The Past as Prologue: How Evangelicals Imagine the Future

This paper explores how early nineteenth-century American evangelicals combined demographic data (“missionary intelligence”) with eschatological speculation to construct politically potent imagined futures. Focusing on northeastern Congregational and Presbyterian evangelicals, including Lyman Beecher and the leaders of the American Education Society, it examines anxieties surrounding western expansion. Evangelicals avidly collected statistical data on religious demographics, fearing that a severe lack of educated ministers would lead to the dominance of “paganism,” “infidelity,” and “Romanism” in the rapidly growing West. Projecting these trend lines forward, they envisioned a fallen republic that had been divested of its Protestant character. When this demographic panic collided with a dominant eschatology that identified the pope as the Antichrist, it catalyzed intense missionary fervor and nativist anguish. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how the potent synthesis of statistical trend lines and apocalyptic schemas could lead evangelicals toward aggressive political activism and mob violence.

This paper draws a direct line between Confederate nationalist ideology and contemporary Christian nationalisms in America. Although the absence of the slavery question in our contemporary context may obscure their connection, I argue that there is a persistent ideological tradition. Both movements claim an affinity with the Revolutionary era; both affirm that the nation exists in a covenant relationship with God, that democracy and secularization threaten the social order, and that chosen leaders embody God’s greater purposes for the nation. Drawing on antebellum sermons, speeches, and secession convention records, this paper traces how Confederate leaders developed a theocratic nationalism that was not defeated on the battlefield but was preserved within postbellum evangelical communities. It then examines how the ingredients of Confederate nationalism are animating contemporary Christian nationalisms. Finally, this paper asks what this historical continuity reveals about the likely trajectory of evangelical Christian nationalisms in the current political moment. 

This paper examines how divergent American evangelical eschatological frameworks generate distinct visions of and political responses to a “future China.” Existing scholarship on American evangelicals and China often focuses on strategic engagement during the Reform and Opening period, neglecting how internal theological diversity and competing genealogies shaped divergent evangelical responses to Sino-American affairs. This paper compares how Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell developed distinct missionary and political strategies toward China. Although both operated within a premillennial framework, they articulated different geopolitical visions of China’s future, either as a potential Christian power or as an apocalyptic threat. Drawing on underutilized archival materials from the Billy Graham Center and the Jerry Falwell Library, the paper highlights how competing evangelical visions of “future China” informed divergent forms of transnational activism and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the complex role American evangelicals play in mediating contemporary Sino-American relations.

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., through its association with the Christian Right and its apologetic approach to American Protestant history, not only recapitulates past historiographical conversations regarding the relationship between Christianity and the United States, but also asserts a particular future, a “Christian Right” utopia, wherein Christianity and “civilization” are discursively intertwined with each other. The narrative pushed forward by the Museum of the Bible — a narrative that legitimizes a specific memory of the early United States and the nation’s relationship with evangelical Protestantism — mirrors older, nineteenth-century accounts of American religious history, mainly those of Robert Baird and Daniel Dorchester. Through the narratives of “labor,” of “civilization,” of “differentiation,” and of “information,” the Museum of the Bible depicts the Protestant missional spirit as inextricable from Christianity, celebrates the resulting connections between Christianity and “civilization,” and proclaims a new (and old) future for the Christian Right. 

I argue that carrying a firearm enables evangelical Christians in the twenty-first century to build a particular kind of future. Armed evangelicals imagine a future in which they and their loved ones will encounter a deadly threat, especially in the form of a stranger armed with a gun. In order to counter this threat, Christians envisage themselves as capable protectors, but only if they are armed. Armed evangelical Christians imaginatively build their future through three modes: discourse about wielding their gun against evil on behalf of the innocent, training their attention to detect threats by imagining them in advance, and regular embodied practice with the firearm.