Evangelicalism meets the continental divide: Moral and economic conservatism in the United States and Canada

Abstract

One of the most prominent ideas subsumed within the "American exceptionalism" literature is that evangelical Protestantism has always had an unusually powerful influence on U.S. political culture. In contrast, more recent literature points to the transnational influence of social movements, including those based in evangelicalism and other religious traditions. We examine the extent to which evangelical influences on moral conservatism and economic conservatism are similar in the United States and Canada. We employ regression models with slope dummy variables on data collected from comparable telephone surveys conducted in the two countries in 1996. Evangelical Protestantism's influence on moral conservatism and value priorities is transnational, but its influence on economic conservatism is distinctively American. Compositional analysis shows this pattern is largely shaped by the greater influence of self-identified fundamentalists among evangelical Protestants in the United States.