The evangelical Christian faith has persistently dominated American culture. In the executive office, public officials frequently reference the terms “So Help Me God” and “God Bless the United States of America” in their inauguration speeches.
In the judicial system, those who are put on trial stands are pressed to swear an oath of truth to the Bible. Beyond government, the evangelical influence spreads far and wide across every domain of American life, from political action groups to popular music to educational institutions.
Referencing a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 65% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians. In the present day, American Evangelicalism has transcended a mere belief and became a vessel for various political, social, and cultural agendas.
This paper will explore varying concepts around religion to ultimately reveal the mercurial facets of faith in the United States.
Historically, religion served a significant purpose in uniting communities under a mutual goal and instilled faith in mankind when natural phenomena turned their course. The Egyptians in the Nile River Valley pleaded to the gods for healthy harvests, while the warring city-states in Greece prayed for successful conquests.
In the modern-day, God continues to serve as a figure for worship, as people who are lost in the chaos of our mortal world appeal to the divine for a sense of security and direction. The commonly shared faith among the majority American population serves to unite the people’s voices and advance the nation’s agendas.
However, in uniting a population under one singular belief, marginalization of the “other people” can easily occur. In the holy wars, two religions came into direct conflict with one another. Through a total of eight crusades starting from 1096 CE, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost to an existential brawl between Christians and Muslims. Concerns of religious marginalization remain a prominent topic of the divide in the present day.
One cannot ignore the minority populations within the United States that worship various religions - many of whom hold beliefs that directly conflict with the interests and values of the evangelical faith. Backed by wealthy elites and spiritual fanatics, evangelical institutions across the states threaten to exert more and more authority over individuals’ private lives.
As revealed by the plight of the LGBTQ community and the pro-choice camp, conflicts between individual identity and religious values are driving many people away from the conversation about faith.
There exists one major fallacy in evangelical preachings - that a “good” life is warranted only by one’s submission to the Christian god. There are a lot of different religions in this world. Christianity only exists as one branch of an aggregate religious system shared among the entire human race.
In the conversation about heaven, Christians find a paradoxical fallacy in confrontation with other religious sects. Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, three prominent faiths shared by billions worldwide, all point to a different set of worldviews and experiences in an individual’s present experience and the afterlife.
There is no way of discrediting one religion with another without the full faith & assumptions in the legitimacy of one god over another, as all context & rules are documented in religious texts, intrinsically faulted by the nature of the man-made composition. As such, there should be no objective truth in the discussion of religious interventions into an individual’s private life.
Across geographic and cultural bounds, there exists an overarching belief among humanity that a superior being exerts an invisible hand over the various elements of our world. Monotheists in Christianity, Judaism, Islam believe in a single God. Greek & Roman mythology, Hinduism, and Taoism depict collective superior bodies ruling over mankind. Ultimately, all religions direct to an out-of-dimension, all-knowing God that structured the basis of our world.
This belief in God enables us to withdraw responsibility for unexplainable phenomena on this planet - from the laws of physics to the invisible forces guiding the capitalistic market. In the following pages, this paper will digress into a philosophical discussion about the controversial dynamics of faith in God.
Christians often preach of a father-son complex between God and mankind. Such a dynamic is already present and observable in our world. Stories of mothers lifting heavy vehicles or fathers charging into collapsing buildings to rescue their children are told across cultural and geographic boundaries.
These rare occurrences serve as evidence to explain God’s “fatherly love”. If one chooses to claim a father-son dynamic between God and man, one may understand that the world is intrinsically good and be encouraged to contribute to their communities and society at large, knowing that a divine figure is looking after their interests.
On the contrary, the concept of god can be warped into a version where god is seen as a slave master. Mankind, being the product of his creative efforts, may be living in a lower dimension where we follow the rules of physics defined in his simulation.
As such, many of the unexplainable phenomena in nature could be simply justified to be “out of our domain”. Even our instinctive tendencies, such as the natural craving for sex or community, may merely be the product of certain mathematical formulas and algorithms.
A fundamental demonstration of this concept is incorporated into the movie Free Guy (2021), where non-player characters (NPC) in a video game turned sentient and developed artificial intelligence. Despite having an independent consciousness, the NPCs were unable to see through the facade of virtual reality created by corporate master-like game developers.
On a parallel level to the “Free Guy” ecosystem, we are incapable of detecting higher dimensions above the world we currently reside in. However, many common observations go on to prove the existence of elements within higher order. The scientific community has largely accepted theories that over 85% of the universe is composed of an unidentifiable “dark matter” and has proven the possibilities of space-time warping through wormholes.
When observed from an outer perspective, one may develop negative feelings about life inside the virtual, “Free Guy” world, as a situation where humanity merely exists as slave-like game pieces in a lower-dimensional world is depressing to think of. However, as warranted above, such a reality is more than possible. In contrasting the two religious dynamics identified in the previous paragraphs, between father-son and master-slave complexes, one may begin to formulate an understanding of the significance of individual choice.
Ultimately, the choice that people make regarding how they interact with religion will drastically affect their values and way of life. In the United States, various groups, marginalized or dominant, have taken upon themselves different interpretations of Evangelical Christianity in the pursuit of their socio-economic goals. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when enslavement was most prominent in the Americas, slave masters often referred to themselves as “representatives” who were performing God’s will in keeping slaves.
According to Mark Noll, a historian of American Christianity, theologians in that period argued that Africans had been brought to America as slaves under divine providence since their “enslavement would allow them to encounter the Christian message” and thus reach salvation in the afterlife (Washington Post, 2019). Plantation owners also referenced the sermons on the injunction in Ephesians and Colossians, which reads: “Slaves, obey your earthly master”, among other biblical citations, to promote docility among enslaved workers.
Enabled by a narrow interpretation of the Bible, the pro-slavery camp found probable claims through religion to justify their otherwise immoral behaviors in depriving Black Americans of human rights and self-determination to maximize cash crop harvests on slave plantations.
Paradoxically, the marginalized African American population made use of the same Evangelical doctrine to build their case for emancipation and the following Civil Rights Movement. Yolanda Pierce, a respected divinity scholar at the celebrated HBCU - Howard University - commented that as enslaved people became literate, they began to study the Bible, and immediately found probable causes to protest this idea of a biblical justification for slavery” (Washington Post, 2019).
The notion that “all men are created equal” is a repetitive motif in American Culture that once overlooked the colored, handicapped and female population. In sharing a mutual Christian faith, black advocates were more equipped to get across arguments in favor of emancipation to the majority-white American population.
Christianity, as it is observed in the present day, is oftentimes subservient to the political and social motivations of a given observer. It is, then, not about the belief so much as the power and sense of community that comes from the beliefs. In the United States and across the globe, religion is taking on an increasingly fluid form. Just as how water constantly changes to fit its container, the idea of religion will transform into any shape in which its bearer desires.