“Never before has religion played such a central role in American presidential politics,” wrote David Gibson in the Chicago Tribune in the wake of the 2004 presidential election.Footnote ¹ Commentators and pundits across the United States expressed surprise at the scale and impact of this development; a Washington Post correspondent observed, “For the first time, vast numbers of evangelical Christians showed their clout at the grassroots level without being organized by a national group such as the Christian Coalition or the Moral Majority.”Footnote ² Two days after the election the Chicago Tribune concluded, “There is little doubt that faith fueled the re-election of President Bush,” while the San Francisco Chronicle reported that pollsters “had not understood the degree to which religious faith was influencing a broad range of voters.”Footnote ³ The Christian Science Monitor concluded that the 2004 Presidential election marked “the arrival of Evangelicals at the core of the Republican party.”Footnote ⁴ The rules had changed, and in order to succeed the Democrats would have to “counteract the growing political power exerted by Christian conservatives and the religious right.”Footnote ⁵

American commentators suggested that the election results would widen the “transatlantic divide [that] has existed for years between increasingly secular Europe and religious America.”Footnote ⁶ Writing in the New York Times, Gary Wills observed that the “secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate,” wryly concluding that the United States “now resembles those nations less than we do our putative enemies.”Footnote ⁷ British newspapers echoed these sentiments, questioning what the Observer described as “a revolution in American politics,” and struggling to comprehend a “political landscape shaped … by the role of faith in government.”Footnote ⁸ In an article highlighting a “moral divide” that existed between Britain and the United States, the London Times found that the “most striking contrast is over the scale of churchgoing.”Footnote ⁹ The article employed the results of a British poll that echoed an election-day poll in the United States, and The Times reported that only 17 percent of Britons compared to 56 percent of Americans attended church at least once every month.Footnote ¹⁰ In the eyes of secular Europeans, the Presidential election on 2 November 2004 was, as Gary Wills's New York Times headline put it, “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out” in America.Footnote ¹¹

In the wake of the Presidential election commentators in both the United States and Europe have struggled to make sense of the political power of evangelical Protestantism. The American media have commissioned numerous opinion polls designed to assess the extent and the significance of religious belief, reporting that 90 percent of Americans believe in God, that 57 percent of Americans believe that “the religious right” has either sufficient or too little influence over the Bush administration, and that 55 percent of all Americans and 83 percent of evangelical Protestant Americans believe “that every word of the Bible is literally accurate.”Footnote ¹² Such statistics have led commentators to the conclusion that “faith fueled the re-election of President Bush,” with the result that the United States has become – as a New York Times op-ed suggested – “Two Nations under God,” a country that is more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War.Footnote ¹³

Such assessments of the role of religion in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century American politics are worryingly ahistorical and deeply flawed. The United States was born in a crucible of evangelical Protestantism, with the Revolution and the creation of the new republic occurring between the First and Second Great Awakenings, the evangelical revivals that defined the new nation as surely as did the Founding Fathers.Footnote ¹⁴ Perhaps the secular nature and interests of many people today, including professional historians, have encouraged assessments and understanding of American history that often all but ignore religion.Footnote ¹⁵ Throughout its history, evangelical Protestantism has shaped and defined the political culture of the United States. At times reactionary and at times liberal and even revolutionary, evangelical Protestantism has been an ever-present undercurrent of American political culture, and the Presidential election of 2004 is only one of many instances of this current breaking the surface and diverting the flow of political discourse and policy.

During the second half of the twentieth century an increasing number of Americans, including many academics and media commentators, came to regard Protestant evangelicalism as an anomaly in their society. Established in the crucible of the Enlightenment by Founding Fathers who believed that reason and science were incompatible with religion, the United States appeared to be a nation where reason had triumphed over religious faith. According to what became known as secularization theory, religion and faith were destined to recede from American life, while science and rational thought would dominate human understanding of the world. At its most simple, secularization theory defined religion as irrational, and as an increasingly outdated and irrelevant “other.” With humans ever more reliant on science and knowledge and the ideals of the Enlightenment, religion would eventually fade away.Footnote ¹⁶

Ever since the Revolution Americans have argued that what Thomas Jefferson metaphorically referred to as a wall of separation between church and state was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.Footnote ¹⁷ Not only secular humanists, but also evangelical Protestants have lauded the constitutional separation of church and state. Former president Jimmy Carter, a devout Baptist, has recently published a cri de coeur in which he castigates what he sees as inappropriate use of religion in politics and government, arguing that this betrays the nation's founding commitment to the separation of church and state.Footnote ¹⁸ Such a view is at best a deeply flawed interpretation of American history, for it is only comparatively recently that church and state have been separated in any meaningful or effective fashion. Until the twentieth century blasphemy remained a crime that was punished by American courts, and prayer and other religious activities were deeply embedded within the American school and educational system.Footnote ¹⁹

This is a history that was forgotten by many twentieth-century Americans. Secularization theory retains enormous power in the United States and beyond, and helps explain the shocked reaction of American pundits to the key role played by Christian voters in the 2004 Presidential election. Such reactions ignore the fact that throughout American history evangelical Protestantism has existed in a symbiotic relationship with society and political culture in the United States. In fact it is quite likely that rather than becoming less religious over time, the United States has actually become more religious in the centuries since the First and Second Great Awakenings. While historians have often assumed that the founders of the American republic were generally quite religious people, and that faith and church membership have declined over time, there is evidence to support precisely the opposite view.Footnote ²⁰ The longue durée of American history has always had religion, and evangelical Protestantism in particular, as a core element, albeit one that has operated in very different ways and contexts over time. It has been a constant and perhaps growing presence in the American polity, and while the United States has indubitably become more modern over time, it has not become more secular. We do not understand America if we ignore religion.Footnote ²¹

The evidence is clear throughout American history, beginning with the founding of the nation. For all that the United States was forged in a revolution that was an expression of the Enlightenment, creating a republican form of government premised upon the rights of man, success in the War of Independence appeared to be contingent upon the virtue of the American citizenry. Clergymen rallied to the Patriot cause and presented British policies and actions “as afflictions placed upon Americans for their sins”: the logic of this approach meant that only by rejecting sin and embracing virtue could Americans win their independence, in the process creating a Christian republic blessed by God.Footnote ²² An “explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty” enabled evangelical Protestantism to play a vital role in what has been termed the democratization of American politics.Footnote ²³ Radical experiments with near-universal white male suffrage such as the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 soon foundered, and the Federal Constitution of 1787 reflected the Founders' rather more conservative belief that republican government and individual liberty were best protected by limiting popular influence over a government comprising educated members of the social elite.Footnote ²⁴

The federal government was, in the memorable words of one historian, a “midget institution in a giant land,” and disestablishment gave evangelical Protestants carte blanche.Footnote ²⁵ “American Christians reveled in freedom of expression, [and] refused to bow to tradition or hierarchy,” and the spread of evangelical Protestantism militated against hierarchical political structures in both church and state.Footnote ²⁶ In communities throughout the nation, “Increasingly assertive common people wanted their leaders unpretentious, their doctrines self-evident and down-to-earth, their music lively and singable, their churches in local hands.”Footnote ²⁷ The many Americans who flocked to revivals and attended services shared their experiences of faith, conversion and salvation in a process that validated the significance and worth of the lowliest of citizens, and even those of non-citizen slaves. Political historians have recorded the erosion of hierarchical forms of government and the development of a far more democratic ethos and political reality, but only historians of religion have acknowledged the significance of the rise of evangelical Protestantism in “the success of common people in shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen, such as the Founding Fathers.” Associating virtue with ordinary people rather than with their leaders, privileging the vernacular and rejecting the past as a source of wisdom and authority, evangelical Protestants helped fashion the democratic political culture of the nineteenth-century United States.Footnote ²⁸

Historians with little interest in religion have failed to appreciate the effects of evangelicals' support for the disestablishment of religion enshrined in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia State for Religious Freedom and in the Federal Constitution of 1787. Evangelicals such as Baptists and Methodists supported disestablishment because it eliminated the power and privilege of Anglicanism and ensured both a democratic level playing field for all religious groups and their right to practice and evangelize. Populist and democratic, the new denominations flourished: the Methodists increased from almost nothing before the Revolution to a quarter of a million members by 1820 and half a million a decade later, while the number of Baptists increased tenfold in the generation after the Revolution. Harder to count yet no less significant was the phenomenal growth of evangelical Protestantism amongst free and enslaved blacks. By the mid-nineteenth century the Methodists and Baptists accounted for almost three-quarters of American Protestants and almost two-thirds of the nation's clergy.Footnote ²⁹

Disestablishment and the rise of evangelical denominations transformed the religious landscape, not least in New England with its traditions of religious orthodoxy and authority and where the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century were initially concentrated. New England experienced enormous social dislocation, and disestablishment left a nagging sense that it had created “a void of spiritual order.”Footnote ³⁰ Thus while disestablishment had liberated evangelical Protestants, it had also eliminated institutionalized ecclesiastical authority. While their religious freedom fostered intense patriotism amongst evangelical Protestants who were convinced that they inhabited God's chosen nation, an apparent spiritual vacuum deeply worried them. As the United States expanded westward, as immigrants poured in from Europe and as the nation's cities and industries grew, patriotic evangelical Protestants expanded their definition of “the righteous community” to encompass the entire nation, and they set about nurturing a healthy Christian republic, working tirelessly to protect the republic against such social ills as alcoholism, prostitution and slavery.Footnote ³¹

The first indications of the partisan political potential of evangelical Protestantism arose when the deism of Thomas Jefferson emerged as an issue in the election of 1800. In newspapers and pulpits around the new republic Jefferson was attacked for seeking to undermine organized religion with his Virginia disestablishment statute, for supporting Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, and for his apparent attacks on Christianity in the Notes on Virginia.Footnote ³² The Founders' god of nature and of reason threatened the patriotic Protestantism of evangelicals who were convinced that “without morality no free government can be long sustained, and without religion there can be no security to morals.”Footnote ³³ In 1800 evangelical Protestants were inspired by “moral” issues to campaign and vote against “a man who despises religion,” and who was not “qualified to govern Christians,” fearing that the very survival of the republic was at stake.Footnote ³⁴ Thus what commentators in 2004 described as “a new fusion between religion and politics” and an election that “was unique in the assertiveness of evangelicals” was, in fact, as old as the republic itself.Footnote ³⁵

It was concern for the health and survival of the American republic that led some American evangelicals to champion moral reform and anti-slavery. The new republic, which Lincoln would later celebrate as “the last best hope” of mankind, was flawed by its dependence upon racial slavery, and a steadily increasing number of evangelicals “perceived their own spiritual deliverance, as well as that of the new nation, to be related to the emancipation of the slave.”Footnote ³⁶

The gradual increase in abolitionist sentiment employed an evangelical framework of confessional testimony, privileging feelings over intellect in authentic reports of the pains inflicted upon and experienced by slaves.Footnote ³⁷ William Lloyd Garrison couched his abolitionism in the rhetoric of New England evangelical reform, raging in an editorial that to “say that this covenant with death shall not be annulled – that this agreement with hell shall continue to stand – that this refuge of lies shall not be swept away – is to hurl defiance at the eternal throne, and to give the lie to Him who sits thereon.”Footnote ³⁸ Ever since the Revolution evangelicals had regularly suggested that the republic was in danger of plunging into irreligious darkness, but it was Garrison who first suggested that slavery was the “gangrene preying upon our vitals” and thus endangering “the liberties of a brave people.”Footnote ³⁹ While evangelicals had traditionally defended the Constitution and the nation it embodied, Garrison was but the first of a growing number who castigated the American republic for its hypocritical tolerance of racial slavery. And like other evangelicals throughout American history, Garrison insisted that it was the responsibility of God-fearing men and women to employ faith and political power to do what was right; in this case, allowing slavery to disappear in God's own good time was not an option.

In attacking slavery and slaveholders as deadly threats to the very existence of the American republic, the radical and revolutionary potential of evangelical Protestantism became apparent. John Brown epitomized the marriage of radical Protestantism and American patriotism in his rigid adherence to Christianity's “Golden Rule” and the egalitarianism of the Declaration of Independence.Footnote ⁴⁰ While Garrison withdrew from a corrupt political system in order to persuade others of the error of their ways, Brown withdrew in order to attack and destroy the cancer that was eating away at God's republic.

During the six weeks between his capture and execution John Brown employed his radical evangelical Protestant understanding of America's destiny to transform popular northern understanding of slavery. Brown admitted much of what he was accused of, embracing guilt through an appeal to a higher moral truth, and declaring himself willing to be martyred for what was right.Footnote ⁴¹ Lying seriously injured after his capture at Harpers Ferry, Brown declared the ill-fated raid the “greatest service man can render to God.”Footnote ⁴² Such words, and his calm demeanour during his trial, transformed popular attitudes in the North. Brown, the terrorist responsible for the bloody Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas, was lauded by many northerners from beyond the radical fringe of evangelical Protestant abolitionism. The apparent successes of the South in protecting and strengthening slavery during the 1850s encouraged even Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson to celebrate Brown as a man who was willing to go beyond passive resistance in his stand again the evil embodied in the republic's embrace of slavery.Footnote ⁴³ The Transcendentalists embraced treason and rebellion against morally corrupt laws, and in the wake of Brown's execution an increasing number of evangelical Protestants agreed with the sentiment. Following Brown's execution even the pacifist Garrison declared that “he no longer needs our sympathy, for he is beyond suffering, and wears the victor's crown,” ending his speech “THE WILL OF GOD BE DONE!” to loud and sustained applause.Footnote ⁴⁴ Within a year of his execution, elements of John Brown's evangelical message would be embraced by the Union armies who marched into the southern states singing his name.

As the nation descended into civil war, the Republicans “presented themselves and Lincoln as the embodiment of uncorrupted evangelical Protestantism,” and the party secured the support of huge numbers of evangelical voters in New England and the Mid-west for a military struggle defined in stridently religious and apocalyptic terms.Footnote ⁴⁵ More than at any time in the past or future, these evangelical Protestants believed that the health and survival of the American republic and of God's great experiment were contingent upon the success of a single political party and its leader, and on the elimination of slavery and the defeat of secession. Over the course of the war Lincoln embraced the evangelical agenda, and his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural – two of the greatest speeches in American political history – were as much evangelical sermons as they were political texts.

In his Gettysburg Address Lincoln brilliantly presented a political agenda in the form of a religious address, blending medium and message to powerful effect. This is evident throughout the speech, but nowhere more so than in the first line: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The dating is almost biblical in tone, yet it refers not to events in the Bible but to a fundamentally secular act, the creation of a republic premised on liberty and equality. Lincoln ended his speech with a similar conjunction of secular and spiritual, dedicating the battlefield cemetery and the Union war effort to the aim “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, delivered in March of 1865 as the war ground to a bloody conclusion, was even more explicit in the use of religious content and style to justify the Union's destruction of slavery and to begin the process of national reconciliation. The 393 words of the speech's longest paragraph contained eleven references to God, and three Scriptural quotations.Footnote ⁴⁷ More significantly, this paragraph framed the trauma of the war, and thus the destiny of the republic, in terms of the actions of God rather than of men. Having noted that both sides “read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” Lincoln suggested that the prayer of neither side “has been answered fully,” for “The Almighty has His own purposes.” The paragraph begins and ends with Lincoln's sermon-like explication of that divine purpose: “All knew,” intoned the president, that slavery “was somehow the cause of the war.” It is now, however, “His appointed time” for the ending of slavery, but Lincoln's speech, like so many evangelical sermons, does not celebrate divine and human victory but rather demands surrender to divine providence. God gave the misery and bloodshed of the Civil War, Lincoln suggested, “to both North and South … as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Lincoln's great inaugural sermon, for such it was, ends with a plea for national reconciliation and a shared commitment to rebuild the republic along the lines laid out by God and the Founders: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.”Footnote ⁴⁸

If John Brown and Abraham Lincoln epitomized the revolutionary democratic spirit inherent in American evangelical Protestantism, William Jennings Bryan's attacks on Darwinianism in the infamous Scopes Trial of 1925 appear to represent the most conservative anti-intellectualism of Protestant fundamentalism. The picture is rather more complicated, however, and far more than John Brown or Abraham Lincoln, it is Williams Jennings Bryan who embodies the remarkable historical significance of evangelical Protestantism in American history, operating as a radical democratic social force and embracing the potential of a republic built upon human rights and equality, while simultaneously championing a fervent and often quite literal faith in the Bible as the revealed Word of God.

Although he was defeated in two Presidential elections, Bryan was quite possibly the most popular progressive of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Rooted in the evangelical heartland of the agrarian Populist movement, Bryan campaigned tirelessly as a moral crusader for rural and urban working Americans against the power of business and industrial leaders. Social Darwinism may have horrified American socialists, but Bryan and others like him reacted against the ideology of the Gospel of Wealth not as a socialist but with the deep-seated moral reprehension of an evangelical Christian, arguing that such inequalities sinned against man and God alike. Bryan championed such Populist and progressive reforms as the direct election of senators, a progressive federal income tax, Prohibition and female suffrage; for him, support for these reforms was intimately related to his arguments against Darwinism during the Scopes Trial, for they all existed on a moral continuum from which Bryan operated to protect Americans and their republic against the modernist forces that threatened to undermine the moral basis of the republic.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the language of a social reformer Bryan attacked Darwinism for representing “man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate – the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As much as any other American, Bryan “embodied the close connection between the Bible's values and American ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy,” and his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention echoed Lincoln's melding of religion and patriotic zeal.Footnote ⁵¹

Bryan's defeat in Tennessee heralded the success of a more secular vision of the United States that would dominate the twentieth century, and more liberal Protestants worked within this framework. Secularization and liberal Protestantism combined forces, and in supporting progressive and democratic moral principles at home and abroad many Americans supported this somewhat secularized version of the Protestant vision of the American republic.Footnote ⁵² In contrast, fundamentalists, especially in the South and West of the nation, took issue with liberalism and withdrew from active participation in politics, only returning in the second half of the twentieth century when their dissent and local action coalesced to threaten the liberal hegemony. Writing in the New York Times Gary Wills went so far as to describe President Bush's re-election in 2004 as “Bryan's revenge for the Scopes Trial of 1925,” and he described evangelicals “roaring back into the arena” of American politics.Footnote ⁵³ In truth they had never left, for evangelical Protestantism has been an ever-present force in American political culture, inspiring both the most radical and revolutionary and the most conservative and reactionary political movements.

The return of evangelical Protestants into America's political mainstream has been occasioned by a familiar fear of threats to the republic and the values for which it stands, the kind of fear that motivated Protestants in the election of 1800, in the lead-up to the Civil War, and in the Populist and progressive struggles of the early twentieth century. The Cold War provided the backdrop for a revival of political evangelical Christianity. On the one hand many American Protestants agreed with Billy Graham's dismissal of communism as “Satan's Religion” in their enthusiastic support for America's moral mission to save not just the nation but the entire world.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, however, black evangelical Protestants coalesced around the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., whose castigation of American immorality in countenancing racial oppression and inequality echoed Garrison, Brown and Lincoln. Graham and King were, perhaps, America's greatest evangelical preachers of the twentieth century, and for all their differences they shared a belief that the values on which the republic was based were under threat, and that adherence to these core republican principles and to evangelical Christianity and its injunctions could protect and save America.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, secularism circumscribed the great American project, and in the wake of the Scopes Trial fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism was exiled to the margins of American society as an outdated belief system that would soon disappear. Yet it had always been and continued to be far more integral to America and to many Americans than those who had abandoned religious faith realized, and in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first religious fundamentalism has demonstrated that secularism cannot easily claim to be a historically mandated right and true path for the American republic.

A symbiotic relationship between evangelical Protestantism and political culture has been present in North America for two and a half centuries, and the Protestant republic described so eloquently by Alexis de Tocqueville continues to flourish:

What changed over time was not religious belief or devotion to the values on which the republic was founded. Rather, what changed over time were the ways in which these mutually supporting belief systems melded, and the social context in which they operated, causing Americans to articulate their reactions against perceived threats to the republic in explicitly evangelical terms, whether as radicals or as conservatives. Evangelical Protestantism has long dominated what are now identified as the “red” states of the South, parts of the Mid-west and the West. Before the Civil War the religious and political culture of the Mid-west contributed to the growth of abolitionism and the Republican Party, informing the evangelically inspired political radicalism of Lincoln. During the latter decades of the nineteenth-century the religious and political culture of the South, Mid-west and West provided a vital foundation for the political radicalism of Populism and progressivism, while simultaneously fueling conservative creationism; to men such as Williams Jennings Bryan there was no contradiction between abolitionism, Populism and creationism.

The ambition of some contemporary American Christians to create a righteous empire, illustrated perhaps by evangelical Protestant support for the re-election of President George W. Bush, meshes with a wide array of secular as well as religious issues and causes. While secular commentators have imagined the religious and the secular to be opposite and indeed mutually exclusive categories, the truth is rather more complicated. Throughout American history religion has been refashioned to meet the needs and situations of a fast-changing society, and contemporary evangelical Protestantism combines the secular and the religious to powerful effect.

During the half-century that American studies has existed, the large majority of its practitioners have operated from a secular humanist perspective. Relatively few of their books and articles on American literature, history, politics, media and culture acknowledge and analyse religion in the United States. Like the media pundits who have been shocked by the political power of evangelical Protestantism in America, academics remain as trapped by secularization theory as they believe evangelical Protestants to be trapped by irrational faith. In short, much of the academic work of American studies is part and parcel of the secularization process, and its students have neglected religion as a vital category of analysis.

How can American studies engage with the reality of an America that has always been and continues to be a deeply religious nation? The secular and the religious can represent hugely different ways of imagining American history and the entire American endeavour, and may produce diametrically opposed interpretations of the American narrative. There is a clear need for academics and students to engage with the development of new theories of modernization that allow for a more complicated and symbiotic relationship between the secular and religious, and that enable us to examine both how evangelical Protestantism has employed the national for religious purposes, and how the American nation-state and its political leaders have actively employed evangelical Protestantism. New theories of religious economy, also referred to as rational-choice theory, acknowledge that secularization is a powerful force in the United States, but that it cannot comprehensively explain contemporary American society. With far greater sensitivity to religion in American history, proponents argue that the First Amendment's disestablishment guarantee against a state church encouraged religious pluralism and competition for members between different religious traditions. The absence of a religious monopoly militated against stagnation, and while some sects lost ground and disappeared, others developed or grew stronger, and evangelical Protestants – particularly Baptists and Methodists – fared particularly well.Footnote ⁵⁶

We do not understand contemporary America, we show ignorance of American history, we misunderstand essential aspects of the American project and we fail to do justice to American studies if we ignore religion in America, and evangelical Protestantism in particular. This has been all but forgotten by the many political commentators who, in the wake of the 2004 Presidential election, described “a new fusion between religion and politics,” despairing of “the fundamentalism of the American electorate” and wondering, could the nation that was “the first real democracy in history” and “a product of Enlightenment values” still “be called an Enlightened nation?”Footnote ⁵⁷ Even the noted British historian Simon Schama, who has lived and taught in the United States for a quarter-century, editorialized his surprise at the fact that to live “in the United States now is to live in a country governed by acts of faith,” and when he wondered, “Was it always thus?” he failed to provide a definitive answer.Footnote ⁵⁸ To assert, as one American columnist did, that the 2004 Presidential election “was unique in the assertiveness of evangelicals and the overt appeals made by the candidates to the faithful” is to forget that evangelical Protestantism has always been a powerful presence in American political culture, especially in rural areas of the South and West.Footnote ⁵⁹ It can function as a conservative or a radical force, depending on the ways in which Americans react to perceived threats against their nation and what they believe it to stand for, whether that threat is slavery or Darwinism. John Zogby, a leading American pollster who incorrectly called the election for John Kerry, admitted afterwards that “there is a huge sense of elitism among pollsters and the media on the role of religion in our society.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Zogby's humble admission was an astute one: the nature, the extent and the significance of American evangelical Protestantism are not new; what is new is an almost wilful popular ignorance of this potent force, and the myriad ways that it can affect American political culture and society.