Few historical studies of American conservatism that have appeared in the last couple decades begin their accounts much before the 1930s. In Republican Theology: The Civil Religion of American Evangelicals, Benjamin T. Lynerd is considerably more ambitious, identifying certain core continuities that have characterized the political theology of American evangelicals since at least the Revolutionary era. The result is a fresh and illuminating treatment that helps place the evangelical contribution to the postwar conservative movement in a much larger historical context.

Lynerd's subject is the American evangelical approach to civil religion and, in particular, the political theology that has provided its intellectual underpinnings. Republican Theology seeks simply to “uncover the logic of this tradition” (33). It is a distinctive civil religion, writes Lynerd, which “originate[d] in a political theology that sees limited government as a condition for a thriving church, but also predicates the health of the republic on the church's capacity to elevate civic virtue” (6). Accordingly, the Religious Right did not “fashion something novel in the 1970s” but rather “tapped into a permanent facet of American evangelicalism,” one with a lengthy pedigree, even if it had recently laid dormant (32). Central to this theology is an unnatural grafting of Lockean liberalism onto “the gospel of individual conversion . . . yielding a spiritual rationale for limited government and the free market” (35). Only under a pristine, no-frills republic, said its advocates, one committed to protecting individual (and especially property) rights could citizens truly thrive as Christians. Further, the faithful held that such a republic would only survive with a religious citizenry. As Lynerd explains it, “The entitlement to liberty is at once salutary toward and conditional upon the moral virtue of those who enjoy it” (44–45). Such a virtuous nation, moreover, was believed destined to play a central role in God's larger redemptive plan.

As for the early origins of this theology, Lynerd begins with an explanation of how the heirs of the Magisterial Reformation came ultimately to embrace Lockean social contract theory. Although Calvin did not stress individual political rights, he managed to lay the groundwork for a covenantal theology that moved eventually in that direction. After Calvin, Theodore Beza and, perhaps most significantly, Johannes Althusius applied a covenantal model to political authority in society at large. The latter's work represented a seventeenth-century stepping-stone to Locke's minimalist state exclusively charged with the protection of individual rights. In Lynerd's account, Scottish moral sense philosophy in the eighteenth century represents a further shift, now beyond covenantal approaches and toward classical liberal contractualism. Lynerd credits Princeton's John Witherspoon with making such Enlightenment ideas acceptable to American protestants of the Revolutionary era.

At the start of the nineteenth century, preachers of the Second Great Awakening, such as Lyman Beecher, developed this theology in their revivalist sermons as they stressed three related themes: the sacredness of individual liberty, the need to preserve liberty through personal virtue, and a keen faith in social improvement tied to postmillennial hopes. The antebellum era witnessed a serious sectional fracturing within protestant denominations over the morality of slavery, yet both northerners and southerners still understood their particular causes to be concerned essentially with liberty. Only African Americans (slave and free), observes Lynerd, “did not buy into [this] republican theology,” though “even in their religion, liberty—or at least liberation—took pride of place” (127). During the Gilded Age, Lyman Beecher's son, Henry Ward Beecher, became a popular exegete of the republican theology, as American protestants confronted the two critical challenges of the postwar era, Darwinian evolution and the growth of industrial capitalism. From his Brooklyn pulpit, Beecher crafted a theology that blended Darwinism and a faith in national progress with a bourgeois individualism that refrained from any searching criticism of the new economic order. Indeed, Lynerd contends that “political theology in the late nineteenth century bifurcated along class lines” with working-class Christians embracing a liberal Social Gospel and the middle and upper classes retaining a more conventional piety (145).

The Fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century was often apolitical and did not initially embrace this republican theology. Nevertheless, the post-World War One debate over the League of Nations, the Scopes Monkey Trial, and arguments about the New Deal combined to draw conservative evangelicals back, Lynerd contends, “toward recovering . . . a religious rationale for limited government” (166). Their nineteenth-century assumptions about the sovereign individual meant that an activist state and welfarism were both deemed unchristian. One way that conservative evangelicals returned to the public square was through commercial radio. The creation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 demonstrated a desire to return to political engagement and, predictably, Harold Ockenga's inaugural speech at the NAE deftly resurrected the central themes of republican theology. As pastor of Boston's landmark Park Street Church, Ockenga emphasized the critical codependence of Christianity, capitalism and democracy. Drawing upon recent studies by Daniel K. Williams and Darren Dochuk, Lynerd maintains that revivalist Billy Graham and the Eisenhower administration helped to “seal” an evangelical-Republican party “alliance in the 1950s” (161). In this way, the old republican theology truly “became Republican ideology” by the mid-seventies. Evangelical intellectuals like Francis Schaeffer taught in familiar terms “the mutual dependence of Christian virtue and political liberty,” while Fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell was persuaded to shift away from his “crucicentric gospel” and toward a social moralism that now sought Roman Catholic and Jewish allies (186, 188). Although traditionally-minded academic theologians and philosophers have been sharply critical of republican theology, it remains remarkably popular today. Perhaps, reflects Lynerd, “the fallacies of joining these principles into one theology are overshadowed by the sheer attraction of each principle to many religious Americans” (207).

Lynerd's study represents an original and enlightening addition to a growing body of scholarship. Among its signal contributions are its chronological sweep and the author's perceptive inspection of the tensions within this distinctive political theology. Lynerd handles complex material with laudable clarity and simplicity. Occasionally, his treatment can slip into oversimplification, however, as when he portrays the turn-of-the-century split between Social Gospel advocates and more individualistic pietists as chiefly rooted in economic class. Further, Lynerd paints with a broad brush when it comes to characterizing nineteenth-century evangelicals’ political assumptions as thoroughly Lockean. As Daniel Walker Howe and others have shown, evangelicals’ debt to romanticism and their support for the Whigs suggest a more complicated picture. Nor are the distinct Lockean and republican threads in the fabric of American political thought always distinguished here as carefully as one might like. Although Lynerd acknowledges in one lengthy footnote the historiographical debate regarding the relative influences of Lockean liberalism and classical republicanism, his analysis would have benefited from a greater recognition of their differences.

Republican Theology nonetheless merits praise for its innovative approach and significant insights. Lynerd's historical sweep provides a deeper understanding of the evangelical contribution to the Religious Right and to American political thought in general.