ABSTRACT
It would be difficult to understand American politics today without knowing something about American religion. And it would be equally difficult to understand either politics or religion without a sense of history, a sense of how the interplay among religion, politics, and culture has shaped the story of the United States to the present time. Since colonial days, religion has played a profound role in molding American culture, directly and indirectly, in ways that no one at the time of the founding could ever have imagined or predicted. In order to sort out the complex history of the relationships among religion, politics, and culture, this chapter discusses five themes: the Puritan temper, pluralism, the evangelical dimension, populism, and the contemporary growth of religious and spiritual individualism. Threads of American religious history, past and present, interact with each other and inevitably help fashion the future.
