Is this why many evangelicals have this to hell with the world mindset--like regarding the environment and stuff?
in antebellum america, there’s a constellation of ‘ideologies’, for lack of a better term, that get glued together to form a common discursive space around american identity: radical whig republicanism + evangelical reformed protestantism + common sense realist epistemology. after the civil war, this gets fractured. the evangelical groups have to either double down on their emphasis of literalist renderings of the principle of sola scriptura, or deflate their epistemological projects. the former, very broadly, develop into the premillenialist tradition*, which is initially apolitical (and you can still see premillenialism have an apolitical effect in its adherents today). the encounter with, especially, darwinism in the 1910s and 1920s politically charges it. it lies largely dormant in popular discourse, but grows in regional importance, until the 1970s and 1980s when the gop, as a principal part of a broader coalition realignment strategy, start to court religious groups into movement conservatism. it’s that moral majority era that produces things like, e.g., prosperity gospel and Left Behind.
*the latter, for whoever’s interested, develop into the postmillenialist tradition, which plays a really important role in the progressive coalition and temperance movement from ~1890-1930