants to the New World. In the New World, these Protestant groups founded and administered colonies in seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, the Atlantic seaboard provided a laboratory for Protestant groups to establish “Christian states . . . informed by . . . God’scontinued guidance over his nation.”

The distinction of the United States as “Protestant” shaped many Americans’ perception of the greatness of the country, which Louis Snyder described as “messianism.” This meant, according to Snyder, that Protestants viewed their country as the pinnacle of civilization capable of transforming not only the destiny of the New World but also the destiny of the world. From the colonial era through the national era, the belief in messianism united colonial Protestants behind a strong “Protestant nationalism,” or the belief that the nation’s strength and national character stem fromembracing, promoting and protecting the Protestant Christian values of the country.Protestant nationalism derived from two interacting beliefs. The first, that thestrength of the United States stems from Protestant Christianity and the racial traits ofAnglo-Saxon race (this point would not be emphasized until immigration issues in theearly nineteenth century). The second, in order for the United States to maintain thatgreatness, Protestantism needed to be monolithic and completely ingrained in the sociocultural landscape of the country. This belief transcended denominational lines, despite differences in theological and liturgical styles, fueling Protestantism to keep America

 The English Puritan establishment, which gained prominence in the New England colonies following the transfer of Dutch and Swedish lands to England by 1664, established their territories as “holy experiments” with the goal of creating a society so faithful and a church so pure that its light would shine and transform the world. Within the colonies, the process of achieving a Godly society meant there was no room for dissention—not from other faiths and not from those within the purview of the Puritan church. In every colony, laws, customs, liturgy, social constructs and government bodies were created by religious elements to promote a unified and pure Christian society. Christian (which to them meant Protestant) and to promote its expansion into all corners of society.

In the nineteenth century, Protestant nationalism drove many endeavors, including the desire to expand the borders of the country to the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed “Manifest Destiny” in 1839 by John O’ Sullivan, the expansion westward took on mythic status in American society, thanks in large part to the writings of prominent clergy like Lyman Beecher, father of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher-Stowe, and popular Americans like Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. These works articulated the importance of American expansion as early as 1835 and shaped perceptions of the region as an “empire of mind, power and wealth” that would be a “glorious benefit” for the nation.

 The appeal to both religious and nationalist themes served western expansion well as manifest destiny gained widespread support by a majority of Americans. In the end, westward expansion, coupled with the social crusades against Mormons and Catholics, show that, despite the “secular” face of American society, the United States was, according to Richard Wolf, near “monolithic in its Protestant orientation and character.”

Beginning in the 1850s, the social and economic changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution weakened the Protestant grip on the country and, conversely, the strength of nationalist Protestantism. As society became more industrial and urban, moving away from the close-knit agrarian communities, Protestant churches failed in their duty to guide this transition. Instead, they remained inert and overly hostile to voices within their religious traditions calling for change. Eventually, the lack of action towards the socio-cultural changes in the industrial era created schisms in the major Protestant denominations (Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians). From the 1870s to the mid1880s, in fact, the gulf between those wanting to confront these changes and those that wanted to ignore them grew substantially eventually splitting denominations into “liberal” churches, which emphasized temporal salvation and an active clergy, and “conservatives,” who maintained the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and spiritual salvation.

In the years immediately following the Civil War, the divisions between Protestant groups deepened. By 1870, the nationalistic Protestantism that dominated the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century vanished. Yet the disconnect between society and the Protestant church would not last. In the late nineteenth century, Ohio Congregationalist Washington Gladden and New York Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch emerged to guide Protestantism back into the hearts of American society while pushing notions of Protestant nationalism into new directions.

In the 1880s, Gladden and Raushcenbusch articulated a theology that refocused colonial messianic nationalism in a nineteenth century context. These men argued that the United States had a special destiny to fulfill as the biblical “City on a Hill,” specifically that America was destined to usher in the kingdom of God.

 Yet social unrest, stemming from political and social clashes in many southern states, threatened America’s destiny. “City upon a Hill” is a phrase that derives from the “Salt and Light” metaphor found in the Gospel of Matthew, which calls the children of God to shine on the world and glorify the word of God for all. 

Not willing to give up on seeing the creation of a Christian America and the kingdom of God, Rauschenbusch, Gladden and their contemporaries articulated a national reform campaign based on “Christian obligations,” which emphasized that every Protestant had the duty to make the country more Godly and to emulate the good works of Jesus Christ to do so.

 In the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Charles Sheldon popularized Christian obligation with the motto “What would Jesus do?” helping fuel the “Social Gospel” movement, which combined Christ emulation with a program of social reform and reconstruction aimed at Christianizing the country.

This new dynamic between faith and society and the programs of reform it would spawn proved popular amongst Americans as social reform swept from coast to coast.

 In fact, liberalism would supplant conservatism and its doctrines of predestination as the primary theological doctrine well into the twentieth century. In the end, the push for social reform and the establishment of the Kingdom of God reignited a nationalistic commitment to the Protestant faith that would last through World War I.

In the nineteenth century, Protestant nationalism became an influential part in shaping the American experience at almost every level of society. Despite the appearance of a nationalistic Protestantism in everything from nineteenth and twentieth century Matt. 5.13-15 KJV (King James Version). In the American context, John Winthrop, governor and leader of the Massachusetts Bay Company, referenced the biblical term in a 1630 sermon he gave on route to their new home in the New World. In his famous invocation he pronounced that the new colony would be “a City upon a Hill” watched by world. Since Winthrop’s time, the term “City on a Hill” defined a special meaning for the birth, growth, and success of America as the preeminent country on earth. In the nineteenth century, Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch used the term to give an eschatological meaning to their vision of social reform. social reform to early twentieth century internationalism, scholarship defining and discussing, explicitly, Protestant nationalism is lacking. In fact, with the exception of Warren L. Vinz’s Pulpit Politics: Faces American Protestant Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (1997), Louis Snyder’s Varieties of Nationalism (1976), and Russell B. Nye’s The Almost Chosen People (1966), few works even give a name to Protestant nationalism.

What does exist and what ultimately influences the study of American Protestantism, are works that examine the broad concepts of Protestantism in America. In general, this type of scholarship populates the field of American Protestant history and holds many luminaries as Martin E. Marty, Sidney E. Mead, H. Richard Niebuhr, Robert T. Handy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Randall Balmer and Lauren F. Winner.

 Each one of these historians offers insightful looks into Protestantism including theology social relevance, political significance and general histories on the development of Protestantism in the United States.

Scholarship on American Protestantism also exists in the form of regional studies. Works on Northern and Eastern Protestantism represent the most oft-studied areas of Protestantism in America with Willem A. Visser ‘T Hooft, Charles Howard Hopkins and Martin E. Marty devoting countless pages describing the emergence and importance of the various socio-religious movements, including liberal theology and Social Gospel. Charles Howard Hopkins’ The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism,1865-1915 (1940) in particular offers insightful looks at society in the northeast and, in great detail, explains the path of the social gospel from a placid ideology to a dynamic source of social reform. 

Scholars of Southern and Western Protestantism, likewise, offer detailed insights into the dynamics of Protestantism. Works by Southern religious historians C. Vann Woodward, Glenn Feldman, Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald Mathews offer excellent insights into the relationship between faith and society and how that dynamic defined the social and racial structure in the South. Similarly, Ferenc Morton Szasz, Sarah Barringer Gordon, and other Western historians examine how Protestantism shaped and defined relationships between non-Protestant groups, like Mormons, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants and Catholics. More importantly though, these historians analyze how eastern Protestantism shaped and influenced development of the West, ultimately bringing the region into line with the rest of the country.

Combining these various approaches to studying American Protestantism, this work will show that behind the movements of reform, expansion, exclusion and discrimination lays a very specific goal of nineteenth century Protestants—the creation of a Christian America. More importantly, it will show that driving the Protestant quest for a Christian America is a salient and potent Protestant nationalism that united the mainline (and dominant) Protestant groups in a common desire to protect and promote that idea. In order to accomplish this task, it is important to trace the development of nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant nationalism, including the environment in which it developed and the various forms it took after the Civil War. 

DOWNLOAD PDF

https://repository.tcu.edu/bitstream/handle/116099117/4115/williams_blake.pdf?sequence=1

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM: MILITANCY AND THE SCOPES TRIAL


A Thesis by Michael Adger Smith  August 2010

ABSTRACT

The Scopes Trial held in Dayton, Tennessee, lasting for eight days in 1925, is one
of the seminal events in American history. Its importance has little to do with the place,
but much to do with cultural, political, scientific, and religious trends of the times.
Historians extensively studied these trends and volumes were written filled with their
analysis of these trends and why the Scopes Trial represented such an interesting
snapshot of history.

One of the first media events of this stature, the extensive coverage of the Scopes
Trial resulted in thousands of words of print, interviews, and commentary sent from
Dayton which helped to shape the public perception of what occurred there. How these
reports was received, of course, depended on the worldview of the reader or hearer.
Religious conservatives took note of any anti-religious bias aimed at those who chose the literal interpretation of the Bible. Others no doubt responded favorably to the exposure of Fundamental religious views as outdated and not in step with the times.

Christian Fundamentalism, arguably the most significant religious movement of
the twentieth century, was a product of chaotic times. It reflected the concerns of many
believers regarding the diminishing role of religion in everyday life, and the Scopes Trial
embodied those concerns. Coming on the heels of great social, political, and scientific
upheaval, those individuals who would naturally turn to religion for comfort, found the
same questions about modernity, science, and the Bible debated there as well, adding to
their sense of uncertainty.

Most conventional definitions of Fundamentalism cite the movement’s strong
stand for doctrinal purity and its anti-modernity position, coming from the fight over
evolution. Historians seldom consider the militancy of Fundamentalism as a key to
understanding how the movement formed, or with the passage of time, how militancy
allowed it to grow and develop into a major social movement and religious powerhouse.

With the benefit of historical hindsight, this key element adds much to the understanding of what happened at Dayton and beyond. The importance of studying  this often-ignored aspect of Christian Fundamentalism should be apparent in an age when this type of religious response is increasingly common.

To understand the role of militancy in relation to doctrine, another event, with much the same relationship and during the same period, provides an example. In 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the government of Russia. Communist doctrine, the
foundation of the revolution, was the subject of much debate from 1844 when Karl Marx

and Friedrich Engels first met and began their collaboration on the Communist
Manifesto, published in 1848. Marxist doctrine, while a great subject for debate, came
into its own, when, in 1917 a small number of ardent believers in Marx’s writings
violently overthrew the government and deposed Czar Nicholas II. Thus, while the
movement was all about doctrine and belief (Marxism) it was not until its adherents felt
strongly enough about making a stand for those believes that change in Russia was
effected. In the same way, Christian Fundamentalists, in 1919 and after, brought a
militant challenge to a public issue which affected their belief.

One area in which the 1920s media and historians tend to agree is that Fundamentalism was anti-modern. In reality, one major issue was at stake between religion and science, namely the belief that man was a special creation of God. This age old argument began in earnest with the Copernican Revolution and saw the fight renewed with Darwinism, as huge paradigm shifts in thinking threatened commonly held beliefs and raised the specter of the battle between new scientific truths and religious dogma.

While doctrine will always be important to any study of Christian Fundamentalism, the militancy with which the early Fundamentalists attacked evolution in the 1920s and later issues such as abortion provide a better understanding of how the movement arose and came to prominence in America around the Scopes Trial. This willingness to draw a line in the sand over issues that challenged their beliefs about the Bible, and fight for them to influence the surrounding culture sheds needed light on the reasons why this event is so important to America’s history.

By 1930 the media pronounced the death of the Fundamentalist movement. Yet, the report was highly exaggerated. Its sudden resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s upended the conventional wisdom of historians and with it, their assumptions concerning both the roots and the cause of Fundamentalism. The movement persists despite of, and thus, because of modernity. How was Fundamentalism able to recruit and charge an army of followers to lay a foundation for a stronger movement after the Scopes Trial which resurged and gained political clout in modern times? These questions provide a new and compelling perspective from which a new look at the Scopes Trial can prove valuable to theologians and historians.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.834.7237&rep=rep1&type=pdf

LOST: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE, 1925-1955

By Patrick Daniel Jackson

Dissertation for the degree of 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in History

December, 2012

INTRODUCTION

Of Angels and Angles

“Together with the problem of gaining political and economic power, the proletariat must also face the problem of winning intellectual power. Just as it has thought to organize itself politically and economically, it must also think about organizing itself culturally.”

– Antonio Gramsci (1919)

“A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is mad about something.”

– Jerry Falwell (1988)

*****

In the 1930s and 1940s there were millions of conservative, evangelical

Protestants in America, and what we think we know about them can mostly be summed up in a few stubborn stereotypes – both popular and academic – that seem to live by their wits rather than by the strength of the evidence. It is widely known among the general populace, for example, that “fundamentalism” is an exclusively southern, and particularly Appalachian, phenomenon. According to this view, it represents a kind of hill-country voodoo, complete with serpents, ecstatic chants, and wild dancing. But while conservative evangelicals have certainly long been at home in Dixie, the World Christian Fundamentals Association – the first national organization to bring them together – was founded at a 1919 meeting held not in Atlanta or Dallas, but in Philadelphia. 

https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/14653/Jackson.pdf?sequence=1

PROTESTANT NATIONALISM IN THE USA

Religiosity and its Political Influence - The case of Evangelical Church and the Presidential Elections

Authors:

Shahram Arshadnejad

Claremont Graduate University

December 2017

Abstract

This analysis is derived from religious political influences in America. There is a great cause of concern that the American polity is under threat to its core which is "secularism" and "separation of church and state," by the religious political movements. That may steer (if succeeded) the American system to an intolerant, one-sided religiously driven position which may exclude many groups of people, hence damaging the core foundation of American polity.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322650125_Religiosity_and_its_Political_Influence_-_The_case_of_Evangelical_Church_and_the_Presidential_Elections

The Bible Riots, The Church Question, and Evangelical Theology: Alexander Campbell, Charles Hodge, and John Williamson Nevin on the True Church

Lane Madison Scruggs

Doctor of Theology

Wycliffe College and the University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This dissertation begins by examining the ecclesiology of three prominent theologians of the American antebellum period. Alexander Campbell, Charles Hodge, and John Williamson Nevin were all Scotch-Irish Presbyterians by birth who self-consciously moved in disparate theological directions over the course of the early 19th century. Tracing the diverging paths of these thinkers with regard to their understanding of the nature and organization of the Church, this work aims to show the ecclesiological diversity among antebellum evangelicalism and challenge some of the historiographical and theological assumptions of this period. From this inductive study, an ecclesiological typology is constructed through the use of Campbell, Hodge, and Nevin as prototypes of the individual ideal types. This typology is then brought into conversation with three contemporary examples of 21st -century evangelical theology, using the Missional Church movement, The Gospel Coalition, and the Federal Vision. 

This cross-century comparison is an attempt to test the thesis that contemporary evangelical ecclesiology – despite its repeated claims – is not doing anything new, but instead it finds itself inhabiting the same ecclesiological types evident in the antebellum period. This typological comparison brings to light a more nuanced and fulsome account of the breadth of evangelical ecclesiology and why it matters for contemporary evangelicals

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/90358/3/Scruggs_Lane_M_201805_ThD_thesis.pdf

Modern American Poetry and the Protestant Establishment

Jonathan Fedors

University of Pennsylvania, 

2013

Abstract

Modern American Poetry and the Protestant Establishment argues that secularization in modern American poetry must be understood with reference to the Protestant establishment. Drawing on interdisciplinary work revising the secularization thesis, and addressed to modern poetry and poetics, Americanist, and modernist scholars, the dissertation demonstrates that the tipping point of secularization in modern American poetry was not reached at the dawn of modernism, as most critics have assumed, but rather in the decades following World War II. From the 1890s to the early 1960s, poets

such as Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, James Weldon Johnson, and Harriet Monroe - founding editor of the important little magazine Poetry: A Magazine of Verse - identified the establishment with the national interest, while fashioning gestures of openness toward its traditional targets of discrimination, particularly Roman Catholics, African Americans, and Jews. These gestures acknowledged the establishment's

weakened position in the face of internal division, war, racial strife, economic inequality, and mounting calls for cultural pluralism. The poetry extending these gestures drew equally on the authority of religious and political literary genres - such as the ode, sermon, psalm, and masque - and establishment institutions - such as the church, state, school, and press. Beginning with Monroe's imperialist Protestant

American poem of ceremonies for the Chicago's World Fair in 1893, the dissertation concludes with Robert Frost's reading at the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, a watershed moment in which the literary scion of the Puritan-Yankee line blessed the election of the country's first Roman Catholic President on the establishment's behalf.

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Graduate Group

English

First Advisor

Bob Perelman

Subject Categories

American Literature | Literature in English, North America

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2014&context=edissertations

THE DEGRADATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

 — AND THE COURT

Michael J. Klarman∗

HARVARD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 134:1]

THE SUPREME COURT

2019 TERM

FOREWORD:

INTRODUCTION

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court invalidated the geographic coverage formula of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,1 effectively abrogating the preclearance requirement in section 5 of the Act.2 Under that provision, most states of the former Confederacy had been required to “preclear” changes to their voting laws and practices with a federal court in Washington, D.C., or with the Department of Justice to ensure those changes did not deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of race.

Announcing that “history did not end in 1965”4 and that “[o]ur country has changed,” Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the conservative majority of the Court, ruled that the geographic coverage formula contained in section 4(b) and used to identify jurisdictions subject to section  was outdated and could no longer be constitutionally justified.

Texas Republicans apparently did not receive Chief Justice Roberts’s memo announcing how much “our country has changed.” Just hours after the decision, Texas implemented a law, enacted two years earlier but blocked by preclearance, that required government-issued photo identification to vote. The list of approved forms of identification included those more commonly possessed by Republican-leaning voters, such as a concealed handgun permit, but not those more commonly possessed by Democratic-leaning voters, such as college identification cards. Hundreds of thousands of registered Texas voters did not possess valid forms of voter identification under the law, including disproportionate numbers of African Americans and Latino Americans.

Moreover, nearly a third of the state’s counties, including some with large populations of people of color, did not have motor vehicle offices, which provide driver’s licenses, the most common form of voter identification.

https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/134-Harv.-L.-Rev.-1.pdf

Sarah B. Gordon, "Free" Religion and "Captive" Schools: Protestants, Catholics, and Education, 1945-1965 ,

56 DePaul L. Rev. 1177 (2007)

Available at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/law-review/vol56/iss4/4 

This Article begins with an in-depth look at the history and context of the first Supreme Court case to address the relationship between public funding and religious education. It then tracks the formation and early activity of a group that was created to overturn the result in that case, and the unexpected twists and turns that followed. The

story is one that involves Catholics and Protestants, usually on opposing sides, wrangling over schoolchildren and the Constitution in a preVatican II world. Given the importance of Jews and Jewish organizations to the law of religion in the 1960s and beyond, the conflicts studied here are remarkable for the relative lack of Jewish voices. Instead, these early legal battles were a precursor to (even an incubator for)

the development of a new and distinctly ecumenical community of interested legal actors in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the late 1940s, the combatants were divided Christians, particularly conservative Catholics and Protestants, each convinced that their own vision of education was the only valid and sustainable one for American

schoolchildren.

One might be tempted to dismiss the conflicts discussed here as relics of a world long gone; doing so, however, one would miss the opportunity to track the unfolding of a new constitutional regime at ground level. Disentangling religious from secular education required courts to decide what belonged in which category, a process that was contested in courtrooms and around negotiating tables across the country from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Although today we think that we know the difference between public and parochial schools, sixty years ago the lines were hotly contested. Everyone understood that the question was vitally important.

The legal conflicts that preoccupied both sides were not those we study in constitutional law classes in the early twenty-first century. Instead, the key battles were conducted in lower courts, and have been all but forgotten. This Article, therefore, is an excavation: it uncovers a formative and fascinating era, when "captive schools" were the central concern of both sides in conflicts over parochial school funding.

The stage was set by the Supreme Court, but the action was primarily at the state level. This mixture of national and state litigation has obscured a rich story of law, religion, and education after World War II.

“God’s Business Men”: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War

Sarah Ruth Hammond

Yale University Ph.D., 2010

For decades, historians of the twentieth-century United States have treated evangelicals as politically apathetic and culturally marginal between the 1925 Scopes Trial and the Reagan revolution. To the contrary, evangelical businessmen during the Depression and World War II opposed the New Deal on theological and economic grounds, and claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the same visionary pragmatism they practiced in the boardroom. For example, industrialist R.G. LeTourneau and executive Herbert J. Taylor countered government centralization in the 1930s and 1940s with philanthropies that invested in a Protestant, capitalist, and democratic world.

Meanwhile, the Christian Business Men’s Committee International, the Business Men’s Evangelistic Clubs, and the Gideons infused spiritual fellowship with the elitism of advertising culture. They were confident that they could steer the masses to Christ and free enterprise from the top down. Indeed, for a few exhilarating years, World War II seemed to give America and its missionaries dominion over the globe. Piety, patriotism, and power drew LeTourneau, Taylor, and the new National Association of Evangelicals to the center of it all,Washington, D.C. The marriage of religious and economic conservatism since the 1970s, which surprised many historians, reflects historical continuity rather than evangelical retreat. 

https://philanthropy.iupui.edu/files/file/sarah_hammond_final_dissertation_april2010.pdf

Compounding the Sacred and the Profane: How Economic Theory Brings New Insight to the Growth and Decline of American Protestantism

Bretton Chad 

Claremont McKenna College

2016

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2296&context=cmc_theses

THE BLESSINGS OF BUSINESS: CORPORATE AMERICA AND CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALISM IN THE SUNBELT AGE, 1945-2000

by DARREN ELLIOTT GREM

ABSTRACT

Scholars and pundits have often cast postwar conservative evangelicalism as a kind of doppelganger of liberal activism, as a grassroots expression of populist will against the social revolutions of the 1960s. In contrast, this dissertation argues that the rise of culturally and politically-engaged, conservative evangelicals first began in the midst of the New Deal state in the 1940s and 1950s and depended heavily on another will—the will of corporations and corporate actors, especially those working out of the economic and social context of an emergent, postwar “Sunbelt.” There, in the midst of a burgeoning regional economy that stretched from Georgia to Texas to California, a postwar generation of business leaders worked with evangelical leaders to resurrect the cause of religious, economic, and political conservatism in the midst of the early Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the Culture Wars heated up, they brought their faith, free market policies, and “family values” to the forefront of American public life.

The blessings of business were everywhere—in the ministries of celebrity evangelists like Billy Graham and lay evangelists like R.G. LeTourneau; in corporate-funded missionary  groups like Young Life, Campus Crusade for Christ, The Navigators, and Wycliffe Bible

Translators; in independent evangelical colleges strung throughout the South and West; in everyday operations at thousands of small businesses and dozens of mass-market corporations; in evangelical-inspired “biblical success” books and in a cottage industry of evangelical-led entrepreneurial seminars; in evangelical culture industries and megachurches; and, most especially, in the careers of evangelical political leaders from Jerry Falwell to George W. Bush.

In documenting both the successes and failures of these corporate-evangelical alliances, this dissertation explains why conservative evangelicalism reemerged when and where it did. But it also shows how corporate power has shaped—and continues to shape—religious culture and politics in modern America.

https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/grem_darren_e_201005_phd.pdf

ROCK CONSCIOUSNESS

The idea that everything from spoons to stones is conscious is gaining academic credibility

NASAIs everything conscious?


By Olivia Goldhill

Science reporter
Published January 27, 2018

Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

“Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?” says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. “Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”

David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness. Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework for solving this problem. Both lead to seemingly intractable complications.
“Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.”

The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work. “It’s very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness,” says Chalmers. “Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.” Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.


Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences. This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.

Panpsychism doesn’t necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. “Panpsychists usually don’t take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole,” writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. “Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness.”

But, then again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One interpretation of the theory holds that “any system is conscious,” says Chalmers. “Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be conscious. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness.”


Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.

One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism. Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because it applies to all structures—not just the human brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.

Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.

“Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume,” says Goff. “Eddington”—the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century—“argued there’s a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap.”

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”

In Eddington’s view, Goff writes in an email, it’s “”silly” to suppose that that underlying nature has nothing to do with consciousness and then to wonder where consciousness comes from.” Stephen Hawking has previously asked: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Goff adds: “The Russell-Eddington proposal is that it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.”

The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the “combination problem”: Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn’t answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.

Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems—from inanimate objects to plants to ants—count as conscious.

An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn’t the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it’s more like seeing it as a “cosmic mess.” Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement—the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they’re separated by such immense distances there can’t be a causal signal between them—suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.

Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness. “The more I think about [any theory], the less plausible it becomes,” says Chalmers. “One starts as a materialist, then turns into a dualist, then a panpsychist, then an idealist,” he adds, echoing his paper on the subject. Idealism holds that physical matter does not exist at all and conscious experience is the only thing there is. From that perspective, panpsychism is quite moderate.

Chalmers quotes his colleague, the philosopher John Perry, who says: “If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration.”

https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/

SEE

Panpsychism's combination problem is a problem for everyone
https://publish.uwo.ca › ~amendel5 › combination
PDF
by A Mendelovici · Cited by 12 — assumptions, the panpsychist's combination problems are not ... Panpsychism is a theory of phenomenal consciousness, the felt, qualitative,.

Panpsychism - CORE
https://core.ac.uk › download › pdf
PDF
by GB SJ · Cited by 124 — It is the thesis that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe (cf. Seager 2009, 206). Panpsychism has a long-standing history in ...