Abstract

The argument of this thesis is that American Christians will be dangerous to America’s democracy if their current voting patterns and their attitudes toward the United States political system remain the same. In the current election, there seems to be a strong sense of distress coming from politically conservative Christians about the “direction in which this country is moving.” One event that supports this idea is the amount of support Rick Santorum acquired in the two to three weeks before the Iowa Caucus in which he finally got national media attention. His supporters appeared to back him because he projected himself as somebody that believed in traditional Christian moral values. Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor, political activist, and theologian, wrote that being optimistic in democracy could eventually lead to tyranny. These Christians, while not the only ones, have made the mistake of being optimistic in the government’s ability to create and implement policy and create more moral society . However, America’s republican democracy was designed by the Founders to be inefficient. Using the theoretic framework of Reinhold Niebuhr, this thesis will analyze statistical data on current voting patterns and political attitudes of particular conservative Christian denominations within the United States. But first, the Niebuhr's theory of how Christians behave in democracy is explained. Along with the proposed problem is Niebuhr's suggestion as to what Christianity's role in democracy should be, and how Christians need to behave in America's modern democratic society.