It doesn’t seem like this was always the case - obviously there’s a lot of myth making about the “founding fathers”, but it does seem that a lot of them were genuine Enlightenment men.
I’m not under any illusions that the USA was ever a secular nation, but it seems like the phenomenon we see now, of right wingers marrying America = Christianity, Christianity = America, in their worldview, wasn’t always there.
Is it just the result of Cold War propaganda, juxtaposing the American empire of Christendom with the evil atheist soviets?
ironically, satanists behave more like jesus than a lot of christians do
Just look up the anti choice movement's origins.
THE NOT-SO-LOFTY ORIGINS OF THE EVANGELICAL PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT http://religiondispatches.org/the-not-so-lofty-origins-of-the-evangelical-pro-life-movement/
"Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.” Only after the movement was underway did it begin advocacy on abortion.
They have to go back to Roman theologian Tertullian to reinforce their claim that the “orthodox position” is that life begins at conception, conveniently leaving out the fact that Church fathers Augustine and Aquinas—and most evangelicals up until the 1970s—are on the other side of the argument.
Its founding moral outrage stemmed not from Roe v. Wade, but from the prospect of government-imposed desegregation; it rest its intellectual foundation on highly dubious, non-scholarly arguments advanced by Francis Schaeffer; it mobilized lay evangelicals to action by telling them the Bible teaches something it does not actually teach; and it actively suppressed the scholarship of evangelicals who held alternative viewpoints. The Bible, does not, in fact, teach that life begins at conception, evangelical scholars understandably emerged to challenge these views. The evangelical pro-life movement maintained momentum by actively suppressing such scholarship."
The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
"At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. That’s interesting. Even more interesting is how thoroughly the record has been rewritten. By the mid-1980s, the evangelical right was so successful with this strategy that the popular evangelical community would no longer tolerate any alternative position. By the time of the 1988 elections, everyone in American evangelicalism opposed legal abortion and everyone in American evangelicalism was pretending that this had always been the case."
Insane settler-colonial millennarian evangelical sects are as American as genocides of indigenous peoples
ever since we first started colonizing north america,a lot of the colonizers were puritans (more religious than the average brit)
If this view of things is correct, and it’s a fine argument, it is typical of the world we live in that a bunch of religious zealots who fled Europe to form their perfect, puritanical society, ended up being the first step on the road that led to megachurches and the prosperity gospel. History loves irony.
I think the megachurch prosperity gospel is more disconnected from the original 2 great awakenings than the above comment writes. Like I think there's less continuity.
Don't forget that most Christians around the world aren't the evangelical kind you have in the USA which means that they believe the earth is older than 4000 years.
I think this special flavor started with the Cold War like you said, but the US of A has had strains of religious fervor running through it pretty much from the start. Like, check out the wikipedia pages for the various "Great Awakenings" in the US.
I think the current wave is from 9/11 and all the anti-Muslim sentiment that came with it.
There have been waves of it, but the current one traces back to the 1980s with the Moral Majority
One of the big ironies with the religious fervor in America as opposed to Europe, which actually explains it to an extent, is that America lacks an official state church while European states typically do. So while the inherently bureaucratic nature of those state churches led both to a grip on the religion of the country while also causing the populace to treat it like any other bureaucracy, in America the lack of a state structure created a much more small business owner approach, especially as the nation was largely Protestant. Which led to, as comradeda put it, individualist pastors who put an emphasis on their own charisma and convincing of the flock to be dependent on them as individuals to receive the word of God. Competition for flocks lead to greater emphasis on the importance of the narrowness of the understanding of the dogma. Hence the tendency for splinter sects, slight differences in interpretation being treated as heresy, and pastors needing to maintain control over the lives of their flocks. All of which leads to greater religiosity.
From before it was born.
A lot of protestants, quakers and amish who couldn't hack it in catholic Europe migrated to America.
