Evangelical Christianity and American State Ideology: A Historical Review

By Travis Rayome, Political History

When the 13 colonies were established throughout the 16th-18th centuries, the myriad Christian denominations that found themselves in the New World began integrating religious practices into the laws of their respective colonies. Some, like the Virginia Colony, integrated themselves into the Old World’s theocratic structures; the first Virginia House of Burgesses meeting in 1619 established compulsory attendance of the Church of England (also known as the Anglican Church) and passed laws mandating that all Virginians do “God’s service” in accordance with Anglican teachings (Marcus 2022). However, other colonies, primarily the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England, came to North America to distance themselves from Europe’s religious hegemonies (in particular, Catholicism and Anglicanism) and established their societies on unique religious structures. No matter how they related to existing Christian institutions, though, many of the 13 colonies were explicitly theocratic. Religion was emphasized and participation was often enforced by colonial governments as a binding force between colonists coming from different localities and cultures in Europe, something to enforce social cohesion and moral order (Marcus 2022). 

However, before America was founded, new colonial governments and religious movements promoted the idea of a range of diverse and independent religious cultures practicing under a secular government, which influenced the decision of the Founding Fathers to enact the separation of church and state. Maryland was founded in 1634 with built-in religious tolerance in order to provide a safe haven for English Catholics, who were facing persecution both in England and across the other colonies, despite them being a minority in the colony and Maryland’s laws flipping back and forth between persecution and protection in the 17th and 18th centuries. Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams, a former Massachusetts resident who was religiously persecuted and expelled by the colony in 1635 and sought to create a new society founded on religious liberty for all people. Today, Newport, Rhode Island, a key early settlement, boasts the nation’s oldest Synagogue, built in 1763 (Marcus 2022). Pennsylvania was founded in 1680 by William Penn, a member of the then-reviled Quaker denomination of Christianity, whose religious beliefs rejected hierarchy and led to Pennsylvania enshrining religious tolerance  and inviting Christians of all denominations. Leading up to the American Revolution, the First Great Awakening of Christianity in America saw the religion become more diverse and decentralized, giving rise to prominent Protestant denominations such as Methodism, Baptism, and Presbyterianism, making it harder for colonial governments to govern in adherence with just one doctrine. Key to the First Great Awakening and binding together these new denominations and communities was the prominence of evangelism, a doctrine whose popularity will end up guiding Christianity’s development as a fixture of American society. Evangelism describes a movement within Protestant denominations prioritizing evangelization, or the spreading of the Gospel. Thomas S. Kidd, an American Christian historian, describes evangelism as an emphasis on spiritual renewal (Kidd xiv). The movement centralizes the religious mission to convert people to Christian values by preaching the gospel, including incorporating them into institutional policy, seen in how colonial and later state governments would govern in accordance with a religious doctrine and in politicians on all levels of government performing their duties in accordance with their own religious beliefs (Johnston 2018). While the diversity of American Christianity means that the values themselves vary between sects, the drive to evangelize American society among American Christian institutions is a common influence on local, state, and even federal laws across our nation’s history.

The Founding Fathers, while being Christian themselves and some describing their work as divinely inspired (James Madison Federalist 37), diverted from the precedent of evangelism and theocratic governance of the colonies in favor of a secular, more egalitarian system. For example, the Constitution barred religious tests and oaths for public officials, with the Federalists citing that, while on the surface promoting accountability and affirming the merit of these figures, such a system could be exploited by bad-faith actors willing to lie and use Christian doctrine to further their own interests. Instead, they argued that democracy would provide better results, as the people could decide for themselves whether a leader was worthy rather than their worthiness being based on supposed adherence to specific values. Because of the decentralization and rapid proliferation of new Churches across the budding nation (by the time of the Constitution’s writing, no one denomination was dominant across all 13 colonies), religion became seen as a matter of personal belief, the kind of subjective value that democratic representation was meant to represent the diversity of as opposed to promoting a singular vision as “objective” (James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation). For this reason, the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution was seen as a measure to prevent tyranny, keeping one ideology from having outsized influence over the nation. In the Constitution, the separation appears as a clause of the First Amendment, dubbed the “Establishment Clause,” which bars the government from establishing or favoring any religion. The Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education (1947) established the bounds of the separation between church and state as the inability for the government to establish or support a religious institution, aid any or all religions, influence individuals to attend or avoid religious services, or punish individuals on the basis of religious beliefs or practices (Wex 2025). 

Despite the areligious status of the United States government, Christianity remained dominant in American culture throughout the period of Westward Expansion following the nation’s establishment. The Second Great Awakening, beginning in the early 1800s, saw preachers and clergy traveling the country to evangelize communities across the 13 colonies and beyond through “revival” town-hall-esque meetings, also saw religious sermons become moving performances meant to convert the masses and inspire worshipers to promote and carry out the mission of God through further evangelism. These revivals personalized religious practices and made the Church into a place for both community and political messaging on top of religious practice. This strategy was highly effective, with churches reporting hundreds of thousands of new converts across the budding nation in the 1830s (The Faith Project 2003). 

During the Second Great Awakening, American Evangelical Christianity became a “Civil Religion,” where the United States’ national mythos became intertwined with the faith as a means of instilling both patriotism in Christians and Christianity within Americans. The principles of evangelism, namely the emphasis on the expansion of the Christian faith and incorporation of Christian values into all facets of life, synthesized with the United States’ political goals. The United States government did not need to explicitly support Christianity, thereby violating the Establishment Clause; instead, through the intertwining of evangelicalism with patriotism brought on by the Second Great Awakening, the concept of “America” was imbued with divine importance. Values key to justifying America’s founding such as liberty, freedom, and democracy took on sacred meanings akin to Grace and Virtue within the Gospels, and became absolutist justifications for the nation’s actions. As noted by historian Donald M. Scott: “Americans did not consider their new nation to be simply another nation among nations, but a providentially blessed entity charged to develop and maintain itself as the beacon of liberty and democracy to the world” (Scott 2013). The USA as a project became something sacred, with the rapid spread of evangelism informing a “specialness” with which America was viewed by Evangelical Christians. This meant that the history of America was of Biblical importance to many, and the political aspirations of the United States such as the expansion of its territory into the western frontier, growth of its economy and industrial capabilities, and strengthening of its global influence, became part of the same mission to evangelize as much of America as possible within mainstream culture. This is the basis for Manifest Destiny and illustrates how the concept, propagated in the Second Great Awakening, motivated settlers to claim more and more Native land to expand America’s borders: the perception of America’s divine importance and destiny, the evangelical mission to fulfill America’s providential mission as a political, economic, colonial, and religious project.

After World War II, Christianity became more openly intertwined with the United States’ culture and political ambitions. The synonymization of freedom, democracy, and other American values with Christian virtue allowed for the United States to assign moral value to their Cold War efforts, positioning communism and Soviet influence in other nations. In a 1969 address to the nation addressing the US invasion of Vietnam, which by that point had resulted in the deaths of 31,000 American soldiers, President Richard Nixon demonstrated subtextually notions of providential destiny with which evangelism regards America and its prosperity, the synonymization of Christian virtues with American values, and the obligation of the people to promote the proliferation of these values: “Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the Wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership” (Nixon 1969). 

Moving beyond subtext into more explicit evangelist policies in the postwar period, the Pledge of Allegiance, meant to reaffirm school-age children’s loyalty to the United States, was amended in 1954 to refer to America as “one nation under God,” an explicit reframing of the United States’ identity as an inherently Christian nation. On top of promoting Christianity, by adding this into the Pledge of Allegiance, American schoolchildren are instilled with an inherent association of America with the divine, making evangelist attitudes towards America that justify decisions like the Vietnam War and Manifest Destiny more normalized even among non-Christian or areligious students. This change also signals the increasing bias the American government has shown for Evangelical Christianity over the past century, and the slow replacement of subtextually Christian messaging with unquestionably religious language can be seen as inevitable given how connected American political rhetoric has been to evangelicalism over the course of the nation’s history. 

This transition into Christian nationalist language, that frames the United States as inherently Christian and pushes Christianity to the center of US policy and culture, has reached new heights with each successive administration in the 21st Century. President George H.W. Bush and his son, later president George W. Bush, never shied away from promoting their faith, incorporating it into policy decisions and public statements and encouraging the American people to be Christian (Johnston 2018). George W. Bush is even quoted as claiming that God told him to invade Iraq in a private meeting in 2003, showing that evangelical influence in politics is not just an element of messaging, but even motivates policy decisions behind the scenes (Cornwell 2005). The history of America is the history of Evangelical Christianity: the two have grown in tandem over the past 250 years, fueled each other’s rise in prominence, and influenced each other’s developments. The growing openness with which post-WWII United States policy reflects evangelical values is not a shift away from the secular nature of the government as described in the Constitution; instead, it is a way of articulating The United States of America’s deep ties to the evangelical movement that reflects the longstanding influence that each have had on each other since the first settlers arrived in the New World.

References

Cornwell, Rupert. 2005. “Bush: God told me to invade Iraq.” The Independent, October 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-6262644.html.

Marcus, J.S. 2022. “The Surprising Religious Diversity of America’s 13 Colonies.” History, July 25. https://www.history.com/articles/religion-13-colonies-america.

Logan, Samuel T. and Kidd, Thomas. 2008. “‘The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America’ by Thomas S. Kidd.” Modern Reformation, July 1. https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/the-great-awakening-the-roots-of-evangelical-christianity-in-colonial-america-by-thomas-s-kidd.

Wex Definitions Team. 2025. “Separation of Church and State.” Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, June. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/separation_of_church_and_state.

James Madison Foundation. “The Founders and the Freedom of Religion: An Introduction.” https://www.jamesmadison.gov/system/files/assets/teach-the-constitution/lessons/01_FoundersFreedomReligion.pdf.

Scott, Donald M. 2013. “The Religious Origins of Manifest Destiny.” National Humanities Center. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/mandestiny.htm.

The Faith Project. 2003. “The Second Great Awakening: Jubilee and Social Change.” PBS. https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/journey_2/p_3.html.

Nixon, Richard. 1969. “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam.” November 3. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-the-war-vietnam.

Johnston, Lori. 2018. “George H.W. Bush Helped Lead GOP Toward Evangelicalism.” The Salt Lake Tribune, December 1. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2018/12/01/george-hw-bush-helped/.