Nothing in the Gospels frowns on tax increases

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Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics don't have to go together
By Kevin Hartnett, April 1, 2013

In the United States, Evangelical Christianity and conservative politics are so intertwined that you’d think the Bible contains a commandment to “vote Republican.” But a recent paper shows that the relationship isn’t a necessary one—and that in a different political climate, Evangelical Christians might even be liberals.

To make this case, Erin McAdams and Justin Earl Lance of Presbyterian College look at survey data on the political views of Evangelicals in the U.S. and Brazil. Both groups hold conservative moral views on issues like homosexuality and abortion, but American Evangelicals are far more economically and politically conservative than their Brazilian counterparts. For example, 96 percent of Brazilian Evangelicals agree with the statement, “The government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep,” while only 67 percent of American Evangelicals do.

Why is this? McAdams and Lance work through a number of different explanations, including the possibility that Evangelical Christianity takes a more orthodox form in the U.S. than in Brazil (it doesn’t, they find). Instead, they argue that the politically conservative bent of American Evangelicalism has to due with the particular political dynamics in the two countries. Their conclusion matches closely to an argument made in Ideas in January by James Farney, who compared U.S. and Canadian politics to show that morality doesn’t need to be a conservative issue.

In the United States, the Republican Party has been making a concerted effort to recruit Evangelical voters since the 1980s. Brazil, by contrast, has a multi-party system and it was only in the 2002 presidential election that any one party (the center-left Worker’s Party) began to make targeted appeals to Evangelicals voters. Another major difference between the two countries is the role that moral issues play in national politics. In Brazil, no party advocates legalizing abortion, which neutralizes it as a political issue; in the U.S., by contrast, the Republican Party has won converts to its conservative economic agenda by championing conservative moral views at the same time.

From a ground-level perspective, the political alignment in the U.S. often feels inevitable, as if very religious Americans could only possibly be Republicans, or, for instance, black voters could only possibly be Democrats. This study shows that political allegiances are much more contingent than that. There is nothing in the Gospels that frowns on tax increases—and, in fact, it’s not hard to imagine a political climate in which the Sermon on the Mount is cited as a reason to support the Affordable Care Act.
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