landmark cases returns live next february on c-span matter of principle join us to hear more stories of the people who sparked groundbreaking cases and the justices and liars who were key to the supreme court's review. now a panel of scholars discusses the history of evangelicals in american politics from the early 19th century to present day. topics include christian leader

henry ward beacher and the u.s. supreme court abortion case, roe v. wade. bob jones university hosted this 90 minute event. well, good evening. and welcome to bob jones university and our first of a series of three forums. we really appreciate you being with us here this evening. if we could, let's begin our program tonight with a word of prayer. heavenly father we do thank you for the opportunity we have here to learn more about our civic responsibilities and the great nation that you have blessed us to be a part of. we do pray for our nation. we pray for our erected leaders. we pray for president obama particularly as he leads this nation, that you might grant him a wisdom and that your sovereign hand might be directing the

decisions he makes. we think of tragedies that have happened recently, the tawics of well-being and even life of citizen, we pray you will protect a life. and i pray those of us who know you will live godly lives and influence those around us. i pray that you will do that for your glory. we pray now you would bless this discussion tonight, that we might learn something that would make us more effective citizens. amen. i want to set the context and purpose for tonight's discussion. it's my opinion that believers or evangelicals should engage in political activities on the basis of their faith commitments. i hold this opinion for a couple of reasons.

first a scripture assumes that a follower of christ will seek opportunities for influence. god instructs his people who are exiled to seek the peeks or welfare of the city where i've caused you to be carried away as captives. and pray unto the lord for it because the peace or welfare thereof, may you have peace. so it's natural to influence people and welfare institutions including government because we see that in scripture. second, evangelicals engage in political activity because faith is not simply a part of a christen's life but essential to his or her identity as a person. evangelicals see themselves in two kingdoms -- we seek those

things which are above. but as we carry out responsibilities as citizens in this earthy kingdom, we do so in keeping our identity as followers of christ. so the am einvolvement of evan can gelicals in american politics as evangelicals should come as no surprise. but knowing this appropriate call to influence and to participate in democracy is not always straightforward. sadly, evangelicals have not always exercised this responsibility and wisdom in meekness. sometimes we're so enamored in the political power of this world that we sometimes become blinded by might. in an area where evangelicals have increasingly pressured,

chrissians must understand how to carry out their physical responsibilities in meekness and wisdom. first, your understanding of how evangelicals have engaged in self-government has been expanded and secondly i hope we glean lessons from evangelicals of the past that are instructive of our lives today. our format tonight is pretty simple. after i introduce our panelists, i'll ask them questions. and then following those questions, i'll take time to answer some of our audience. be sure to get a card from our volunteers if you've not already done that. and maybe if you don't have one, you could put your hand up very quickly and one of our volunteers could get one. tonight we have the privilege of hearing from four respected

panelists. and let me introduce each one of them to you. first of all, carl abrahams who is on your far left. i don't mean anything political by that i can assure you. first is carl abrahams. he is frequently sought by the media as an expert on religion and american culture. he's the author of two books and conservative constraints, north carolina and the new deal. he holds a ba in history -- in addition he studied in paris, the university of north carolina

chapel hill and harvard divinity school. and then dr. jim guth served as firmman's chair as both the university and faculty of science department. and initiated the washington internship program which has sent over a thousand firmman students to washington. he holds a bachelor of science from the universe of wisconsin and a phd from harvard university. and then we have a professor of history and director of

cedarville's honors program. his research area is 19th century america, especially the political history of the american civil war in the guilded age. she was selected to attend the american history seminar on the guilded age sponsored by the guilder layerman institution of american history and the counsel of independent colleges hosted by stanford university. his research also includes the role of ohio and politics during the 19th century. he holds a ba, an ma and a ph d from the university of akron. and then center right is a candidate of american history and fellow from princeton university. his area of focus is 19th

century american legal institutions, both practice and theory, the development of a legal profession, the reform of civil trial practice and debates over the common law and the intersection of american law and american christianity. he recently assumed a position of law clerk for chief judge lee rosenthal at the u.s. district court for the southern district of texas. he's received legal history fellowships from yale law school, the hertz institute and also holds a ba in history and ma of church history and a jd from yale law school. would you please welcome our

panelists for tonight's discussion. [ applause ] >> we're going to begin tonight what might seem somewhat of a simple question, but i think def definitions are very important. so i'm going to direct this question to kellan and ask him to define what an evangelical is and how would you define them from other religious groups. >> excuse me. thank you for inviting me. thank you for the question, and hopefully we'll have about two minutes after i've answered it to have the rest of the panel. it does seem like a simple question, a good question to start off by defining the term we're going to be talking about for this panel and panels to come. but it is also a very cruel question for an american religious historian because

historians debate rather furiously what evangelical means and who that label applies to. and part of the reason for that is the word evangelical really didn't have much meaning until the 20th century. but clearly the evangelicals of the 20th century have their roots going back further. there were movements and groups in the 18th and 19th centuries known by all sorts of names. as piitous, new lights, new divinity, new measures, as new revivalists, which had all different aims and types and thinkings about reforms and politics. but clearly there were strands and things held in common in these groups. and so historians debate whether the term evangelicalism is

appropriate for these groups. so one historian named david bebenten has marked four issue of what it is and these criteria. everyone disagrees whether all four go together or whether there should be more than four. precisely because everyone talks about it and argues with it, it's actually sort of a convenient bench mark to start with. so his four qualities that mark an evangelical, the first he calls it biblaicism.

the second a way of saying the cross and atonement is really essential to identity. the third is conversion, that the emphasis that individuals ought to be choosing as conversion to the gospel, belief to the gospel. and the fourth category is activism. which is not just in the political sense of being politically active, although reforming oneself and ones society is active. but especially that belief and conversion ought to change a person's life and that a person ought to be active in changing their life because they have converted and believed the gospel. so these are the four that are suggested to define an evangelical. and i should emphasize they are

emphases. but these are supposed to be the things that are at the center of evangelical identity as opposed to what a lot of 19th century historians would call lutu liturjicals. which don't so much emphasize going out and converting people the way revivalists did and more instrumental of the sack rumental part of the church, not so much going out and doing the soul winning that the evangelicals are talking about. so let me sort of sketch the time line from the 19th century to now and nalittle bit more of

the definition and hopefully that sets the stage for us. basically in the 19th century-wheel you're thinking about evangelical involvement in politic, you find the people that historians would call evangelicals basically on every side of every issue, on every side of every political party, maybe there are arguable emphases we will get to, but there are evangelicals that are very ardently anti-slaverly and one that defend the institution of slavery. there are ones that are democrats, and republicans and wigs and popalists and the whole litany of parties that went through the 19th century. but there are certain gener

generalizations you can make. and they tended to run along generational lines. baptists and clae catholics almost always reliably vote democratic from jackson into the late 19th century. while methist and presbyterian evangelicals, calvinists, congregationalists and respectable liturgicals, episcopali episcopalians, lutherans and dutch reform fairly reliably vote for the whig party and are involved in the republican party after the demise of the whigs. that's a very different story from what happens in the 20th century. in the 20th century it's no longer that you can divide evangelicals along denominational lines and sort of figure out who's politically active where and who's voting for whom.

after the rise of liberal theology and the fundamentalist modernist controversy, at the fundamentalist movement gets started, it's attracting people from across the denominational boundaries ask. so a methodist fundamentalist founded a school that has a lot of presbyterian fundamentalists on staff and baptists fundamentalists attending as students. anyone know the school.

all sort of together on one side of the political spectrum in a way that hadn't been true of evangelicals in the 19th century. this is referred -- this thesis is broadly referred to as the restructuring of american religion which is a coin termed by the sociology at princeton. so briefly that leads me to define one more distinction, hopefully the stage has been set.

the term evangelical to sort of distance themselves from that militancy point. sometimes people refer to this as new evangelicalism. i don't know that that title is very helpful or has any meaning because, really, evangelicalism and fundamentalism are both new in the 1950s in significant ways, in the same way they're also very old in the 1950s in significant ways. but what happens from that point onward is that these different groups, fundamentalists and evangelicals, often use those labels to make sure you know they're not the other one. even though they all share those four emphases that i mentioned of what historically marks evangelicals. now, to bring this story up to today, the political media and political pollsters have no kind of patience for this nuance, right? there's no breakdown in how

fundamentalists vote and evangelicals vote and where pentecostals fit on that scale or whatever. evangelical is often used to describe politically conservative christianity of any time and often that term is used interchangeably to talk about evangelicals, to talk about fundamentalists, even to talk about conservative roman catholics who in the 19th century would not at all fit the category as historians use it. so a very long and meandering way to say i've not given you a precise definition because history does not give us a precise definition but i think that's part of the helpfulness and usefulness of starting with the panel on the past and having these panelists here to think through what the change over time is, where those imprecisions are and why they matter to what's going on right now. so thank you again for inviting me. i'm looking forward to hearing

from the other panelists. >> so as i said, what seems to be a simple question about just defining what an evangelical is, when you look at it from a historical perspective, it's complicated and kellen in his answer invited discussion on this so i want to throw out this next question perhaps to the entire panel, whoever might want to jump on it, i think kellen suggested hiss answer to the question but when did evangelicals become recognized as a political force or as a political movement historically in the united states? can we point to a particular time when either historians or political scientists have said that evangelicals should be recognized as some sort of a political force or some sort of a political movement. anybody? >> i would just add sort of a working definition to simplify what kellen just laid out for

us. for fundamentalists in the 1920s and '30s, they had a very simple way as well of communicating what they meant and they would talk about believing in supernatural christianity. that very quickly got to what they really were all about which would include what kellen just elaborated on and one other thing that they would add, some of them, i don't agree with them, but some would add pre-millennialism would be. and there was a big debate is mill answer titants the answer pre-millennialism. so there was all sorts of short hand. i would argue that -- and i was surprised by this, it's an odd source but alexis detoqueville,

when he came to america in the 1830s and went back and wrote his book, one of the biggest impressions he had about america was the importance of religion that he saw in americans and the way he elaborated on it was in a very positive way that religion -- and he called it as it was translated, traditional religion, which suggests maybe evangelicalism, he's not using that word obviously but traditional religion and it made americans less selfish, made them more civic minded. it neutralized individualism. it made them better citizens across the board. and so for someone, a foreigner, to come to america and recognize that there's something traditional and different about american religion, maybe the

1830s is a little early. but he saw something. even if americans were not conscious of that identity. and when you think about what's going on politically, he was here during the jacksonian presidency. despite that he still saw some very positive things about religi religion. >> so kellen said an evangelical would be somebody who believes in the supernatural, the new birth specifically, contrasted perhaps with somebody of a main line christian denomination. we're going trace this historically now and tom's expertise as i mentioned in the

introduction is in 19th century u.s. history. how did evangelicals in the 19th century involve themselves in politics and how did the significant social or political issues that were important to them, perhaps even the key figures that were involved. >> so there's a lot that i can talk about. i want to focus in on the time period dr. abrams raised, that's the early part of the 19th century. in that time we see an awakening as historians refer to it. the roots are more and varied. i guess it goes to our conversation about evangelicalism's breadth. some historians would argue there is a link going back to the first grade awakening and the theology of jonathan edwards. there's some compelling evidence to suggest that's correct. edwards was -- well, there's a lot to edwards theology and i don't pretend to be an expert. but i know he focused on a key

phrase that human beings have a natural ability but a moral inability. by that he meant that human beings have a natural ability to do anything. they can do positive things, good works, but their struggle is in their will, their motive and only god can correct that. the reason that that's significant is the influence that that had not only at the time because he was addressing concerns about anti-nomianism, his response was listen after you come to know christ, after your justification you have to live out the faith, it must be evident in how you live your life. and he would suggest far too much credit was given in the role of the justification process. kellen referred to the new divinity, one of the many news he mentioned. and those include people like bellamy and hopkins and a number of others and they took that a step further and this is where i

see the connection to the second grade awakening. they talked about something called disinterested benevolence. in order to demonstrate that you understand who god is, that you have an appreciation for who he really is, you demonstrate love simply because of who he is, not because he's going to save you or prevent you from going to hell or bless you in this earthly life but simply because you recognize who he is. edwards would teach that love comes before faith and belief and the justification process and the new divinity theologians took that one step further and they said in your christian life, then, you should do good works. but they referred to it as disinterested benevolence. you don't do good because of the benefit to you, you do it because of demonstrating the love of god because the benefit that somebody else receives from it. to me that epitomizes the impact of the second grade awakening.

i'll has on the add there's much more to the second grade awakening. certainly there's more of a focus on the role of the human being in the justification process, the ability to choose tork, to accept, to believe, for many it was relieving the anxiety of trying to figure out am i part of the pre-destined? there's a perfectionism strain coming out of methodism, sometimes referred to as entire zantfication. the belief that after justification you can arrive at a state of relative perfection. for the second grade awakeners meant doing good works, benevolence, then you see the logical step to the third area which is millennialism, the belief that the church is bringing in the kingdom of god and perhaps also that this nation was chosen to bring in that millennium, this nation being the united states which is an interesting topic and runs through the country's history.

revival is the method then. so how do they get along politically, well, they launched what is called the age of reform, sometimes referred to as the benbenevolent empire. you see individuals like charles finney and his disciple, they were very focused on temperance and abolition, you see henry beecher and his son lyman and lyman's son all of whom were involved in -- lyman was involved in temperance but they'll be involved in trying to improve the american society wily in with a goal of bringing god's law to bear in the community which they lev -- live. someone creates a better society. what i think is intriguing is

coming from this time period, because i this i as you listen you'll see how much they apply to our current moment. finney said this on social and political involvement "the promotion of public and private order and happiness is one of the indispensable means of saving souls. so in finney's mind improving society wasn't just bringing in the kingdom or benevolent work, it was just creating an atmosphere in which the gospel. it was driven by the gospel. secondly, this is more telling by our time period, this is from henry cowells, it relates to nomination for the presidency. men are put in nomination for president, how few care to inquire whether they are licentious or not, whether they are for virtue or no virtue, for moral purity or no moral purity it's a small affair for most voters. it's intriguing because i think as evangelicals in this time

period they would reflect upon the character of the presidential candidate and it's a question that's coming up a bit in our current election. >> very help fful and carl if y could move into the 20th century. how did evangelicals involve themselves in the early 20th century in the political scene and what were the key issues or methods of political involvement that we saw among evangelicals? >> the most obvious was prohibition, getting the 18th amendment, it's almost like if you think about it rationally it's touch a bizarre story that you could get three-fourths of the states to stop the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages but it happened by 1920 with the 18th amendment. the key there is -- and i think this is a part of the historical

misunderstanding, a lot of people think it was just billy sunday and the evangelicals but it wasn't there the evangelicals i guess along with the anti-slavery campaign basically were part of the mainstream thinking of the day and, again, you have to use your historical imagination and get back into the early 20th century. most americans thought alcohol and drunkenness was a problem. business people didn't like it because it affected the health of their workers' problems with absenteeism and so forth and the violence that came with it, in new york city in the 1900s there were 10, 000 saloons which we call bars so alcohol was such a

problem that evangelicals were part of middle america and getting the political support to get that amendment. the problem came in the 1920s when you tried to -- what was called the noble experiment to enforce it. enforcement was the problem. or they thought it was the problem. and there i think a lot of the evangelicals and fundamentalists lost that broad base of support which you would need to sustain it. but there's also -- i think this is more sort of counterintuitive, something i discovered maybe a couple years ago that if you look at the 20s and 30s, evangelicals slowly are becoming the greatest supporters of american jews and not just in america but also in places like germany and it shouldn't be that strange when you think about it

because they're better informed than most americans about the plight of jews, for example, in germany through missionaries and also through the periodicals. the plight of jews in germany, i think american evangelicals are more aware of it than most americans are aware of it at the time and sadly some of the support is not that they are enlightened on variable views, many evangelicals were anti-semitic, there were a couple especially but that's dying down. what really generates a lot of the enthusiasm and support for jews is the idea that israel has to be rebuilt. it's part of pre-millennialism, it's part of what they believe and this is before 1948, the

prophecy that there will be an israel and when that's done in that timetable christ will return. so part of the enthusiastic support for the jews is to help facilitate that timetable so let's protect them, let's help them and zionism is popular among evangelicals at a time when it's not generally known about or strongly supported. >> well, let's move now to the mid-20th century and perhaps late 20th century and for some of us it's interesting to be talking about that from a historical perspective because some of us actually lived this time period. but how did evangelicals in the mid-20th century perhaps up to the late 20th century thinking to the 1980s, how did evangelicals involve themselves

in politics and social issues at that time, perhaps who were the key figures involved in that era. >> okay, well moving right along, as we say, other time, if you think there's a lot of discussion as kellen pointed out about how to define evangelicals, among scholars, the role of evangelical involvement in politics beginning in the '60s and '70s and especially into the 1980s with the so-called new christian right is subject to a great deal of disagreement. what was it or who was it or what was it that brought evangelicals into the political process? there's an old saying among those of us who studied religion and politics that if you have four political scientists in a room and ask them that question there will be at least nine different answers on what did it. i'm going to give you briefly some of the answers that scholars have suggested.

unfortunately, people tend to be mono causal. they tend to see one factor as being the prime or the definitive answer to why evangelicals become more availabled in american politics and especially in the '70s and 1980s with the appearance of christian right organizations of all sorts. one of the first, and it's before this period, is a theory that has a lot of support from a few historians and some political scientists and i guess i might summarize this by the labelling theory, you know, the cold war did it. that especially the confrontation between the united states and the soviet union, the godless communists, was something that got conservative christians concerned about the future of the united states and the future of the world and in that period you saw the appearance of a whole series of,s like just to name one, fred

schwartz, christian anti-communism crusade. i mention that because i used to go to the crusade meetings when they appeared in milwaukee, wisconsin, where i lived or near where i lived and those meetings were attended by a lot of conservative christians and there are a variety of other organizations as well. some historians saw this as an extension of the mccarthyite era in the early 1950s and you see in the press today some journalists have revived the notion that richard hoffsteader, the famous columbian historian that evangelicals but other christians as well had a paranoid style, that they saw enemies everywhere, and especially the soviet union was very clearly an important enemy, both religiously and politically and some people are arguing that paranoid style is appearing again among americans, especially among some religious groups, they use that to

explain, for example, the level of evangelical support that donald trump has had. now the enemy is islam or perhaps mexicans or perhaps immigrants from elsewhere. but in any case the notion is that somehow it's defining an opponent that has really activated evangelicals over the years. sometimes it's the enemies of israel, carl pointed out how important israel was in the political thinking in the 1940s and 1950s and i remember in my little church in wisconsin back in the 1950s how kpated everybody was with the establishment of the state of israel and how much that got -- in fact, i started watching a program called "report from the u.n." in the early 1950s because it was all this dealing the the arab/israeli crisis in one way or another. that's one theory. and this is -- this goes back to

the old blind men and the elephant, or maybe the blind scholars and the elephant but the trunk is the cold war did it. an ear is the attack on christian schools did it during the 1960s there was proliferation in many parts of the country, not just the south but elsewhere of christian schools and beginning in the carter administration the irs began to investigate many of these schools determining whether or not they were simply segregation academies as the phrase went. and the carter administration and then later the reagan administration took steps to withdraw tax exemptions, everybody here is very familiar with that effort. and a lot of scholars argue that that was really the -- sort of the tripping point for the creation of new christian right organizations and there's some truth to that. a lot of the early christian right organizations were filled with christian school

administrators and others who had some kind of stake in christian education. so another partial piece, if you will. other scholars go a very different direction and they argue that it was really roe v. wade in 1973 that was a motivating force for a great many evangelicals to get involved in politics. of course evangelicals weren't the first to move on that, the catholic church reacted much faster and with much more force initially but overtime evangelicals did respond and respond in great numbers and by the 1980s of course the issue of abortion had become a major one, a matter of concern to a great many conservative christians and it's remained so to the present day. another theory related to the third one is that it's really the sexual revolution of the

1960s. that were the most important factors mobilizing evangelicals. indeed in the '60s, there's a steady increase in local organizations all over the country that deal with issues -- addressing issues of controlling pornography, trying to prevent prostitution, prohibit ordnances, recognizing gay rights and, of course, more recently we've had mobilization against same-sex marriage and things like that. a lot of scholars see abortion as part of this [ inaudible ] that the republican party and -- [ inaudible ] [ muted ] level of voting

turnout than other values that could be activated by republican politicians and that republican activists and officials rather cynically and in the minds of most of these scholars used evangelical protestants as cannoned toer in the electoral wars with the democrats. i think each of these theories has some truth to it. and if you look at each of them, you find some evangelicals were concerned with each of these sets of issues, there are some others as well but i think the basic underlying factor is not so much any of these specific questions or issues or even the specific strategy of republican politicians which, after all, have to have something to work with. but rather the real sense among conservative christians that american culture has really moved away from their values. and i think this is a general feeling that underlies many of

these more specific concerns which are often determined by where you just happen to be at a particular point in time, what local issues are, which things you are most sensitive to and in one way or another i think the same kinds of concerns underlie some of the contemporary discontent with the way in which our national institutions are functioning. that we are really moving away from or dislocating from the historic values that evangelical christians and others have held to -- for a great many years. that's a start, we'll get into it more later on. >> so i think that's a very compelling overview in the time that we have of tracing evangelical participation in politics going back to the 19th century so, jim, at the end of your answer you suggested something along the lines i have that in mind for the next question and that is is there a

common theme across these many years of evangelical participation in politics or has it been quite diverse? has it -- has there been an ebb and flow to it depending upon the era or the issues that the nation was facing? around how does that relate to affiliation with particular political parties? has there been an epiabb and fl to that? what do y'all think of that? has there been constancy and dominant theme in terms of evangelicals and their involvement in politics and social issues or has there been a significant amount of diversity to that. to. ? >> i'm interested in the doctor's comments. i agree with them. and what i was thinking about as he was speaking is that in the 19th century after the second grade awakening we do see among some of those involved in the reform movement as sort of the

opinion that the united states is this chosen nation by god to bring progress and democracy and freedom to the world. we're going to -- it's sort of a continuation of the puritan theme of being a model for the rest of the world. that we can be a christian nation and demonstrate how a nation ought to function and even to the point of some suggesting, i remember a great 19th century historian by the name of george bancroft who, though not an evangelical by any stretch but kind of portrayed american history as this movement and progress towards democracy, the great end all of mankind was democracy and certainly there are a lot of excellent qualities to democracy but it was almost as if there was this divine appointment for america to head in this direction and i do think there is a consistency among some evangelicals through american history of this theme. now while i would critique it, there's a flip side to that because there is certainly a

recognition, we ought to recognize that american is a western civilization, it is certainly predicated upon judeo-christian values. we can debate the notion of a christian nation all night, and we don't need to do it, but certainly we were a country that was at least influenced by christian thought and biblical principle and i think evangelicals have latched on to that and rightly wanted to participate in the system and bring biblical principle to bear in the public square. so while i might critique the messianic view of america, i also see -- i also believe that evangelicals driven by their theology recognize that, hey, may faith ought to have a public outworking and i have the opportunity in a democracy to express biblical principle and since it's truth it would be best for our nation to operate on it so why don't i pursue in the the public square? and i think there has been consistency there even as the issues change and as evangelicals have ebbed and flowed in terms of their actual involvement. sometimes they've withdrawn but there's been some consistency

with that i think through time. >> if we look at some data that i've analyzed over just recently, if you ask americans as a whole whether or not they think the united states has some special role in the world, you don't mention god in connection with it, but whether the united states or -- is the united states just like everybody else and just another nation whatever in the world of power politics or whatever the case may be. evangelicals above all other religious groups are still more likely to say that the united states has a special role to play in the world. i can't -- based on survey data i can't tell you what they think of that role as being but nevertheless there's still the special idea that we can be a model or that we have a responsibility for what happens in our world. >> so the notion of american exceptionalism.

>> is strongest among evangelicals. >> right. and i think of ronald reagan and one of the images or phrases that he was known for was america being that shining city on a hill. that particular notion. . kellen maybe turn to you next again on legal matters. among evangelicals today, of course, there is a lot of focus and concern about court decisions and legal matters. could you talk to us a bit about what particular legal issues have been important to evangelicals from a historical perspective? are there any particular that stand out to you that would demonstrate that that perhaps is not unique to the day in which we live right now?

>> everything. as a legal historian i -- it's my professional duty to say that law is everywhere and that's particularly true in the things that we've been talking about. you can't really discuss anti-slavery or prohibition or christian schools and tax policy without thinking about the legal dimensions of the legislation, the regulation and the court cases that inevitably come out of these types of reform movements. and to blend some of this answer with the previous question, as a historian, i'm generally inclined to look at the 19th century as a lost world, or a foreign country. they do things different there. and i'm less inclined to see some of the strong continuities that maybe others are more willing to see. and i think a church/state relation might be one of those places where the 19th century

remains a lost world and in some ways an undiscovered world. i think one of the most fascinating issues in church/state law coming from the 19th century that people don't recognize today is that churches in early american history looked very much like states. and you can't go through every denomination so i'll focus particularly on the baptists. the baptists ran their own court system through the mechanism of having church discipline so up until, say, around the 1820s in kentucky if you were a baptist you would go to church on sunday and on saturday or every other saturday you would then meet for the discipline session and members would bring forth accusations, they would say brother so and so cursed this week, sister so and so gossiped. the deacons and elders would

hear the accusations, they would examine the accused, did you curse, brother so and so? and they would get an admission and after examining the evidence they would levy fines which would then be payed into the support of the church. if it was a dispute between church members they would mediate, they would reconcile the parties until the parties were ready to sit down at communion together with each other. and baptist discipline became so famous for its justice and its efficiency that even non-members instead of taking their civil suits over property and contracts to the territorial courts of the united states would take them to the local baptist church to get adjudication and would even pay in fines for the support of the churches that were being run. and so in light of this, one of the leading points of

evangelical baptist political theology was always the question of jurisdiction. who is best equipped and able and competent to be enacting a give social reform or another? and a lot of evangelicals who were not baptist who were on the hill with side were working in these benevolent societies, were sending in petitions to congress to get things done through congress. a lot of evangelicals on the baptist side were rejecting that kind of approach and saying if you want to get social reform done the way that you do it is you convert people, bring them into the church and the church discipline processes will work their way out into temperance or anti-slavery or all these various reforms that you're trying to get at. just to briefly survey why these things go away, part of it is american diversity, the diversity of evangelicals that are out there, especially when

the disciples of christ come to kentucky, they are very much like baptists but they don't run these discipline sessions so if you're brother so and so with a cursing problem, you can go next door or sometimes in the same building and worship with the disciples of christ and escape the discipline system. and then it's no longer a matter of evangelizing the people to bring them into the discipline of the church because the dissign nepals of christ are evangelicals and the people are converted and then you have this difficult question of how then do you reach them? what's the proper mechanism for getting social reform across? and that's when you see evangelicals increasingly turn to state or federal levers of power to try to overcome these problems with exit. but i would say that feature of the 19th century, of churches as their own site of governance is an important part of the history

that i think starts to fade away over time. and it's also especially important for probably the largest subgroup of evangelicals in the country which is black or african-american evangelicals at this time who were either slaves before the civil war or freed men afterwards, a lot of political engagement of the type that we've been talking about was not open to them until after the civil rights revolution. the type of governance i've just surveyed off was because if you owned your own church, had your own incorporation, very often black evangelicals who could not sue in their own name in the courts because they were black could sue as a church because the church had a legal identity. so the church itself could collect on debts or enforce property rights that black christians otherwise could not even assert in the courts or assert in the legislature or in

these other political arenas and i think that's an important part of the history of how law and governance have related within evangelical politics of the time. >> well, we have focused on the past and our next forum coming up will focus on the present, but i want us to take a few minutes before we have questions from the audience to think about how this -- the past, how this history relates to the present. so perhaps we can spend a few minutes talking about how the involvement of evangelicals today in politics, whether it be through the legal branch, the legal realm or otherwise how involvement today perhaps differs from the past. what would evangelicals of the past be surprised about today in terms of how evangelicals go

about their civic responsibilities in the public sphere. who wants to take the first stab at that one? >> i think someone like william jennings bryan would think he's in a lost century. if you start looking at the profile of who was obviously a fundamentalist hero at the skoeks trial but if you start digging into his background, he's one of the most fascinating characters that drives us to use our historical imagination to figure out how he could be all of these things. he was a pacifist, fundamentalist, evangelical, he was a progressive which for that day would be the world liberal that we would use now. he was anti-imperialist and how in his mind he could put those

things together my feeling is he was post-millennial so you reform the world and things get better and better and then christ comes back after the millennium so you engage in all those things, war doesn't work with the millennium so you have to be anti-war, alcohol work with the millennium so you want to get that as a reform and you do all of these things. so i think just looking at his life is a lesson in how complex evangelicals can be. i think the non-evangelicals often who look at us look at us as monolithic but we are not. there's great variety sometimes within the individual even.

>> so you would suggest that complexity even exists today, it may look a little different but it still exists today? >> today in the current 2016 climate even don't expect monolithic views because they aren't there typically. >> tom? >> i was struck by mr. funk's comments about the baptist church operating the way it did in the 19th century. to me it reminded me about how important the church was in society as an institution. it was an institution that was reported. it was an institution that the church function and fashion that society appreciated. and you see other evidence of this in the 19th century as we head towards the civil war era. one of the institutions that tie this is country together are the churches and as they split over the institution of slavery, those ties that bind the nation together begin to break and henry clay, a senator from

kentucky in that time period said if the pastors can't get together, how do you expect us politicians to get along on this issue and he makes a significant point and certainly clay is no evangelical. his reputation was anything but. but he makes an important point for the time period that resonated with people. it seems if we were to bring evangelicals to the 19th century from this point in time they would look at evangelicals today and ask how is it that your faith, what you believe, is impacting how you're looking at these issues. why isn't the church a major player in the conversation, in societal conversation and second of all how is it that what you believe allows you to arrive at the position you've come to with regard to whatever political issue you want to choose, with the second grade awakening, in most cases they weren't pursuing a governmental solution to their problems, they were trying to solve them on their own. mr. funk did a nice job of talking about how that

transitioned to government perspective but i don't know, they would probably react to that but more importantly they'd ask what is it that the baseball tea -- bible teaches that allows you to arrive at this conclusion >> very interesting. >> i'll follow up on something carl was suggesting and this is not anything easy to do but he used the example of prohibition but one of the things that most of the historical literature talks about what a glorious failure that was in a sense but if you look at the kinds of evidence about american drink and the social and physical and other ills that were attended on that, that was an obvious target and i think that tells us that, you know, be careful of obvious targets. sometimes the obvious target is one you shouldn't shoot at maybe. for a variety of reasons. another example coming again out of prohibition is the only

reason it was successful is because of wide cooperation among evangelical protestants and all sorts of other folks and sometimes evangelical protestants are not inclined to cooperate with other people from different backgrounds and traditions, those things kind of i guess urge us to be humble about choices of issues, our choices of allies, we ought to look at our allies and say are these the kinds of allies who we want to be associated with or not? those are tough questions, not easy questions. we often think of them as being far too easy, something we can just make up our mind. issues are easy targets and who we're going to work with is another easy to decision to make and they're not easy decisions. >> i didn't mean to cut you off if you had something to say kellen. . jim, with your response there

you have anticipated the question that i wanted to end with before we go to the audience and that is what lessons are there from history for evangelicals today because my sense is -- and we can point specifically to the presidential election, we heard a lot of questions among evangelicals because of the -- at least until very recent elections, very strong affiliation with the republican party and almost the inevide inevitability of supporting the republican candidate, there have been a lot of questions about what to do in this particular presidential election so all of that to say, what lessons are there from the past in evangelicals' participation in politics for today, whether it involves specifically this presidential election or the general political landscape.

what lesson should we take from evangelicals and their approach in the past for today, whether that be based upon missteps they've taken in the past or successes that they've taken in the past. what wonderful advice do you have for our audience out here? >> well, i'll start out. as citizens, we all make choices, we have to make choices. and we have to -- evangelicals in recent years have voted republican, about 80% of evangelicals, white evangelicals have voted republican in the last several presidential elections. which raises the questions about are you evangelical or are you republican? or both. but i think one of the real risks that we run is idolatry. we come to see candidates of a

particular political party or a particular candidate who we identify with as having maybe the right values or religious affiliation or set of policy prescriptions, we come to get to close and we identify that candidate with the cause of christ which i think is a fundamental error in christian politics. >> and with that particular answer and for any students i have out here, this probably will come as no surprise to them, i eluded to it earlier in the opening remarks but if you are a student, if you are a citizen and you have not read cal thomas' book and ed dobson's book, ed dobson a graduate from bob jones university entitled "blinded by right." about their role in the moral

majority in the 1980s, they get into the issue among some evangelicals to make involvement in politics and perhaps even supporting particular candidates, particularly or seeking particular offices as a form of idolatry. so i would highly commend that book to you. what other lessons? >> at the end of the day some of the basic things we still need to remember. freedom of speech is very important when you think about preaching the gospel. we take it for granted but the continuity in american history, i think 19th century, 20th century to today, the important issue and freedom of speech and religious liberty, continuing to focus on that. that's so obvious but sometimes

we forget. >> right. and along those lines i'm often reminded in today's world that the first amendment particularly does not simply protect the right to hold certain beliefs but actually to behave, to act upon them. it deals with the exercising of religion and not just holding a particular belief so the freedoms that are afforded in this country -- which we would want protected for people of diverse view points -- is very important. >> i think going back to my previous comment about evangelicals from the 19th century evaluating evangelicals in the 20th or 21st century, i think that they would want to encourage evangelicals in this country to reassert the role that the church once played and the way that's done is not by following the society or culture it's by providing something

distinctive within the culture and that is -- the point i was getting at earlier was maintaining the theological evaluation of the issues that matter in a nation in the 21st century. maintaining a truly christian approach to them and i think that goes to the doctor's comments as well. a lot of students have asked me recently, how do you evaluate candidates in this particular election. a recent pew survey showed that if you compare the evangelical -- white evangelical vote from the previous election, 15%, 17% voted for president obama, most of them voted in favor of him as opposed to anti-romney. the recent pew survey had 15% of white evangelicals saying they would vote for secretary clinton, 12% of them said it was an anti-trump vote. and i understand that and my perspective, my suggestion to them is you do need to pay attention to what the parties stand for. we have a two-party system in

this country for a reason. that doesn't mean the candidates themselves don't matter. but when you've got candidates that have issues on both sides, to put it kindly, problems on both sides, the platforms matter. thankfully we have a system where the president isn't an absolute dictator. there's some boundaries left and hopefully the parties can help keep them account to believe the platforms they stand on so there is room to at least consider the platforms and i definitely encourage people to vote even when they're frustrated. >> and as i listen to what you have to say, tom, we had an era of party-centered politics that shifted more to candidate-centered politics and today i would suggest that we've probably moved toward a culture-centered politics so the whole notion of the importance of parties is good advice. >> kellen it sounds like you have the last word, at least for

this part of -- >> as an officer of a federal court i am thankfully relieved of being able to say anything about present politics. >> we appreciate that disclaimer. [ laughter ] >> so hiere's the neat thing about the 19th century. some of the legal issues that we've talked about with anti-slavery and temperance and the decision of whether these sorts of reforms can be carried out through evangelism and church discipline or whether you need a state mechanism in order to reach them, the reason a lot of evangelicals in the 19th century turned to the state mechanisms in the cases in which they're successful is often a very clear anti-slavery logic behind the turn to politics. that one of the reasons, the sort of baptist argument that you go out and evangelize and

discipline people in the church, one of the reasons that failed first and foremost with slavery was because slavery was such a totalizing system, you could not go evangelize the slaves without permission of the slave master. and you even had a hard time evangelizing the slave master with all of the restrictions that were put on the males of mailing tracts to the south, with all of the difficulties of travel after gradual emancipation and so if you were a good evangelical in massachusetts that felt guilty about the sin of slavery in your country because you recognize your clothes were manufactured through slave labor, your industry was funded and your tariffs were supported by slave labor there wasn't anything you could do to reach that even through evangelical means and

this is sort of the formation of an saint slavery politics to find a way that can cure this problem of exit, that people can always leave and find a church that will support what they're doing and if you look at the other relations that grow out of evangelical reform in the 19th century, the ones that are the most successful follow on the same logic which is prohibition is likened to a save holder, alcohol is the slave master and you can never appropriately reach someone with the gospel if they are enslaved to alcohol and never have that capacity for choice that was was talked about earlier arising in the second grade awakening and in the theology of edwards and prostitution, anti-gambling measures follow along the same logic so people have the misimpression that the 19th century was this time when christians in america were just making the law of god the law of the land and that's how it worked and that's what

christians were doing and ought to be doing but there were quite a lot of sins that don't end up in the legislature adultery and blasphemy and these things were regulated highly in the colonial era but the regulations fall off the board in the 19th century partly because they don't have this anti-slavery logic to them. if you commit adultery, it's evidence that you have choice, you are making pour choices, you have that volition, you are not enslaved so there doesn't need to be a politics or law that is going to free you from anything, you just need to stop making bad choices whereas things like prostitution, gambling, slavery are tied to this idea of either forcal slavery through addiction or literal slit williteral slav has to be a power that can break the chains in order for the gospel to go out so the question

is how much of that logic has hung on into the 20th and 21st century or what the the logic that drives evangelical reform is a question i get to ask without answering so thank you. [ laughter ] >> all right. we will take some questions from the audience so if you could pass them to the aisles and we'll have individuals pick them up, we'll take 10 or 15 minutes to answer some of these question questio questions. all right, we'll start with this particular question and it was one that i thought might come up

and that is why do you believe evangelical political groups like the moral majority and the christian coalition were so strong at one point and then headed into virtual extinction? i think dr. guth might be a good person to start the answer there. >> well, i think there are several answers to that. the first answer is that they were too personality centered. they were started by falwell, robertson, and personality-centered organizations usually don't survive the political or the real demise of the founder. it is very hard to make that sociological transition from first generation to second generation leadership. all of those organizations also because of their association with recognized leaders of particular segments of the evangelical community didn't have much attraction for other

segments of the evangelical community. so jerry falwell basically attracted baptist bible fundamentalists and that was about it in terms of organization, had lots of people on his mailing list but it really never was much of an organization nationally. pat robertson mostly attracted pentecostales and charismatics and didn't extend far otherwise, and that tends to be a pattern. since these organizations depend on the voluntary subscriptions of individuals and contributions of individuals, one of the things that many of these organizations, like organizations on the left, have to do is take relatively extreme positions in order to raise money. we know that direct mail fundraising, for example, tends to emphasize a divisive, highly-combustible kind of rhetoric. and if you do that, you're going to limit your appeal across the

broader community. also, you're likely to wear out your welcome even with the enthusiasts who initially support you. so there are a whole variety of things like that. if you are doing that, by the way, you also tend to attract the hostile attention of the media and groups on the other side of the political spectrum, and that's not usually very helpful either. >> very good. dr. guth mentioned the court case roev. wade as a motivation for some evangelicals. could other liberal supreme court decisions be thought to have similar effect such as prayer and bible reading decisions of the 1960s or just a similar liberal court blanket idea? why are you all looking at me?

>> one of the fascinating things about the school prayer and bible reading decisions in the 1960s is that this was -- these were actually a pair of decisions that evangelicals were, in fact, all over the map on. part of that just has to do with the particulars of the case. so the prayer that was struck down in the 1960-some-year prayer decision was this written out prescribed prayer in new york. so it wasn't a spontaneous, from-the-heart prayer teachers were permitted to offer. it was this sort of card that they read to the benevolent creator of life that was not prayed in the name of jesus or anything. when the supreme court struck it down, carl mcintyre, chief of fundamentalists at the time rejoiced and said it was no prayer at all, get this out of the schools, we don't need to have it. the tide swiftly turned when the same sort of logic was then applied to striking down bible

reading, which, again, was very restricted in most schools where was reading a passage, often out of the king james bible, without note or comment, was supposed to be how it was implemented. if any of you remember bible reading in the schools, your memory may vary on how it was actually carried out in different localities. even there, there were evangelicals who disputed about whether that did any good to read the bible without any actual interpretation or encouragement to believe it, whether hthat actually constituted an act of worship or not, although it tended to be conservative evangelicals and in this case carl mcintyre was not a fan of the decision, because the bible is in fact the bible and the word of god. so that did mobilize evangelicals i think probably more than roe v. wade would.

that one tended to have consequences that rolled out later down the road, but justice black, who was instrumental in these 1960s opinions, he was receiving hundreds of death threats a day from people upset about these decisions, and then also just lots of critical mail from evangelicals who didn't necessarily commit beth threats. but mailing anything to the supreme court is incredibly rare. they do not get mail. so to get hundreds of letters about a decision every day was just -- it was unimaginable before it happened. >> let me come at that from a little different angle. i lived in massachusetts at the time of the decision, and the bible read there in the public schools was the dewey version of the bible, so catholics were reading their own version. i've done some work on the public support or opposition to that, and evangelicals weren't very distinctive.

main line protestants and catholics, everybody was opposed to this decision in terms of the mass public. i'm not sure how much that really distinguished evangelicals from other christians at that time. i have a little bit more nuanced view i think on how much that really got things going. >> we've got several good questions here. here is a very, very thoughtful one, to make us stop and think. how essential should we view freedom of religion and freedom of speech to the vitality of american evangelicallism given that the greatest growth of christianity is occurring in countries where those freedoms are non-existent? so maybe kellen and jim are off the hook on that one since you all have answered questions already. either tom or carl want to dive in on that one? [ laughter ]

>> there's no question that persecution, god works in lands of persecution to prosper his church. my view on this has always been that the american church and the liberties that it has has allowed it to evangelize and share the gospel in the way that persecuted are not allowed. it is to our detriment we have not allowed the church to grow and prosper the way we see in some persecuted countries. i think we have to be good stew war stewards of what we have in the moment, and it is difficult for me to encourage the church to sit by and watch as freedoms dissipate and not seek to prevent it happening because of

the benefits they provide to us, ensuring the gospel not only here but around the world. i get the point, goss works in all circumstances and remarkably in times of persecution, but i would pray that the american church do what it ought to be doing even in a time of freedom and liberty. as that day, as those freedoms seem to be closing in on us, with the opportunities -- i am a big believer in the concept that in a republican system, which we have, the dictates of scripture about the role of government in some ways apply to us. so if romans 13 suggests for example we have a role in justice, if we have a role in our government, then there's a certain stewardship responsibility for us to maintain what our governing documents maintain, which in this case is the constitution and maintains the opportunity for us to have religious liberty. to me it is not only a preference, a belief that to whom much is given much is

required, but it is also stewardship responsibility that i think scripture gives to us. >> so i think while it is a very, very thoughtful answer, it is almost implying a false choice between the two involved there. >> i would add the best answer would be a theological one, not necessarily a political one, that we may not necessarily want the hear, but there is grace in suffering and going through the experience of suffering religious persecution. it can be a means of grace which would allow you by god's grace to be more fervent in your practice of religion. >> and in an evangelical world, god's power far surpasses any human power in terms of limitations that might be artificially placed upon the gospel. >> yes. so you look at church history and you see good examples, first

century onward. >> has the philosophy of mills utilitarianism affected the development of evangelical political values? did the greatest good argument allow evangelicals to ignore the moral failings of canned thdida that they support? i think this gets into the theme of these forums of balancing piety and pragmatism. does pragmatism play a role in an evangelical's participation as a citizen of two different kingdoms? >> not a complete thought, matthew 10 refers to being wise as serpent and innocent as doves. we are talking about a political system which is a human institution, it involves human beings who are fallen. there aren't going to be perfect

solutions, so we're put in a situation where we have to make difficult choices, sometimes that demand shrewdness. i use that worry rather than compromise, although honestly our political system is predicated on the notion of promis compromise. the challenge for us as christian is recognizing there are some absolute principles upon which we are not willing to compromise, and it makes being involved in the system rather challenging for us. so my grandfather used to say moderation in everything. it is not a biblical principle, but there's some application the our political system. we have to make difficult choices or completely remove ourselves from the system, and i don't find that -- i find that challenging with regard to biblical principle and applying it to our lives. so sometimes that means voting for individuals that we know are fallen. >> i think in the history of

evangelicals, something remarkable happened in the -- a lot of evangelicals, fundamentalists were very, very anti-catholic. by the late 1930s they figured something out and the catholics figured something out, they had a common enemy, it was communism. this was before the cold war, so the common denominator of anti-communism drove fundamentalists and catholics to work together, people that would not a decade before speak to each other. so in the greater good of fighting something that was anti-religious and aithistic, that didn't seem to be as important. >> i think it has been a theme

throughout history of evangelicals in christian ministry guarding the purity of the gospel, but then looking for areas where there might be cooperation, appropriate cooperation in societal kinds of issues. it would be somewhat easy to end right now since we really only have two minutes left, but this is a really good question. maybe it is a little bit of a dicey one to end on. can you comment on the term "liberalism?" what is religious liberalism? is it the same as political liberalism? are the two related? you have 30 seconds. [ laughter ] >> anybody want to tackle that question? >> i'll try to give an empirical answer to it. religious liberalism is, of

course, a phenomenon we're probably familiar with. it is a deviation from traditional orthodoxy, if you will. is it related to political liberalism? it is not the same thing, but it is related in american politics. religious liberals are more likely to be political liberals as we conventionally define those terms. now, the connection is not always clear, why it is a particular set -- [ inaudible comment ]. >> it may be they simply go together because they represent some underlying, bigger phenomenon of liberalism of all sorts, if you will. but in one part of the restructuring that kellen talked about before is the conformity of religious orthodoxy with more conservative political decisions and more religious liberalism

with more as defined. lots of people violate the rules, but they're what we call central tendencies in political science. >> very good. anything to add? kellen, you looked like you wanted to add something. >> i would say you could have a similar discussion about the word conservative and whether there's been a con flags of conservative theology with conservative politics and if there is a necessary, logical relation between them. the history of evangelicalism in the 19th century is there wasn't necessarily a relation between those two. as we already heard with william jennings briana jennings bryan, who had very few conservative years political as he was conservative thee logically. where was i go with this? so i guess that is one question of history that moves from the 19th century into the 20th

century, is how did it become the way that a conservative theology would become tied to what at the time was known as a conservative politics. >> well, kellen, you get the last word for us this evening. would you please join me in thanking our panelists? [ applause ] >> i want to thank each one of you for being here the night. i would encourage you to come back october the 13th at 7:00 right here in stratton hall for our next panel where our focus will be on the present. the panelists we'll have will be linda abrams who is a professor here at bju, charles devin who i believe is here tonight, who is a retired professor from clemson university, also regent university and grove city college, and finally danielle

vincent, a professor at furman. again, thank you for being here tonight and you are dismissed. >> saturday night on book tv beginning at 9:00 p.m. eastern, former marine corps officer tracey crow and jerri bell, former naval officer, talk about the history of the women in the military in their book "it's my country too, women's military stories from the american revolution to afghanistan." >> for so long women's stories, women's military stories have just been discounted or appropriated by others, and so

she just felt like the timing was right. it is time to give these women a voice. >> we're not a social experiment. we were soldiers, we were sailors, and we ended up in iraq and afghanistan doing the same jobs in many cases as the men, and coming home to a country that did not recognize many of us as veterans, but with the same physical and moral injuries as the men at 10:00 p.m., "after words." arizona senator jeff flake calls for a return to core conservative principles in his book "conscience of a conservative." he's interviewed by se cup, new york daily news columnist. >> how do you make the case, rightly i think, that the health of conservatism is an urgent matter that actually has real world implications? >> i think -- i guess you can split two things. can you win elections, and if you are doing it just for the sake of winning elections, then,

yeah, we can do that. but if we as conservatives want to enact conservative policy, then you have to treat an election like how do we set this up for governing in ways we can move forward with our agenda then at 11:00 p.m., robert o'neill, who participated in the killing of osama bin laden, on his military career and his participation in 400 other missions. in his book "the operator," firing the shots that killed osama bin laden and my years as a sale team warrior. >> we didn't have a set line of who is going where, but the guy that ended upbringing me up to the bedroom pulled me aside and said, hey, don't take it the wrong way, i'm going, i'm going, but if we know we're going to die why are we going, which is legit. i said, you know, we're not going for fame and we're not going for bravado.

we are going for the single mom who dropped her kids off at school on a tuesday morning and then 45 minutes later she jumped to her death out of a sky scraper because it was a better alternative than burning alive inside. >> watch saturday night beginning with tracey crow and jerri bell at 9:00 followed by "after words" with senator jeff lake at 10:00 p.m. eastern, and robert o'neill at 11:00 p.m. on c-span 2's book tv. now historian and author elizabeth cobbs talks about the women who served overseas as telephone operators in the u.s. army's signal corps during world war i. the national archives in washington d.c. hosted this event. it is just under an hour. >> after the united states entered world war i women as well as men eagerly volunteered to serve their