We have now reached a point in American history in which a slim but decisive majority of Americans has opted for the material safety net and progressive social engineering of big government rather than the real but uncertain opportunities of economic and religious freedom.  The pressing question for us now is what sort of Christianity can navigate this new situation.

As of the early hours of Wednesday, November 7, 2012 the results of Election 2012 are now evident. In a nutshell, the American nation is profoundly divided.  As I write this, less than a percentage point separates President Obama and Governor Romney in the popular vote, although the electoral-college vote gives a clear majority to the incumbent President.

One obvious lesson of this election has to do with the increasing diversity of the American electorate.  The Romney campaign understandably banked on widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, while the Obama campaign assiduously cobbled together a diverse constituency of African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, and liberal whites.  The latter strategy constituted a winning hand in a close race.  The divisive politics of identity is alive and well, and the irony of the fact that Obama promised to bring us together in 2008 is not lost on us.

Not surprisingly, we also see the decisive re-emergence of social issues and, dare I say it, the culture war.  Interestingly, these issues were not raised primarily by Republicans.  It was the incumbent president and his party who insistently ran on a platform of abortion rights with no restrictions and no limits.  In retrospect, this was a cynical but effective political calculation.  According to Katie Couric of ABC News, single women now constitute around 25% of the electorate, and Obama garnered a large percentage of their votes.  By contrast, two Republican Senate candidates paid dearly for public statements that ran against the grain on abortion rights.  All this brings new poignancy to the late Irving Kristol’s observation that the culture war “is over” and “we lost.”

The results of this watershed election are likely to be extraordinarily significant, both for the nation and for American Christianity.  The impact on the nation is fairly easy to discern.  In essence, this election was an unwitting vote for stasis, for more of the same.  Despite small gains for the Democrats in the Senate (due largely to inept campaigns by Republicans in several states) the legislative terrain is essentially unchanged, and a newly reelected President who has consistently governed from the far left is unlikely to change his modus operendi.  In other words, progress on deficit reduction and entitlement reform is highly unlikely, and American economic decline will continue.  The college students who voted for Obama had better be planning to live with their parents for the foreseeable future, because the economic winds are not going to blow in their favor.  Expect a wave of layoffs as business owners realize that the crippling economic weight of Obamacare is not going to be lifted.

More interesting are the implications for American Christianity.  Recent survey results indicate the decline of traditional Christianity, the dissolving of religious affinities, and significant increases in secular “none of the aboves,” and these trajectories should continue in the second Obama term.  For decades now scholars have puzzled over America’s failure to follow Western Europe in the path of secularism, but that is now changing as government expands exponentially.

Reasons for this were anticipated long ago by that most prescient of nineteenth-century observers–Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America.  Among the great threats to American democracy identified by Tocqueville was the technocratic state intent on meeting the material needs of the electorate.  Such big-government impulses operate on the basis of materialism—the soul destroying assumption that human beings and their needs are simply material.  In such a context God is effectively replaced in the minds of many by the state.  Furthermore, Tocqueville also noted that this big-government state is intolerant of other sources of authority, and so it seeks to undermine associational groups, such as the church, which might compete with it for the allegiance of citizens.  Thus we can only expect more threats along the lines of Obamacare to the religious liberty of people of faith.

We have now reached a point in American history in which a slim but decisive majority of Americans has opted for the material safety net and progressive social engineering of big government rather than the real but uncertain opportunities of economic and religious freedom.  The pressing question for us now is what sort of Christianity can navigate this new situation.

William B. Evans is the Younts Prof. of Bible and Religion at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, where he teaches courses in theology, American religion, and religion and culture.  He holds degrees from Taylor University, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and Vanderbilt University.