ABSTRACT
The picture of evangelical involvement in US political life is confusing and complicated. The factor that considerably complicates any discussion of the role of evangelicals in politics is that of definition. Southern denominationalism more or less preserved the essential expression of the nineteenth-century evangelicalism; in the North it took on a strongly interdenominational character. A few people began to appear on the congressional scene who openly identified themselves as Christians of the evangelical variety. The clarion voice of conservativism that marked evangelical politics in the 1940s and 1950s had turned into a cacophony, a situation that was best exemplified in the campaign of 1980 when three avowedly born-again, presidential candidates with widely differing political programs presented themselves to the electorate. In his presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1959, Robert T. Handy called attention to the "religious depression" that began settling in within US Protestantism in the mid-1920s.
