Some of you may recall historian Matthew Sutton’s claim that “post-World War II evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free market economics.” We wrote about it here and here. This kind of portrayal of American evangelicalism sells books and gets social media attention. I can’t tell you how many times a Christian publisher has sent me a book to blurb that is built on Sutton’s definition of evangelicalism (or something similar). I have declined most of these offers.
Sutton’s definition doesn’t really tell us much about what happens every Sunday morning in evangelical churches. According to the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, most evangelical churches are not politically active. Here is Fiona AndrĂ© at Religion News Service:
Despite the incessant tracking of evangelical Christian, Latino Catholic, Muslim and other religious groups through the recently ended election season, a study released on Election Day by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research showed that most congregations are politically inactive, with nearly half actively avoiding discussing politics at their gatherings.
The Hartford report, “Politics in the Pews? Analyzing Congregational Political Engagement,” focused on how congregations as a whole deal with politics, not religious individuals or their clergy alone. “Congregations often get left out of conversations about religion and politics but are inferred to be influential,” reads the report.Â
Even if members are politically active and many leaders are often outspoken about issues and candidates they support, most congregations make great efforts to keep politics out of the church.
“When they come together as a spiritual community, they don’t want politics directly involved. There’s a lot of pushback from the people in the pews,” said Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, who co-wrote the report with Charissa Mikoski, an assistant research professor.
The study’s data was drawn from a larger project developed by the institute to track congregational change, Faith Communities Today. It relies on surveys of 15,278 congregations conducted in early 2020. Responses were given by congregation leaders on behalf of their assemblies. (The project is funded by the Lilly Endowment, which also is a financial supporter of RNS.)
According to the report, 23% of congregation leaders identified their congregation as politically active, but only 40% engaged in what the report calls “overtly political activities” over 12 months, mostly infrequently.
The report measured congregations’ level of political engagement by looking at seven categories of political activities, including distributing voter guides, organizing protests in support or opposition of a policy, and inviting a candidate to address the congregation. A minority of congregations engage in any of the above; 22% handed out voter guides; 7% asked a candidate to speak to the congregations; and 10% lobbied for elected officials.
In nearly half of congregations — 45% — their leaders thought most participants didn’t share the same political views, making politics a sometimes treacherous topic. Discussing politics is also tricky for pastors, the report found, as they risk offending members whose views don’t align.
Not surprisingly, “purple congregations,” in which both political parties are represented in the pews, were more likely to avoid political discussion than politically homogenous ones, per the report. Congregations where politics had previously spurred conflicts, the case in 10% of the congregations surveyed, were less likely to engage in any of these activities again.
The results clash with the general narrative about Christians’ political engagement, especially stories of evangelicals’ avid political engagement. According to Hartford’s report, however, Catholic and Orthodox parishes are more engaged than Protestant churches.
“Further, the congregations who are engaged in these kinds of political activities do not fit the broader narrative of Evangelical Protestants being more politically active,” the report said. “While these connections are present at the individual level, it does not appear to be happening at the organizational (congregational) level.”
Read the rest here.
Clearly Sutton’s definition of evangelicalism, a definition shared by many other prominent scholars, does not entirely hold up. (I am really surprised the prestigious Journal of the Academy of Religion published Sutton’s definition of post-war evangelicalism, but that may be the story for another post about peer review and the self-perpetuating nature of academia.)
If you want to get a sense of how this narrative of evangelicalism has permeated the media, just do a Google images search for “evangelicals.” The first three rows of images all include either Donald Trump or a Trump rally.
I’m quite sympathetic to the take here. I think the hullabaloo over “Christian nationalism” is to a large extent fear-mongering in the service of moving product. And what one sees at one of Mike Flynn’s rallies isn’t what one sees at the corner church on a Sunday morning.
However, I’m not sure we’ve accurately grasped just what politics at the congregational level looks like.
This, eg, is an odd construction: “most congregations are politically inactive, with nearly half actively avoiding discussing politics at their gatherings.” What is that saying? The majority of congregations are politically inactive, yet more than half *do* discuss politics at official gatherings? Or am I misreading the sentence? (Also, what is “actively avoiding”? Is it being contrasted with “passively avoiding” or is it just a more intentional form of “avoiding”?)
The survey seems to define “political engagement” as political engagement as political activities like “distributing voter guides, organizing protests in support or opposition of a policy, and inviting a candidate to address the congregation.”
But isn’t there another form of political engagement that’s just as powerful–the creation and maintenance of a consensus around certain political ideas and allegiances? Congregations, in my experience, can do that very effectively without actually sponsoring or participating in any of those overt activities mentioned.
That’s fair, John. I was reacting to a narrative that seems to suggest that when one walks into an evangelical church they are going to here discussions of candidates and perhaps even endorsements.
Given that no worldly political ideology fully captures the political implications of the gospel in the broadest sense, and that God likely has no specific “position” on most policy questions, the existence of “purple” congregations is a good thing; there should be more–up to: all of ’em.
That half of the politically mixed congregations that don’t talk about politics are probably wary of fights, and not talking is certainly better than fighting amongst ourselves about these matters. Better yet would be recognizing the benefit of having different perspectives about these worldly issues, and seeing that talking freely about different approaches is likely to help us to a better job of serving our neighbors–which is the fundamental business of Christian involvement in politics. In that ideal circumstance, we don’t fear things getting out of hand because we understand these are the affairs of Babylon, and we’re just seeking the good of the city where God has placed us, for now, in exile.
And if by God’s grace we could together get that perspective, and together practice its implications, people outside might start to get a glimpse of what the kingdom of God (or what following Jesus) is really about.
…seems to me.
Not sure if it’s the study or the RNS reporting on the study, but there seems to be an assumption here that “overt” statements or activities — plenary verbal politics? — are more significant and influential than implicit, tacit, presumed beliefs and behaviors and identities.
That’s not how people or congregations tend to work. Identity is often shared/formed/claimed/passed by that which goes without saying. We absorb that which we are presumed to be more readily than we accept that which we are instructed to be. We sometimes do what we’re told. We usually become what we’re shown.
I’m not arguing here about the definition of “evangelical” but about this study’s very limited & very limiting notion of what “political” means. This limiting is, in itself, an expression of implicit, presumed politics.
Consider also the study’s weirdly anachronistic assumption that “congregations” are like Anglican parishes rather than American affinity groups chosen for reasons rather than assigned by doctrinal/geographical givens. We have cars, not parishes. We choose where we go. That consumer choice is, almost always, implicitly political even as it is also almost always explicitly described in “spiritual” or “doctrinal” language (language which is also, itself, implicitly political).