The Politics of Evangelical Identity

Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada

Lydia Bean

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780691173702
  9780691161303
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400852611
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

A comparative look at evangelical churches across the U.S.-Canada border that reveals deep political differences

It is now a common refrain among liberals that Christian Right pastors and television pundits have hijacked evangelical Christianity for partisan gain. The Politics of Evangelical Identity challenges this notion, arguing that the hijacking metaphor paints a fundamentally distorted picture of how evangelical churches have become politicized. The book reveals how the powerful coalition between evangelicals and the Republican Party is not merely a creation of political elites who have framed conservative issues in religious language, but is anchored in the lives of local congregations.

Drawing on her groundbreaking research at evangelical churches near the U.S. border with Canada—two in Buffalo, New York, and two in Hamilton, Ontario—Lydia Bean compares how American and Canadian evangelicals talk about politics in congregational settings. While Canadian evangelicals share the same theology and conservative moral attitudes as their American counterparts, their politics are quite different. On the U.S. side of the border, political conservatism is woven into the very fabric of everyday religious practice. Bean shows how subtle partisan cues emerge in small group interactions as members define how "we Christians" should relate to others in the broader civic arena, while liberals are cast in the role of adversaries. She explains how the most explicit partisan cues come not from clergy but rather from lay opinion leaders who help their less politically engaged peers to link evangelical identity to conservative politics.

The Politics of Evangelical Identity demonstrates how deep the ties remain between political conservatism and evangelical Christianity in America.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Timeline
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Comparing Evangelicals in the United States and Canada
• Chapter 2: The Boundaries of Evangelical Identity
• Chapter 3: Two American Churches: Partisanship without Politics
• Chapter 4: Two Canadian Churches: Civil Religion in Exile
• Chapter 5: Evangelicals, Economic Conservatism, and National Identity
• Chapter 6: Captains in the Culture War
• Chapter 7: The Boundaries of Political Diversity in Two U.S. Congregations
• Chapter 8: Practicing Civility in Two Canadian Congregations
• Conclusion: Politics and Lived Religion
• Methodological Appendix: Ethnographic Methods
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index