ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the religious-political pattern in the United States. The political history of the country is so short that this pattern is almost a matter of variations on one basic design. The chapter deals with the establishment of that design: the formative years and the one major realignment which took place around the middle of the nineteenth century. The interrelationship between religion and politics in the United States has been of interest to most analysts of American culture. Both before and after the formation of the United States as a nation, it was not only a country whose population was largely Protestant, but specific Protestant denominations were the official state church. The election of 1928 played a major role in structuring the subsequent alignment of American voters. The only method used to infer the relationship between social characteristics such as religious affiliation and voting habits was to compare the social characteristics of different voting areas.
