The politics of evangelical identity in the United States and Canada

Since the 1970s, white evangelical Christians have become an important constituency for the Republican Party in the United States. This development has been explained in terms of a "Culture War" between "orthodox" and "progressive" visions of moral authority and national identity. Critics of the "Culture War" framework argue that this conflict is sustained by a small set of political and religious elites, who strategically mobilize mass publics around cultural divides. Within this "political mobilization" framework, the link between evangelicalism and conservative politics is socially constructed from the "top down." But how has this link become constructed as natural within the lives of rank-and-file American evangelicals? This dissertation argues that religion and conservative politics have also become linked from the "bottom up," in the ways that evangelicals construct subcultural identity in local congregations.;To evaluate the consequences of local identity construction, U.S. evangelicals were compared with their religious counterparts in Canada, where party mobilization around religion and morality has historically been more constrained. This comparison used multi-site, ethnographic observation in two Baptist and two Pentecostal churches, matched on either side of the border in Hamilton, Ontario and Buffalo, New York. This observation was supplemented with 60 interviews with clergy and laypeople.;Evangelicals in both countries were found to have equally conservative moral beliefs, but American evangelicals constructed their religious identity in more partisan terms, while Canadian evangelicals constructed their religious identity in more civic terms. This meant that in the two American churches, religious identity was effectively conflated with party identification, while in the two Canadian churches, it was easier for evangelicals to identify as both theologically conservative and politically liberal or left-leaning. This "subcultural identity" framework helps explain why evangelical morality has such different political consequences over time and across national contexts. This analysis also paints a more complex picture of the role of religious nationalism in diverse, secular democracies.