The largely forgotten history of
evangelical political activism forces us to re-evaluate the
rights and wrongs of the Religious Right movement. The
second in a three-part series.
The Religious Right movement is a misunderstood
phenomenon. It has been dead for more than a decade, and
few are now comfortable defending it. But most evangelical
leaders haven’t yet come to terms with the most important
reasons it failed. That’s why we haven’t discovered a
satisfactory model of political engagement for the
twenty-first century.
The rise of the Religious Right was not as dramatic a
change from previous history as it may seem.
Evangelicals did change the strategy of their political
activism in the late 1970s. The new strategy was markedly
better in some respects, and markedly worse in others.
Both the good and the bad changes received much attention
and convinced people that something fundamentally new was
happening.
Though evangelicals’ strategy changed, their underlying
assumptions about politics and the goals of their activism
remained largely the same. These continuities deserve more
notice than they have received, especially if we want to
think systematically about how our activism needs to
change for the new century.
Unfortunately, some commentators use the phrase
“religious right” simply to refer to voters who are both
politically conservative and religiously conservative. On
this definition, there will always be a “religious
right”—but that’s a very misleading picture. Most
evangelicals vote conservative, yet less than a fifth
continue to identify themselves as members of the
Religious Right.
It’s more illuminating to consider the Religious Right as
a distinct political strategy. Evangelicals’ operating
strategy incorporated at least four major changes in the
late 1970s, all of which culminated in 1979 through a
broad constellation of political efforts (such as Jerry
Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority):
1) Catholics. Well into the early
1970s, most evangelical leaders were almost as
anti-Catholic as they were anti-secularist. This was a
natural result of their political model based on restoring
the old Protestant-dominated social order. But by 1979,
evangelical leaders were suddenly making major long-term
investments in alliances with Catholics. They jettisoned
the confessional Protestantism of the old social order for
a broader “Judeo-Christian” moral traditionalism.
2) Fundamentalism. What had been an
acrimonious divide between “fundamentalists” and
“evangelicals” was also largely mitigated. Up through the
early 1970s, the prevailing political model had fueled
hostility between these subgroups. The evangelical desire
to act as moral guardians of America’s social order
clashed head-on with fundamentalist fears that playing
such a role would inevitably compromise doctrinal purity,
just as it had for the mainline. Tensions along these
lines remain to this day, but in 1979 they suddenly became
subordinated to what were viewed as more urgent moral and
cultural concerns. This opened the door to unprecedented
levels of evangelical cooperation and of political
mobilization among fundamentalists.
3) Race. White evangelical leaders as a
group, who had too often turned a blind eye to racial
injustice or even aided and abetted it, got on board for
civil rights. Until the 1970s, many white evangelical
leaders supported the racial status quo uncritically, in
large part because they saw themselves as guardians of the
existing social order. Changed racial attitudes would
still take a while to reach everybody, but by 1979 it was
clear enough which way the wind was blowing.
4) Partisanship. Perhaps most important
was the new willingness of evangelical
leaders—unconsciously, but consistently—to put all their
eggs in the basket of one political party. Earlier
evangelical leaders had always seen themselves as the
guardians of a bipartisan social order and cultural
consensus, so they had carefully maintained
relationships across party lines. [ emphasis
added ] Billy Graham, turned off by Goldwater’s opposition
to federal civil rights legislation, welcomed Johnson’s
aggressive efforts to cultivate his support. Pat Robertson
backed the evangelical Carter over Ford in 1976. But under
the Religious Right model, seemingly without realizing
what they were doing, evangelical leaders extensively
subordinated the life of the church to the political
interests of the GOP.
Evangelical leaders muted their criticism of immoral
personal behavior in order to avoid embarrassing
Republican leaders. Moral witness on divorce was
especially eclipsed. Graham had backed Eisenhower in part
because his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, was a divorcee;
evangelicals mobilized against Nelson Rockefeller for the
same reason. All that changed when evangelicals decided to
go all-in with the divorced Reagan. Right at the moment
when divorce was becoming normalized, evangelicals
unilaterally disarmed themselves against it.
They also tempered the more socially scandalous aspects
of their theology, such as the exclusivity of salvation in
Christ. The Religious Roundtable’s 1980 National Affairs
Briefing is mainly remembered for Reagan’s “I endorse you”
remark, but a remark by Southern Baptist Convention
President Bailey Smith is equally noteworthy. Smith
complained that political rallies typically feature public
prayers from both Christian and Jewish clergy, which
implies Christianity and Judaism are the same, when in
fact only those who trust Christ have God’s favor.
Robertson and Falwell rushed to offer complex, obfuscatory
“clarifications” of this embarrassing comment, lest the
media fallout damage Reagan.
And they donated time and resources to GOP politicians
who ignored them, in pathetic hopes of currying their
favor. Ralph Reed was especially aggressive in pushing
evangelicals to invest in helping the GOP, on the
preposterous theory that the GOP would feel a need to
repay them.[ ! ] A federal corruption
investigation would later expose Reed as a shameless
huckster on the make (“Hey, now that I’m done with the
electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate
accounts!” ran a now notorious
1998 email
to Jack Abramoff). But it says a lot about
evangelical leaders’ naiveté that Reed could play them
so brazenly. It says even more that some
people are still letting him do it.
To a large extent, this partisanship coincided with
increased levels of hostility from the other side of the
aisle. Yet even if many in the Democratic Party were
pushing evangelicals out, evangelical leaders didn’t have
to respond by becoming uncritical cheerleaders of
the Republicans. Moreover, the causation ran
the other way, as well; uncritical evangelical
cheerleading for the GOP generated hostility to
evangelicals among Democrats—certainly after 1980, if not
before.
What explains these four strategic shifts? The
conventional narrative is that court decisions on issues
such as abortion and school prayer were the catalyst. But
evangelicals were actually slow to adopt these causes,
largely due to their anti-Catholicism.
Some Religious Right leaders point to a 1978 IRS proposal
to strip some evangelical schools of their tax-exempt
status. But that seems like a slender thread on which to
hang such a huge and sustained social shift. The proposal,
which was never implemented, was not a central feature in
evangelical political discourse. Nor was this the first
time evangelicals had ever been the target of federal
harassment.
A parsimonious explanation that fits the facts is that
the astonishing steamroller of libertinism in the 1970s
produced something like a panic. Evangelicals saw America
rushing ever more rapidly toward cultural catastrophe. The
tipping point had to be near. “God is angry with us as a
nation,” Falwell declared. “I have a divine mandate to go
right into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that
will save America.”
The moral panic theory explains at
least three of the four strategic shifts. Evangelicals
dropped their opposition to Catholics because, in their
panic, they were desperate for allies. Fundamentalists
overcame their fear of activism because they were more
afraid of societal collapse. Evangelicals went all-in on
the GOP in hopes of maximizing their political leverage.
(The change in racial attitudes is a more complex story to
which we can’t do justice here.)
This theory differs from the prevailing explanations
mainly by denying that evangelical mobilization was
primarily a defensive response to anti-evangelical
government action. There certainly have been plenty of
instances of legal, policy, and regulatory discrimination
against evangelicals—and not only recently. In the 1940s,
for example, FCC regulations blatantly discriminated
against evangelical religious broadcasters in favor of the
mainline until evangelical political activists
successfully challenged this injustice. But in general,
evangelicals have been much too quick to cry out, “They
attacked us! We’re only defending ourselves!” The high
points and low points of evangelical mobilization in the
twentieth century just don’t seem very strongly connected,
either in timing or in content, to government incursions.
But they are clearly connected to heightened anxiety about
national moral decay.
Why does all this matter? Because it shows that what was
really shifting in evangelical politics was
strategy—evangelicals were prompted to desperate measures
by what they saw as desperate times, but their basic
assumptions and goals did not really change.
In some ways, the Religious Right exacerbated the
inadequacies of the inherited model by removing
inefficiencies and mobilizing more effectively. It was a
triumphalist movement, openly bragging that with its new
alliances, new voter enrollments, and new partisan
strategic positioning, it would roll to victory, put the
enemies of morality under its heels, and save America. “We
have . . . enough votes to run the country,” Robertson
announced in 1979. “We are going to take over.” As with
Ockenga in 1947, Robertson’s triumphalism was not only
typical for the time, it was formative.
The Religious Right accomplished early successes. Before
the 1980 election, libertinism was winning an accelerating
series of political victories, shifting American law and
policy onto a materialistic, utilitarian basis. After
1980, a new anti-libertine coalition forged by the
Religious Right brought this victory procession to a halt.
That is a substantial achievement.
But the Religious Right was already declining in power by
the mid-1980s, and it withered throughout the 1990s. After
the early years, it accomplished few of its legislative
priorities. Politicians deftly extracted money,
votes, and volunteer time from evangelicals while
delivering little of substance. [ and they did
just about nothing about it, taking solace in a cult of
personality centered on Reagan -BR comment ] The best it
could do was maintain a political stalemate with
libertinism.
Here is where I have to disagree with Daniel Williams’
groundbreaking new book, God’s
Own Party. Williams has collected extensive
evidence documenting evangelical activism throughout the
last century, upon which I’ve drawn in both parts of this
article (along with other sources). But Williams thinks
the Religious Right was highly successful; his main thesis
is that evangelicals are now essentially in control of the
GOP. I agree with David
Courtwright that it’s the politicians who have been
in the driver’s seat.
Then in 2000, George W. Bush broke with the Religious
Right strategy decisively. He aligned with conservatives
on social issues and wasn’t shy about identifying himself
personally as a man of faith, but he eschewed triumphalist
rhetoric and kept Religious Right leaders at arm’s length.
He emphasized that he was equally sympathetic not only to
“people of all faiths,” but also to “people of no faith”
and their concerns. His heavy investment in positive
portrayals of Islam after 9/11 was of a piece with this.
Bush’s desire to treat Christianity, Islam, and atheism
as functionally equivalent for civic purposes stands in
stark contrast to the “Judeo-Christian” moral
traditionalism of the Religious Right. Bush
consistently appealed to what he said were universal
values shared by all humanity; whatever you think of that,
it isn’t what Pat Robertson believes.
Bush’s campaign and presidency were not just the death
knell of the Religious Right strategy; they were the
beginning of the end of the whole twentieth-century
evangelical model of political engagement. Bush manifestly
did not view either evangelicals as such or some grand
coalition of conservative religious traditions as having a
special guardianship over America’s social order. Nor did
he have any interest in trying to restore such a
guardianship.
A decade after its death, it now seems to be pretty
widely admitted that the Religious Right strategy was a
bad deal. It did extensive damage within our own household
and exposed us to a great deal of political manipulation.
Worst of all, it has reinforced a widespread cultural
perception that the gospel of Christ is a right-wing
political program, driving
people away from the church.
If the twentieth-century model is no longer satisfactory,
how do we begin building a new one? I’ll look at that in a
follow-up article tomorrow.
