The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia
David A. Hollinger | 28 August 2025 | Public Seminar
For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in a low-education electorate. This astonishing fact has inspired remarkably little discussion. Religion has a lot do with it. The Republican Party courted evangelical Protestants for decades, but the client eventually captured the patron. The party was gradually narrowed by the Manichean worldview and limited intellectual horizons of evangelicals. Even Republicans with a strictly opportunistic, rather than principled, engagement with evangelicalism found themselves stuck to it like a tar baby. Dependence on evangelical votes became too great to allow for release.
How did this happen? How has it changed the political environment in which universities must operate? How, in this environment, can universities maintain their integrity as knowledge-centered institutions while advancing pluralist democracy?…