Role of theology in America's divide today

We see many Christian references during the Capitol insurrection of January 6 and many people wonder whether conspiracy theories and the political upheavals in the United States are at least partly rooted in Christian evangelical theology. In this article, we explore the role of theology in defining the logical conclusion of the rabbit hole that American conspiracy theorists find themselves in.

First, I have to declare that I identify as a Catholic and so may not be the most objective of parties if my opinions sound sectarian but I try to leave my personal beliefs out of this little dissertation. In this article, evangelicalism is treated as separate from mainstream Protestantism, even though I recognise that the two identities are often adopted by the same person. Neither am I saying the evangelical worldview is monolithically uniform. Much like most thinking in human society, it is incredibly diverse, multi-faceted and interacts with the world differently in different fields. Similarly, conspiracy theorists exist within a spectrum from those who may consider the plausibility of only one theory to those who with an affinity, nay addiction, to any idea suspicious of establishment thinking. I recognise too that not everyone whom we consider a conspiracy theorist would identify as one. It would be a disservice to evangelicalism in particular and the wider Christian community as a whole, of which I am a member, to conflate everyone who identifies as an evangelical with a propensity for some or all of conspiracy thinking.

Human society is just too complex for easy categorisation, no matter how much students and observers of sociology may try. We can only hope to identify some of the many social forces that act in varying degrees on a particular individual with a particular persuasion on a particular issue. It is not my intention to apply a broad brush to describe wide swathes of human society but to identify some possible origins of the worldview of an individual, which can be the starting point for understanding that particular worldview.

With this clarification, perhaps we can start.

Christian background in America's origins

A romanticised depiction of the first English colonialists encountering the locals but it probably did happen like this in some places

To start at the very beginning, the first English settlements in America were seen as another part of a conflict with Spain. While these early settlements failed, they were really, in a sense, partly driven by religious considerations as Protestant England under Elizabeth sought to outflank Catholic Spanish incursions into North America, which at that time had reached modern-day Florida. In some ways, the Protestant English settlements built on their experience in colonising Catholic Ireland, creating a link to shared oppression experience with Native Americans for Irish-Americans long before their arrival after the potato famine.

Interesting note: the country of Great Britain did not exist yet at that time: that came later in 1707, though the crowns of England and Scotland were united under a common king in 1603 in the person of James I (or VI of Scotland). That is why Americans colloquially refer to the British as the English and never as British because they were originally colonised by England, not Britain. There were a few Scottish colonies but they all failed. While the early permanent settlements in North America were set up in the name of the English crown, many subsequent settlements were set up by English dissident Christians persecuted in England when the established church there attempted to assert its ecclesiastical authority. Included in this wave during the turbulent Stuart rule in the 17th century were Puritans of the Pilgrim Fathers fame and the Quakers.

St Bartholomew's Day massacre in France in 1572

During the Thirty Years' War between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, 1618-1648, continental Europeans also migrated to America to escape persecution and pressures to change their religion, particularly from Germany and France, which faced the more horrendous religious violence during this period. This became the basis for a need to separate church and state in a highly religious society, to avoid the experience of religious wars rampant in Europe, with popular support seen as early as in the 1657 Flushing Remonstance. While a religious truce was largely observed in America, it was by no means universal. Even in Maryland, the only colony set up for Catholics, Catholicism was proscribed in three different periods before the Revolutionary Wars. Having said that, the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 was a landmark legislation, being the first of its kind in the English-speaking world.

Religious tolerance in colonial America was, therefore, limited and largely treated Protestantism as the 'default' religion. Even in Maryland, Catholics numbered a small minority, as they still do today. Today, Catholics form a >40% plurality in only one state, Rhode Island. Political and public life in the colonial era was already dominated by WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, especially of the Puritan Anglican variety, while most crown governors were drawn from the ranks of establishment Anglicans. Catholics and Jews didn't get much of a look in, as did some English Protestant Dissenters, at least for some time during the initial colonial period. Quakers were then seen as a threat by the Anglican and Puritan aristocracy, probably because of their numbers and organisations.

Itinerant preachers commonly serve remote communities far from the few town churches

Colonial America was largely rural and many of the rural folk had at best rudimentary levels of literacy. Far from the centres of learning in the towns and in Europe and conditioned by a belief system that de-institutionalised Church authority, many Americans in remote areas received most of their religious education from itinerant preachers, most of whom were equipped more with charismatic fervour and oratorical eloquence than seminary training or doctrinal rigour favoured by the established churches. Coupled with the political freedom to pursue their religion to its logical conclusion, it is no surprise that such Protestants adopted a more individualistic theology.

In such an environment, some Protestants soon interpreted their religion in ever more Protestant terms, with some describing themselves as 'militant Protestants' and becoming the forerunners of today's evangelicals. Having said that, the first of America's many religious revivals, which swept the country regularly, was to a certain extent rationalist as it was emotional in nature, heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and by science, very unlike how a religious revival would be seen today.

White Anglo-Saxon Protestants

Christianity had always had a dominant role in American politics, being the bedrock for the Prohibition of the 1920s. It is assumed that everyone should be Christian and it is hard to see an atheist being elected to high office today, even though some 11% of adult Americans identify as atheists or agnostics. The issue of religious affiliation has maligned the candidacies of Romney (Mainstream Christians classify Mormons as marginal Christians at best, due to the use of non-Biblical books as divine scripture) and Obama (falsely perceived as Muslim by 29% of white evangelicals surveyed in the run-up to his first election as President).

Evangelical theology and antithesis to scholarship Much of Protestant theology (even with a nod to the diversity in Protestant thinking) is revivalist in nature and very much based on the Bible as the sole self-evident source of revelation, rejecting the Church as the intermediary in an individual's interactions with God.

Luther at work

Catholic doctrine is that scriptures need to be understood under the guidance of Church teachings known as traditions - not the ‘old practices’ type but teachings handed down from the Apostles. The Bible is the written part of the traditions of which the Church is the custodian. Thus, to read the Bible and to teach Catholic teachings, the Church has built up an entire edifice of scholarship of ever-growing complexity, with much reference to the writings of early Church fathers. With all that scholarship comes the interpretative role that Luther eschewed.

In going back to the Bible, Luther justified his rejection of the authority of the Church by a Scriptural verse that stated that we are justified by faith (Rm 3:28), to which Luther added the word alone in his German translation. The addition of the one single word made all the difference. Where Luther intended to decry the use of perfunctory works of charity to evidence a Christian's salvation, this addition opened the door to the idea that a Christian only needs to believe to be saved, with no need for evidence, understanding or rationality. And most Bible translations favoured by evangelicals include this Luther addition in the footnotes, with only one translation adding the word only. But ask an evangelical to read the passage, and they tend to read it with the additional word even if it is not there, as this debate on works vs faith so patently illustrates. More fundamentalist forms of Protestantism (as opposed to more mainstream forms like the Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists) believe that one could understand the Word of God unmediated by any intermediary, eg, a Church. In rejecting Church authority to be the sole arbiter of Biblical interpretation, much of the body of scholarship itself was rejected. Evangelicals are wary of scholars whom they think are trying to interpret the Bible for them, and this wariness extends to the knowledge and expertise the scholars have. To them, scholarship is not merely optional but could potentially be intrusive, because it implies a hierarchy of understanding that contradicts the premise that Scripture is self-authenticated to any reader with faith.

This rejection of scholarship seeps into more secular fields: in evangelical thinking, it is hard to separate the secular from the religious, as their Faith informs so much of the way they view the world and understand events around them. So, it is not difficult for their rejection of religious authority to be consistent with their rejection of scientific authority. The more moderate forms of evangelical Christianity co-opt science into their theology.  For instance, one university tried to reconcile Biblical veracity with evolution by debating whether God breathed life into a pre-human for him to become the first Adam.

Creation Museum in Kentucky

The more extreme forms of evangelicalism go much further, though, and attempt to subordinate empirical evidence to prior theological conclusions. Creative convolutions of logic are often able to bridge scientific consensus with literal Biblical interpretation. There is a Creation Museum with a dinosaur display that dates the year of the extinction of dinosaurs as 2348BC, the supposed year of Noah’s Flood.

To us, it may sound like stretching the use of science, but for evangelicals, there is a need to reconcile what they see as truth with what others see as facts. Our differences here are not disagreement with any particular scientific claims, but disagreement with the method by which claims are validated. When truth is established through personal conviction rather than communal verification, factual consensus becomes fragile. This belief in justification by faith alone means that you get to heaven through your own faith and efforts, not by relying on learning (rejection of scholars) or professionals (rejection of priests as intermediaries). This is why so much of American culture - evident in Hollywood - vaunts the person with little or no training triumphing over experts with their long training. The untrained housewife picks up a gun and kills professionals, purely through the will to protect her children. I find the epitome, or nadir, of this philosophy in the film Armageddon, which is based on the premise that it is easier to teach miners to fly a spacecraft than to teach an astronaut to drill holes. The rejection of scholarship, and also accepted facts by conspiracy theorists, makes it futile to appeal to the logic of more accepted arguments. Rational arguments are viewed with suspicion by those with an instinctive revulsion of scholarship, while those more religious will see the hand of the Devil in arguments trying to dissuade them from the divine truth. The mindset cultivated in such evangelical subcultures overlaps significantly with those found in conspiracy thinking, particularly the privileging of insider knowledge and distrust of institutional authority. You see this in the Capitol insurrection or in the Flat Earth Society.

I must hasten to add that the road from the Reformation rejection of Church authority to conspiracy theorists is far from inevitable and most Protestant stops at where they deem reasonable Christians should, far from the extreme logical conclusion that a small minority at the zealous end of the spectrum. Also, none of this implies that evangelical theology leads inevitably to extremism. Rather, it creates a mindset in which certain deviations from socially accepted factual consensus encounter less internal resistance. It is the coupling of this mindset to the more transient tides of social and political dynamics which gives rise to some, but not all, of the political extremism throughout American history, of which the Capitol insurrection is but the latest.

Catholic acceptance into the American establishment

Catholic US Presidents

This story encountered a twist of late. Catholics tend to be excluded from American halls of power dominated by WASPs. A Catholic candidate of the Democratic Party lost the presidential election in 1928 because of his Catholicism. JFK won in spite of his Catholicism, not because - he famously had to declare that the pope did not determine his policies. In the 1980s, with the ascendancy of John Paul II and Reagan, evangelicals began to realise that they had a lot in common with Catholics in their stance against abortion and homosexuality, etc. Not having their own scholarship that can provide coherent, rational-based (as opposed to religious-based) arguments to the public, evangelicals began to reach out to Catholics, whose tradition of scholarship was able to provide the much-needed rationality in their battle for public opinion. Catholics' consent to this alliance helped them be accepted into the upper echelons of American power. As a result of this alliance, Catholics achieved their goal and today have undisputedly been coopted into the WASP power structure. As late as 1984, Ferraro, the Democratic candidate for Vice-President, had to defend her public stance on abortion against the Catholic hierarchy and the debate then was whether her Catholicism mattered among Protestant voters . It is only with the candidacy of John Kerry in 2004 that we finally had a major party candidate whose Catholicism did not matter to Protestant voters. If anything, his brand of Catholicism was more a point of contention with some Catholic bishops. That, to me, was the moment Catholicism was accepted in the halls of power, not the election of JFK.

Catholic justices on the US Supreme Court; conservatives outnumber liberals

Nobody blinks an eye today when a Catholic ascends to high office. I find it interesting that many Americans are unaware that Biden is Catholic. That is when you know that a politician's Catholicism is no longer an issue. Catholics are the majority on the Supreme Court (5 out of 9) at the time of writing in 2025, with 6 of the 15 Catholic justices ever appointed having served in the last 5 years. It is also instructive that four of the five Catholic justices are counted as conservatives.

Herein lies the nature of this alliance, with its consequence in the alignment of social philosophies and political priorities that now dominate certain branches of government. Over time, it reshaped both partners, lending evangelicals access to established intellectual traditions while simultaneously pulling American Catholicism from the authority-avoidance of a marginalised people towards a more combative, single-issue public posture. American Catholicism has become more conservative in the last few decades to the point that many of us in the rest of the world (and I dare say to the exasperation of Pope Francis as well), American Catholics seem like very single-issue cultural warriors. The Catholic Church all over the world is a broad church, bringing together social justice with social conservatism, often in the same person. The Catholic Church in the United States seems to be different in having such a clear cleavage between these two positions that they have become factions in the US Church. I guess it reflects the polarisation in American society today, even though, as a Catholic, I believe the Church is called to reconcile society and not to divide it. I expect that senior appointments by Pope Francis and Pope Leo would go some way to heal this chasm, brought about by the unique experience of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Danger of religious justification for political action

It should not be an issue for an individual's religious convictions to influence their political choices. After all, most political decisions are about moral priorities and the propagation of moral truths is often where religions are supposed to excel. But any political action has to operate within the scope of acceptable legal and social norms of the wider society. Any conflict should be settled using the institutions of the society in which the individual resides and the religion operates. Otherwise, the social contract unravels. If an individual subjugates their rights & responsibilities to society below their rights & responsibilities to their religion, the individual cannot be enjoying all the rights of the society any more than a person holding another passport (ie, having an alternative loyalty) has less than full rights in one's country.

Christian paraphernalia at the Capitol insurrection

If this is coupled with a belief that a political position is required by God, who divinely mandates action to realise that end, society would be threatened if individuals undermine society's institutions to further that religious mandate. Often, this appeal to that higher mandate means that the ends justify the means. We can see the disregard of democratic norms in some places where voter suppression, gerrymandering and other tools are deployed as political parties seek to maintain themselves in power in defiance of the will of the majority, sometimes to remould a better society in the image of their ostensible religious values.

We see this dynamic culminating in the Independent Network Charismatic ('INC'), a loose coalition of non-affiliated evangelical churches, not even counted as Pentecostal denominations. INC churches tend to emphasise an experience of Christianity based on a divinely-ordained mission to reshape the social and political fabric of the world and a group identity predicated on loyalty and in opposition to ideas the group labels liberal. This stands in contrast to a Christianity favoured by mainstream churches based on clear theological identification, a community founded on common faith values and the social demands of the Sermon on the Mount. This outlook is often disseminated, sometimes by entrepreneurs with Christianity as a product, through electronic and social media to convey an emotionally resonant message at ever-larger scales, instead of the more traditional experiential conversion of internal value systems. This accelerates the evolution of American nonconforming religious leadership from the itinerant preacher on horseback, through radio, TV and fax evangelists, to the social media influencer of today.

This decoupling from the broader Christian institutions, rigorous doctrinal scholarship and non-partisan accountability of political leaders continues the apocalypticism common in nineteenth-century American evangelicalism with the addition of political activism to advance millennialism on earth. But before we dismiss this as a fringe cultish phenomenon not uncommon in American Christianity, studies that estimated 3-36 million adherents in INC churches, depending on definitions, and not counting those in established churches who have also absorbed the ideology. Many identify as Christian Nationalists, are more likely than other Americans to see political struggles through the apocalyptic lens of revolution and to support political violence. Armed with the panoply of political and social tools that a modern and technological society has placed at their disposal, they have much capacity to destabilise the American political system

After almost 250 years, the American Constitution remains a work in progress, and the ideals it contains are still yet not fully realised. This is because the debate over what makes an American and the value system underpinning that identity were incomplete in those early discussions in 1776 & 1789. The resulting compromise came up with a formula of words which satisfied everyone because each delegation could return home with their own interpretation of those words, suitable to maintain their own hands on the levers of local power. That kicking of the can down the road then and since, had the cost in the upheavals America later faced, through to the Civil War to today.

While it may be late, America needs to have those conversations today that were avoided all those centuries ago. Talking with rather than talking at; Reconciling values rather than triumphing one's own; Focusing on what is common in that identity rather than what differentiates. This will be the test whether America is that melting pot to meld the many into one or will America be building two separate societies on a single but divided land. Whichever path is taken, the world is watching and any failure of American democracy will only weaken the cause of democracy in our fragile world.