Republican Theology

White evangelicals occupy strange property on the ideological map in America exhibiting a pronounced commitment to the principle of limited government and yet making a significant exception for issues relating to personal morality - an exception many observers take to be paradoxical at best. Explanations of this phenomenon usually point to the knotty political alliance evangelicals built with free-market types in the late twentieth century but sermonic evidence suggests a deeper and longer intellectual thread one that has pervaded evangelical thought all the way back to the American founding.