3

RELIGION AND POLITICS

The Rise of the New Christian Right

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

By the 1970s, the New Deal political order was under severe strain. A series of social conflicts – over the war in Vietnam, the remedies designed to bring African-Americans into the mainstream of civic life, the changes in personal (particularly sexual) propriety – were felt by many to be individual manifestations of a broader, profound cultural divide brought on by the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. That divide, and the perception that the federal government under the leadership of the national Democratic Party sat on the wrong side of it, reinforced the longstanding wariness of white southerners toward the party on racial matters and led them to defect to the GOP. The social conflicts also gave rise to resentments outside the South among white ethnic groups and Catholics toward the political party that had historically brought them into the middle class but that now looked as if it had changed the rules of the game. With the Great Society-identified programs of affirmative action, public housing, school busing, and the like, many white northern ethnics came to believe the government had intruded into their communities, unfairly favored African-Americans at their expense, and renounced the traditional (if in part mythic) moral ethos of individual merit, self-reliance, and personal responsibility. At the same time the 1970s marked the apparent exhaustion of the New Deal economic order. Customary Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies seemed unable to deal with or even satisfactorily explain the unusual combination of high inflation and low economic growth that bedeviled the decade. The OPEC-delivered oil shocks, a primary source of the inflationary pressures, also underscored the reality that an increasingly interconnected international economy was no longer under the dominion of the United States.

With several of the constituent groups of its electoral bloc pitted against each other and its prowess at managing the economy in doubt, the New Deal coalition began to unravel. Into this breach came a resurgent anti-establishment conservatism, energized by what many considered an unlikely source: fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. It was unlikely because fundamentalist and, to a somewhat lesser extent, evangelical Protestants adhered to a religious doctrine that counseled separation from the secular world to concentrate on private morality and personal salvation. Because of this, their participation in the world of politics was assumed to be permanently low. At the broader sociological level, religion itself had been expected to diminish in importance. The widely accepted secularization thesis held that as society became more modern and prosperous, and as scientific knowledge advanced, an inexorable process of secularization would reduce the scale and scope of religion’s public influence. Yet by the late 1970s, not only did a potent set of conservative Christian organizations enter and transform the political public sphere, they mobilized their congregants and co-religionists to vote en masse for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Since that time, the Christian right has become the base (or, at least, an extremely important component) of the Republican Party. How did this happen?

This chapter traces the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s and its part in anti-establishment conservatism’s takeover of the Republican Party. Mapping this rise requires a close look at the changing, internally contested nature of American Protestantism and its relationship with politics over time, for conservative white Protestants have always constituted the Christian right, old and new. Reconstructing a condensed history of evangelical Protestantism in America helps us understand the split between church modernists and traditionalists, the workings beneath the supposed withdrawal of the latter from the world, and the conditions that sparked their “reemergence” to the realm of politics in the 1970s. Although I will demonstrate flaws in the standard story of conservative Christians’ separation and insularity, it is clear that they did become more active in political life in the late 1970s. Their activism energized the right and helped mortally wound the New Deal political order, thereby ushering in the contemporary conservative era.

The secularization thesis

Most social theorists from the mid-nineteenth century onward viewed modernity as an inevitable process whereby religion would decline in public life, replaced by secular reason. The secularization thesis held that in the wake of economic progress and the modernist differentiation of spheres of life into the public and the private, the social importance of religion would decline and retreat to the private sphere.1 The differentiation of spheres is not just that of public and private. Modernity is also characterized by separate spheres of social activity – such as law, medicine, science, the economy – operating and being judged according to standards distinctive to each sphere rather than governed and legitimated by an overall religious stamp of order, or, in the words of the sociologist of religion Peter Berger, a “sacred canopy” of meaning.2 The basic modernist framework was encapsulated by the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” People are free to exercise their religion but there is to be no religious test for public office and no state religion.

For some scholars, these twin tolerations – the political freedom of elected governments from control by religious authorities and the religious choices of individuals and groups free from control by the government – marked an achievement rooted in the nature of American Protestantism itself. In Europe, democracy and religion historically were enemies. In America, founded by religiously devout Christian dissenters with republican commitments, they were allies of a particular kind. As the political scientist Hugh Heclo, following Tocqueville, puts it, “In America, organized Christianity assured its enduring influence by disassociating itself from the vicissitudes of political authority and power. The ‘political’ separation of church and state does not safeguard liberty by protecting secular people; rather, it safeguards liberty by protecting religion from being corrupted into something less than itself.”3 The separation of church and state meant that politics should be conducted on the basis of public reason (in principle accessible to all citizens) and not on the basis of religiously revealed truths or religiously sectarian teachings. This, too, had certain roots in the distinctive nature of American Protestantism. For most of the nineteenth century, the American Protestant worldview married a deep evangelical religiosity to republican political ideology and moral reasoning based on Scottish common-sense philosophy (rather than the acute rationalism of the continental Enlightenment). Its epistemology held that there is a world outside us, which we can know through the use of induction from facts obvious to the senses. Resting on the implicit assumption that human nature is good and educable, individuals were understood as free agents, naturally capable of understanding Scripture without priestly expertise and of exercising independent moral judgment. The capacity of individuals to read and understand the Bible meant in turn that ordinary persons in principle were capable of self-government. Science, the precise observation of the world, was the complement to the literal reading of the Bible, and science confirmed Scripture. There could be no contradiction between the deist God of the Newtonian universe and the God of the Bible, between natural and revealed religion.4 Science was a means of realizing God’s divine plan; Scripture’s function was to provide inerrant facts concerning all matters, including science and history. Work in the world improved the world.

Hence the dominance of what is known as “postmillennialism,” the theological doctrine that understood spiritual and cultural progress as paving the way for the thousand years of God’s kingdom, after which Christ would come to earth a second time. Nineteenth-century American Protestants believed that the Holy Spirit working through Christians would so Christianize culture that Jesus could return to provide the capstone to a thousand-year reign of perfect peace. Human history reflects the ongoing struggle between the cosmic forces of God and Satan, each represented by earthly powers, but with the victory of righteousness essentially assured. Human effort can speed the advent of a perfect new world.5 The Social Gospel, that late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century religious movement on the importance of good works and the mobilization of citizens to help the poor and do good politically, embodied the central motifs of the postmillennial Protestant worldview.6 In this optimistic, progressive view of history, the fit between the Christian God and republican liberty was natural, even divinely ordained. America was seen as a special nation, a chosen nation even, whose self-development and encounters in the world were generally regarded as the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. The evangelical tradition is a primary source of the idea of American exceptionalism.

The characteristic American focus on morality in this world rather than salvation in the next can be understood at least in part as the diffusion of Protestant liberalism into American culture7 – and the reverse, as well: democratic culture diffused into Protestantism. The egalitarian drive of American culture identified by Tocqueville and the related presumptions of free will and efficacy of individual effort impacted nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism’s development. In contrast to the orthodox Calvinist doctrine of humanity’s total dependence on God for salvation, nineteenth-century evangelical revivalism preached a quintessentially American version of the Arminian doctrine, influential among many European Protestant denominations, that individuals had free agency in choosing to be saved. In a complex dynamic described as “democratic evangelicalism,” Protestant leaders (in part to keep up with un-churched preachers, especially in newly settled areas as white people moved west) came to embrace a religion of the heart rather than the mind, and declared morality as the essence of religion.8

The sociologist of religion Robert Bellah has argued that deep in the American tradition is the sense of obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth. This feeling of duty was present in the revolutionary founding and was associated with the creation of early Protestant denominations, but over time has become generalized no matter whose religion is referenced.9 The deep impact of Protestantism on American values influenced politics through the diffusion of such values over the course of American history. If there was to be a continuing influence of religion in the dual commitment to religious liberty and popular self-government, it was to proceed via culture, not via politics in any direct fashion. Another sociologist, José Casanova, explains this as a double process of diffusion and secularization, involving three historical “disestablishments.” The first disestablishment was the founding constitutional separation of the state from ecclesiastical institutions and the dissociation of the political community of citizens from any religious community. The second was the secularization of the life of the mind, entailing the post-Civil War secularization of higher education and diminution of Protestant hegemony over the public sphere of American civil society. Occurring in the mid-1960s and into the 1970s, the third disestablishment was the secularization of the “life-world” (the culturally grounded background environment in and through which people experience the world), involving the growth of centralized government to extend legal protection to an emerging pluralistic system of norms with regard to freedom of inquiry, thought, speech, and conduct in the public sphere.10 This is, in brief, the secularization story in America, describing a process that unfolded over many generations. On closer look, it is more accurately the story of just the historically dominant, modernist stream of American Protestantism. This chapter chronicles the reaction against the development of a secularized society by the other prominent stream of American Protestantism: the traditionalists. It is this reaction that underlies the rise of the new Christian right.

Protestantism: Modernist and fundamentalist

Protestantism, by nature schismatic on account of its individualistic and democratic character and without an institutional hierarchy like Catholicism, fractured historically not just along denominational lines (e.g., Congregationalists, Lutherans, Baptists, etc.), but also within denominations over slavery and the basic view of God’s word. The Civil War and Darwinism ruptured nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism. Churches of the same denomination on different sides of the Mason–Dixon line found that they did not share the same values on the crucial issue of slavery, and, in part because of the slavery question, no longer interpreted the Bible in the same way. Pressed by abolitionist revivalist zeal, northern congregations eventually denounced slavery, finding biblical warrant in opposing the evil of the peculiar institution. Their southern counterparts likewise recited biblical passages attesting to Negro inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude, and Saint Paul’s counsels of obedience to masters, thus legitimating a slavery-based moral order. The Methodist and Baptist churches split over slavery in the 1840s, establishing distinct northern and southern branches. The Presbyterians split in 1861.11

Darwinism posed another fault-line. Recall that evangelical Protestantism revered science and believed there was no contradiction between science and Scripture. Faced with scientific evidence that the earth had a very long geologic history and that numerous biological species had appeared and disappeared during the eons, many Protestants came to believe that the Genesis story of creation could not be sustained. This supposition in turn opened a process of exposing Scripture to hermeneutic criticism and interpretation (the so-called Higher Criticism). These modernist presumptions caused some to doubt the inerrancy of the Bible and to accept natural science’s challenge to biblical miracles. Protestant modernists began to downplay the supernatural and to view theology as no longer a fixed, God-given body of eternally valid truths. They still identified the progress of the kingdom of God with the progress of civilization, but they increasingly viewed the essence of religion as morality, not blind faith, and eventually embraced ecumenism and the pluralism of values.12 These beliefs embodied the postmillennial approach to the world, such that the Holy Spirit was understood to work through Christians to improve the world in the here-and-now, thus allowing Jesus to return and institute a perfect peace.13

Modernist precepts had the effect of further dividing the Protestant denominations. Traditionalists denounced modernist (or “liberal”) Protestantism’s embrace of the Higher Criticism of Scripture. The Bible, they declared, was God’s very word, inerrant and perfect. Darwinian theory, in their view, undermined the central biblical tenet of humanity’s special creation. For traditionalists, the modernist teachings were part and parcel of the decline of civilization. Modernism and the decadence it brought represented the failure of postmillennial promises concerning the growth of God’s kingdom in this age.14 Contrary to the optimism of Enlightenment-influenced postmillennialism, some late nineteenth-century revivalists believed the world was getting worse and worse. Some of this pessimism could be tied to the splits over slavery, for alongside the southern Protestant churches’ biblical justification of slavery came the loss of the impulse to transform the world and hence a weakening tie to the postmillennial worldview. The most influential anti-modern revivalist doctrine was dispensationalism, associated with the eschatological teachings of John Nelson Darby, the Anglo-Irish evangelist. Dispensationalism was a version of premillennialism that provided a general theory of history. In contrast to postmillennialist Protestantism’s progressive story, Darby and his followers saw history in terms of eras or “dispensations” of regression owing to the fact that human beings are by nature sinful. Historical change takes place not via human actions but through divine intervention, the details of which are revealed in Scripture. History doesn’t just reflect the Bible; the Bible is history. In this view, the present age, marked by apostasy in the churches and the moral collapse of Christian civilization, is prior to Christ’s kingdom; the millennium lies wholly in the future, after Christ returns to a very troubled world. Linking verses from the books of Revelation, Daniel, and Ezekiel, Darby described Christ’s second coming as at the end of an apocalyptic period of “tribulation,” a period of war, famine, and social chaos during the seven-year rule of the Antichrist. The final battle of Armageddon focuses on the Jews and takes place in the biblical land of Israel. As the “end-times” unfold, true Christian believers and innocents are pulled from earth to heaven in the “Rapture.” Following Armageddon, Christ returns to establish a kingdom in Jerusalem, where he will reign for a thousand years.15 Most, but by no means all, Protestant traditionalists (that is, those who would become known as fundamentalists) espoused some version of premillennialism.

What mattered to traditionalist Protestants in the decades just before and after the turn of the twentieth century was personal salvation through the acceptance of Christ. The legacy of revivalism inhered in their celebration of experiential truth over reasoned knowledge, of being “born again.” Because the world is under Satan’s rule, they scorned efforts to make the world better through social activism and politics. This is what lay behind the fierce antagonism of traditionalists toward the Social Gospel of the modernists. Traditionalists viewed the Social Gospel’s emphasis on good works and serving the poor as undercutting the elemental concern for repentance from sin and the dependence on God’s grace. Indeed, they considered the doctrine of human intervention in the world as just short of blasphemy; only God could so intervene. Society is not responsible for human failings. Rather, each person must find personal salvation by mastering his/her own inner soul and coming to know Jesus personally. In this way one acknowledges one’s sinfulness and the need for God’s grace. Hence the overwhelming emphasis was on the personal experience of God, individual prayer, reading God’s true word, and saving souls by proselytizing. Political causes were to be avoided. Indeed, in the run-up to U.S. involvement in World War I, the traditionalists opposed America’s military intervention, their pacifism based on the conviction that all efforts to solve the world’s problems through politics were hopeless. They held that no government could receive God’s blessing until the second coming of Christ. The blame for World War I was laid at the door of modernism, and especially (Social) Darwinism’s doctrine of the survival of the fittest. Indeed, it was the modernists who were the war mongers and imperialists during the Great War, certain of their own rightness and superiority. This is why traditionalist Protestants fought so hard against the teaching of evolution in school – not simply because the theory violated the biblical account of creation, but also because of the Social Darwinism that stalked modernism.16

After a bitter struggle with their liberal co-religionists in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the traditionalists lost in various efforts to halt the spread of modernism inside the more democratically organized denominations (Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Presbyterians) and restore their churches to tradition and Scripture. The traditionalists abandoned those congregations to form their own independent churches, religious schools, Bible colleges, and missions. Allying with the Protestant liberals (and against Catholics) on alcohol and Prohibition, the traditionalists broke with them on the inerrancy of Scripture and the theory of evolution. As the standard interpretation goes, the traditionalists were defeated intellectually and publicly ridiculed in 1925 at the Scopes trial (concerning whether laws outlawing the teaching of evolution in public schools were constitutional), after which, now labeled “fundamentalists,” they withdrew from the public arena to concentrate on institution building and personal salvation.17 Withdrawal was not simply a function of having lost the public relations battle at the Scopes trial; it had a powerful theological basis. Modernism and the theory of evolution, according to fundamentalists, had caused the crisis of the twentieth century by undermining the biblical foundations of American civilization. After Scopes, the solution for true Bible-believers was to separate from the evil secular world.

Terminology

At this juncture, it may be wise to take stock and register a note on terminology. Evangelicalism is a branch of Bible-believing Protestantism deriving from the nineteenth-century revivalist movement. The Second Great Awakening, the early nineteenth-century Arminian revivalist movement professing that every person could be saved, enrolled millions of new members and led to the establishment of new denominations. The individual emotional experience of the spiritual and of personal conversion underlay the evangelical movement. Historically, nearly all nineteenth-century Protestants were evangelicals. By the turn of the twentieth century, this evangelical root split into two: the modernist “mainline” form (which can no longer be considered evangelical) and the “fundamentalist” form (which sought to maintain the old evangelical beliefs and theology). Fundamentalism can be understood as an extreme form of evangelicalism; it is tradition made self-aware and consequently defensive.18 It wasn’t until 1920 that the term “fundamentalist” was coined for those trying to preserve what they took to be the fundamental truths of Christianity, including the inerrancy of Scripture and authenticity of biblical miracles.

In the 1940s, there emerged a third general stream of Protestantism, referred to as the “New Evangelicalism.” This new stream developed from more open revivalist fundamentalists: that is, those who rejected the closed and rigid fundamentalist style in favor of a more inclusive fellowship, but who shared fundamentalism’s affinity to biblical inerrancy and the personal experience-based spirituality of the revivalist tradition. The New Evangelicals grew with the Youth for Christ movement of the mid-1940s, the establishment of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE, the institutional umbrella for the New Evangelicalism movement), and Billy Graham’s revivalist crusade. Powered by Graham’s public persona, New Evangelicalism allied with fundamentalists against the modernists but engaged the world more generously than the fundamentalists in order to lead people to Christ. What differentiates the evangelical from the mainline Protestant is the personal and devotional relationship with God, the experience of being “born again.” New Evangelicals founded Fuller seminary as their training school and started the journal Christianity Today as their primary communication medium.19 Since at least the 1940s, evangelical and Pentecostal denominations have grown robustly while mainline Protestant denominations have declined in membership. Approximately 51 percent of Americans are Protestants, with the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention the biggest denomination. Just under 24 percent of Americans are Catholics.20

To further confuse the labels and terms, fundamentalists variously refer to themselves as fundamentalists, evangelicals, and, simply, Christians. Another catchall term for evangelicals is “born-again Christians.” Although it is relatively easy to distinguish between liberal (or modernist or mainline – the three terms are used pretty much interchangeably) Protestants and their conservative cousins, the line between fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism can be hazy. To make matters more complex, Pentecostals and charismatics have some key differences with fundamentalists and evangelicals (particularly the speaking in tongues, the laying on of hands in faith-healing, and in many instances a health and wealth theology), but share the elemental doctrine of salvation and belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. In sum, where one can identify tendencies and make broad generalizations, it should be understood that the reality of categories, labels, and belief systems is fluid and complex. For the purposes of this book, it is important to understand that whereas some doctrinal and institutional differences remain between fundamentalists and evangelicals, they joined political forces in the late 1970s to constitute the new Christian right. For that reason, I use the term “conservative evangelicals” as a general category.

Fundamentalism’s purported withdrawal from the world

The fundamentalist proscription against engaging with the secular world gained force after the traditionalists failed in their struggle to win control over the mainline denominations and suffered defeat at the Scopes trial. Historian of religion George Marsden argues that it is difficult to overestimate the impact of the Scopes trial in transforming fundamentalism. The strength of the movement in centers of national life waned. Although fundamentalism had begun as an urban and northern assemblage, after Scopes it came to embody the hostility of rural America toward modern culture and intellect, coalescing largely in local congregations in the South.21 Fundamentalists entrenched themselves as a “cognitive minority” that, among other things, invoked the Depression as evidence of God’s vindictive punishment on an apostate America.22

In the conventional scholarly interpretation, the intervening years did not significantly alter this dynamic of fundamentalism’s separation and insularity. Even the dangers of the international situation and especially of communism did not impel conservative evangelicals toward political activism; rather they reinforced the central goal of salvation. As Heclo summarizes:

[F]or evangelicals, the threats of atheistic communism abroad and godlessness at home served mainly as prompts to call for personal conversion and spiritual revival in the nation, not for direct engagement in politics and public policy. In the growing evangelical churches, mainline Protestantism’s gospel of social reform was generally viewed as an un-Christian distraction from the ultimate value of personal salvation in the midst of a degenerating world. An emphasis on social and political activism sidetracked the Gospel.23

But this conventional wisdom regarding fundamentalism’s withdrawal from the public arena is overstated, if not plainly inaccurate. Early on, despite their initial pacifism, fundamentalists became hyper-patriots by the end of World War I, adding bolshevism and socialism to the list of modernist forces that, in their view, had caused the decline of civilization. One of the fronts in fundamentalism’s crusade was the battle for America – in Marsden’s phrase, “the battle to save the nation as an evangelical civilization.” While in theory this agenda conflicted with fundamentalism’s pessimism about Christian civilization, in practice the two managed to coexist.24 Fundamentalist leaders such as J. Frank Norris became heavily involved in the social movement to ban alcohol and in so doing were part of the broader Protestant effort to attack Catholic political power in big cities. As Norris declared in 1922, “[I]n the name of the American Flag and of the Holy Bible I defy the Roman Catholic machine of New York.”25 The Scopes trial itself highlighted Protestant traditionalists’ public endeavors to keep the teaching of evolution out of schools. That engagement with the secular world really did not change all that much after Scopes. During the chaotic decade of the 1930s, as Leo Ribuffo and other historians have shown, various fundamentalist leaders such as Gerald B. Winrod and William Dudley Pelley blended conservative Christianity with right-wing, quasi-fascist political activities in opposition to the New Deal. Winrod formed the Defenders of the Christian Faith in 1925, a fundamentalist Christian organization that opposed teaching evolution in public schools and supported Prohibition and racial segregation. The Defenders saw Franklin Roosevelt as a devil linked with the Jewish–Communist conspiracy and believed that Adolf Hitler would save Europe from communism. Winrod’s newspaper, The Defender, achieved a 100,000 monthly circulation by 1937. William Dudley Pelley was not a minister, but he founded the Christian Party and ran for president in 1936 to oppose FDR and the New Deal. A devotee of Hitler, Pelley earlier founded the Silver Legion, a fascist organization whose followers, known as the Silver Shirts and Christian Patriots, wore Nazi-like silver uniforms.26

Other fundamentalist Protestant leaders and congregations also engaged politically. The Church League of America, also known as the National Laymen’s Council, formed in 1937 in opposition to the New Deal, for example, focused less on the Gospel than on the internal subversion of American institutions by liberalism, which the League considered merely a soft form of communism.27 The Baptist preacher John R. Rice founded The Sword of the Lord magazine in 1934 and served as the editor of that publication of zealous religious nationalism until 1980. The Sword applied biblical literalism to justify and glorify capitalism, oppose the New Deal and communism, and justify modern-day and potential wars as the commands of God. Like Winrod, Rice saw Franklin Roosevelt as the Antichrist. Endorsing Senator Robert Taft in 1952, he wrote that “every Christian American” should work to free the country from “the wicked, corrupt Democratic administration.”28 Immersed in the politics of the nation in spite of the doctrine of separation from it, the Sword achieved a circulation of over 300,000 by the mid-1970s, and this underestimates Rice’s probable influence given that the magazine reprinted his sermons and books in the tens of millions of copies.29

The point here is not to overstate the historic importance of these right-wing Christian leaders and groups; rather it is to show that the assumption of fundamentalism’s separation and insularity from the public world is much exaggerated. This more accurate view is important because it reveals the continuities between the “old” Christian right and the “new” Christian right that emerged in the 1970s and provides clues to the emergence of the 1970s incarnation. Fundamentalists did create their own inward-looking institutions after Scopes in the form of schools and Bible institutes, community groups, social service agencies, bookstores, radio and television programs, and the like. Indeed, as the political scientist Rogers Smith reminds us, fundamentalist churches often sought and received access to public facilities and governmental assistance in creating their “insular” facilities.30 They had to engage the secular world to escape from it. It was from those facilities, especially their media resources, that conservative pastoral leaders directly engaged the public world through a programmatic nationalistic anti-communism.

Richard Hofstadter called attention to the outsized role of fundamentalist leaders in right-wing anti-communist organizations of the 1950s and 1960s.31 Although individual salvation was still primary for these pastors, gone was any isolationism of the pre-World War I variety. Probably the most significant of these religious leaders was Carl McIntire. Defrocked in 1936 along with his mentor, the theologian J. Gresham Machen, for challenging the Presbyterian foreign missions, McIntire founded a breakaway fundamentalist Presbyterian congregation. He subsequently created umbrella organizations, the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) in 1941 and the International Council of Christian Churches in 1948. Both organizations were formed to challenge the growing ecumenism of the mainline Federal Council of Churches and World Council of Churches. McIntire typically combined anti-communism and anti-Catholicism (the old “rum and Romanism” calumny) with attacks on liberal Protestantism. He preached that Satan’s coming was imminent in the form of the worldwide communist movement, and, like many fundamentalists, he considered the mainline churches and their councils to be riddled with un-American, pro-communist traitors. McIntire and his followers cooperated with HUAC and Joseph McCarthy’s staff, even fingering suspected communists within the clergy. Indeed, McIntire went so far as to denounce the National Association of Evangelicals because the association had refused to require its members to separate themselves from the modernist Federal Council of Churches.32

McIntire is important to understand because he shows how the inward-looking politics of individual salvation linked to public mid-century anti-communist politics writ large. Notwithstanding the doctrine of total separation from those who did not accept the Bible entirely as the word of God, McIntire and his flock were very much part of the secular world of politics. Beginning in 1955, McIntire commented directly on any number of political issues in his Christian Beacon monthly newspaper and on Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, his radio program, which by the mid-1960s reportedly reached an audience of 20 million on 600 stations. From his Pennsylvania radio station, McIntire aired innumerable attacks on civil rights, the United Nations, and UNICEF, and later called for U.S. victory in Vietnam. McIntire preached that it was imperative for a born-again believer to recognize his duty under God to be involved in politics.33 True to his word, he served on the Young Americans for Freedom’s first board of directors and joined forces with the secular right wing in the effort to elect Barry Goldwater president of the United States in 1964.34 Associated with McIntire, but organizationally independent (grassroots anti-communism in the 1950s tended to consist of many small organizations rather than a united national movement), were several other right-wing Protestant clerical and lay activists with considerable followings: Rev. Edgar C. Bundy, who became director of the Church League of America in 1956; Billy James Hargis, an ordained minister (later disaccredited) in the Disciples of Christ Church, who latched onto Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign and launched the Christian Crusade through radio; and Dr. Frederick Schwarz, an Australian émigré who set up the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade and conducted large public rallies and training seminars, with particular success in southern California. “The best way to enlist anti-Communist fighters,” Schwarz claimed, “is to enlist them in the army of Jesus.”35 These groups had direct and indirect connections to the broader conservative anti-communist movement, including Senator McCarthy and military brass (particularly General Edwin Walker, who was accused of distributing right-wing literature to the soldiers of his division, and was arrested for sedition for opposing the use of federal troops to protect pro-civil rights marchers), and some loose connection to the racist right, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society.36 They held particular animus for the National and World Council of Churches and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. McIntire’s ACCC declared the Revised Standard Version communistic, the work of Satan. For almost all of these right-wing preachers, broadcasting was a key resource. McIntire’s radio assets were noted above. By the middle 1960s, Billy James Hargis’s daily and weekly broadcasts were carried on 500 radio and 250 television stations. His Christian Crusade was a multi-million dollar enterprise, publishing pamphlets, books, and a monthly newspaper. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade reported a gross income of $1.2 million in its peak year of 1961.37

Anti-communism was the ideological hub around which conservative Christians mobilized in the public arena. This included the New Evangelicals. The National Association of Evangelicals, the umbrella organization for the New Evangelicalism, founded in 1943 under the leadership of Carl Henry and Harold Okenga to unite traditionalist Protestants against the forces of Protestant liberalism, also organized anti-communist programs for member churches in the early 1960s. Much larger and more moderate than McIntire’s ACCC, the still very conservative NAE member denominations had some 10 million church members and reflected the growth of mid-century urban revivalism associated with Billy Graham’s crusade. Graham himself frequently preached that communism was “Satan’s religion,” and in the early 1950s he advocated a military as well as spiritual showdown with communism.38 Notwithstanding the theological doctrine of personal salvation, fundamentalist and New Evangelical leaders supported a militant Cold War foreign policy. They denounced the internationalism of liberal Protestantism, its idealism, and its moralistic paeans to peace and reconciliation in favor of a muscular, militaristic anti-communism. New Evangelicalism’s house organ, Christianity Today, directed for decades by NAE co-founder Carl Henry and backed financially by Sun Oil Company chairman J. Howard Pew, assailed communism throughout the 1950s and 1960s. (Pew was also a funder of William F. Buckley’s National Review and Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy.) Until the 1970s, when it moderated its tone, Christianity Today, in its editorials, typically linked the Christian faith with democracy, capitalism, and American culture and values, and attacked communism as a dedicated servant of the Antichrist. True to his New Evangelical roots, Henry believed Christians should be engaged with the world. It was essential to fuse social concern and personal religion, to restore supernatural religious truth in public life. In foreign policy the solution was to assume human sinful nature, knowing that peace could never come until the human spirit was regenerated through Christ. Christianity Today adamantly opposed the United Nations and foreign aid; it supported Chiang Kai-shek in China against the communists.39

Fundamentalist leaders’ strident opposition to desegregation was another arena wherein the assumption of fundamentalist withdrawal from the world cannot withstand scrutiny. Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis railed against desegregation (a “communist conspiracy”), as did the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who would become the leader of the most important Christian right organization in the 1980s, the Moral Majority. Indeed, the oft-quoted 1965 speech in which Falwell invoked biblical separation from the world was a speech in which he defended segregation, attacked the civil rights movement, and associated its leaders with communism. Just because Falwell declared, “Our ministry is not reformation but transformation … [t]he gospel does not clean up the outside but regenerates the inside,” it seems arbitrary to find in this an example of pietistic withdrawal rather than a pointed instance of engaging the world against a looming political change. It is difficult to maintain that Falwell’s public defense of segregation be understood as an absence of political engagement.40 It is political engagement while asserting it is not. Finally, not to belabor the point about separation and insularity, but inasmuch as the growth of many southern independent Baptist churches reflected the growth of the New South, Falwell, for one, never interpreted the doctrine of separation to mean withdrawal from commerce and industry. As Frances FitzGerald notes aptly, Falwell’s sermons typically were lessons for worldly achievement, urging not a retreat from the social order but successful participation in it.41 The inaccurate assumption of conservative evangelicalism’s separation and insularity masks the very real continuities between the “old” Christian Right and the “new” Christian right.

The new Christian right emerges

The politically mobilized Christian right that emerged in the 1970s had clear historical influences and forebears. Indeed, the old and new Christian right shared many of the same concerns and enemies, including vitriol toward liberal Protestantism. At the same time, while the standard interpretation of conservative evangelicalism’s separation from the public arena is overstated, something did happen to remobilize conservative Christians toward political activity in the mid- to late 1970s. As the sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes, studies conducted between 1953 and 1974 on the relationship between conservative theological convictions and political activity consistently found that evangelicals were less inclined toward political participation than were their more modernist counterparts. In marked contrast, the studies conducted between 1976 and 1981 found just the opposite: evangelicals were the most politically involved Christians.42 Voting data confirm this. Prior to 1980, a lower percentage of white evangelicals reported voting in presidential elections compared to non-evangelicals: 61.1 percent compared to 70.5 percent in the South; 60.8 percent compared to 73.2 percent outside the South. In the 1980 presidential election, voting turnout among white evangelicals increased significantly: 77.0 percent of evangelicals voted compared with 65.9 percent of non-evangelicals in the South; 74.6 percent of evangelicals voted compared with 73.3 percent of non-evangelicals outside the South. The white evangelical vote went strongly for Ronald Reagan in 1980 (61.2 percent in the South; 67.2 percent outside the South) and overwhelmingly to conservative Republicans thereafter.43 Born-again Christians would make up 36 percent of the George W. Bush vote in the presidential contest of 2004 and 38.5 percent of the John McCain vote in 2008.44 In the 2012 presidential election, 79 percent of white born-again Christians voted for Mitt Romney, accounting for roughly 38.5 percent of Romney’s total vote.45

The voting data alone show that something happened to activate white evangelicals politically. What was it? Broadly, it was the process of secularization itself. The federal government began to secularize the life-world in response to the pluralistic cultural dynamism of the 1960s and the force of logic of judicial decisions involving the Fourteenth Amendment. Civil rights legislation expanded the rights of minorities to belong to the national community. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court pursued a jurisprudence that embraced that expansive vision, resulting in decisions protecting the rights of racial minorities and unblocking the channels of political change.46 As the Supreme Court moved beyond the protection of minority rights toward pluralistic positions in domains of public life that had historically embedded traditionalist Protestant values in such matters as school prayer, sexual propriety, and the discriminatory practices of religious institutions, religious conservatives felt these changes marked not only an abdication of moral responsibility but also a taking of sides. They felt their institutions were coming under threat by an intrusive government. Recall that after the Scopes trial fundamentalists engaged in extensive institution building to secure their place and status apart from the secular world and that of mainline Protestantism. They established independent congregations, Christian academies, and evangelical colleges. They used their experience in religious radio to hone revivalist techniques and fundraising practices, establishing a large number of broadcast stations and Christian programming sources, leading to the rise of what came to be called the electronic church or televangelism.47 By the 1970s, these were among the institutions that, they believed, had come under threat by the actions of the federal government and federal judiciary.

Radio, regulation, and the rise of televangelism

One of the earliest – and somewhat bizarre – instances of institutional threat was the one to religious broadcasting. Some historical context is necessary here, as this episode underscores the importance of broadcasting as a material resource for conservative evangelicals and how intensely they would fight when they felt these institutions were imperiled. This seeming digression also has the benefit of explaining the rise of televangelism and sets the stage for understanding the critical function conservative mass media play in the current moment.

American radio has a long history of broadcasts featuring compelling preachers and inspirational church music. Religious organizations were among the earliest pioneers to be licensed by the Department of Commerce when radio broadcasting commenced in the 1920s. Enterprising evangelical and Pentecostal congregations made extensive use of the new medium of radio for outreach and institutional growth in the years prior to its regulation. Among the operators of radio stations in the mid-1920s were Aimee Semple McPherson’s Echo Park Evangelistic Association, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago. Baptist church-run stations could be found in many cities. By 1924, local churches held one of every fourteen radio licenses.48 This changed as broadcasting came under regulation toward the end of the decade. The standard historical account is that as radio grew, the problem of signal interference intensified as well, prompting Congress after years of failed efforts to pass legislation to deal with the problems of the new communication medium. But signal interference was not the only matter to be dealt with in the Radio Act of 1927. The nature of the medium was also at issue. What should be the relationship between commercial imperatives and amateur or educational ones; between the notion of radio as a medium of general public communication and the existence of broadcasters who pursued narrow, private interests? The latter issue was not just about monetary gain, a principal subject of debate in the middle 1920s. As important to the new policy-makers of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) was the use of radio for intemperate attacks on persons or institutions. The difficulties posed, for instance, by Joseph Rutherford’s anti-Catholic sermons on his Brooklyn Jehovah’s Witness station, or the Reverend Robert (“Fighting Bob”) Shuler’s malicious attacks on public officials, Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans on his Los Angeles station, were real and vexing.

As the FRC began formulating policy for the new mass medium of radio, it favored a commercial broadcast system, and in the spectrum reassignments of 1927–8 the Commission took back many religious and university-based licenses, forcing religious and educational stations to share frequencies, often at lower transmitting power.49 Defining the broadcast system as public and commercial, the FRC required broadcast licensees, as part of their new mandate as trustees of the public airwaves, to cater to broad audience segments with “a well-rounded program.” Religious stations were deemed “propaganda” stations precisely because they did not fulfil these criteria. The FRC finessed the issue by including religious programming, along with news, weather, and other types of local programs, in the category of “public service,” and obligated broadcast licensees to air some unspecified amount of these.50

The result of the frequency reassignments and establishing a public trustee status for broadcast licensees was to reduce the radio presence of fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and evangelicals, and to elevate the broadcast profile of mainline Protestants. In the effort to meet their public service obligations, commercial radio stations tended to award free airtime, known then as “sustaining” time, to mainstream Protestant organizations, and to a lesser degree to Catholic and Jewish religious organizations. Indeed, NBC, by far the most important network in the early years of broadcasting, appointed the general secretary of the mainline Protestant Federal Council of Churches, Charles S. Macfarland, to chair the network’s religious advisory council. The cooperation between NBC and the Federal Council of Churches led to several long-running mainline Protestant services on the premier radio broadcast organization’s networks.51 After all, mainline Protestants were mainline for a reason: their religious views generally held sway in dominant circles of American life and their radio programs presented these views in predictable, demure, acceptably non-sectarian and ecumenical ways. This allowed broadcasters to meet their public service obligations without attracting unwanted attention or controversy.

In contrast, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and evangelical radio broadcasts’ sectarian claims on theological truth and their direct appeals for funds rankled radio station managers and broadcast network executives. Non-mainline religious broadcasting, including that of the most famous religious broadcaster of them all, the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, generally had to pay for airtime. The pattern for non-mainline and controversial religious broadcasters like Father Coughlin was paid commercial religious broadcasting, often on individual local radio stations that were joined in a temporary network (showing, by the way, that while they may have been anti-modernist in theology, non-mainline Christians were quite modernist in embracing new communication technologies and adept at using those technologies and popular culture genres to tie together their communities and recruit new members). More than anyone, Coughlin demonstrated the power of the new medium in garnering attention and contributions. The figure generally offered of the national audience for Coughlin’s broadcasts in the early 1930s, was up to 40 million people.52 But religious conservative radio broadcasters always felt under siege by the Protestant mainline and by the National Association of Broadcasters – and by the FCC, which viewed the inflammatory example of Father Coughlin, whose broadcasts later in the decade were increasingly marked by anti-Semitism and support for some of the policies of Hitler and Mussolini, as making a bad case for paid religious broadcasting.53

This pattern – mainline Protestant organizations and churches receiving free sustaining time on network-affiliated stations while non-mainline Protestants paid for airtime on small independent outlets – lasted until 1960. Recognizing that previous regulations had failed to produce sufficient public interest programming, the FCC changed course and ruled, among other things in its En Banc Programming Inquiry, that no important public interest would be served by differentiating between free airtime and commercially sponsored programming in evaluating a station’s performance.54 This policy change had important, if inadvertent, consequences for the subject at hand. Television was still early in its development in 1960. Commercial television stations, seeing the FCC’s devaluation of sustaining time, began charging for the time they hitherto had set aside for free religious programming. Most mainline churches declined to take up the broadcasters’ proposition or were outbid by enterprising fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and evangelical preachers. Long used to receiving free airtime, the mainline organizations had no funds allocated for the purchase of broadcast time. Moreover, mainline Protestant denominations are typically bureaucratically organized, and their broadcast units would have had to labor through the church hierarchy to obtain both permission and funding to buy airtime. In contrast, non-mainline churches are usually independent, often stand-alone, headed by a powerful preacher. Non-mainline broadcast units were organizationally nimble and were already in the habit of purchasing broadcast time. Moreover, the timing was propitious. The advent of television in the 1950s coincided with Billy Graham’s New Evangelical revivalist crusade and showed the importance of the new medium for the growth of evangelical church membership and donations. Graham, Oral Roberts, and Jerry Falwell aired sermons as early as the 1950s, as, of course, did Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis.55 The 1960 FCC rule change thus enabled these preachers, unhampered by denominational bureaucracies, to purchase relatively cheap time on commercial broadcast stations. They were later joined by the likes of James Robison, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker, who used radio and television time to spread their views not just on religious matters but on social and political ones as well.

As their audiences increased, and as new broadcast stations and cable channels came available when the FCC enacted a liberalized entry policy period in the 1970s, religious broadcasters began purchasing not just airtime on existing broadcast outlets, but buying stations and cable channels as well.56 By the end of the 1970s, there were thirty religiously oriented TV stations, more than 1,000 religious radio stations, and four religious networks, all supported by audience contributions. Conservative Christian broadcast organizations became an important source both of new evangelizing and of considerable fundraising. This was the phenomenon known as televangelism. By 1980, 90 percent of all religious programming on television was commercial, almost all controlled by non-mainline Protestants.57

Many of the broadcast licenses obtained by religious broadcasters included frequencies reserved for educational purposes. When, in 1975, an educational group petitioned the FCC to disqualify religious affiliates and institutions from holding educational broadcast licenses, religious broadcasters and their audiences grew alarmed. The petition generated over 700,000 letters of opposition to the FCC, premised on the mistaken view the petition had been filed by the president of American Atheists.58 The FCC quickly dismissed the petition (contradicting its 1927–8 logic that religious broadcasting constituted a kind of special, “propagandistic,” rather than a general, public, educational interest). But that did not halt the flow of letters from those who believed that the Commission was considering a ban on religious broadcasting. The FCC had received more than 5 million letters by February 1977.59 The religious right clearly believed their broadcast resources had come under threat.

Fourteenth Amendment challenges to religious resources: Evangelical victimhood

The FCC never remotely threatened religious broadcasting. But the perception among conservative evangelicals was that the federal government was on the cusp of seizing a prized resource. Although the actual, as opposed to the perceived, threat to religious broadcasting was minor, other federal agencies did clash with religious organizations over substantive issues in the mid- to late 1970s. Coming from the conceptual universe of pursuing racial nondiscrimination under the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, numerous federal agencies began scrutinizing the admissions and employment practices of tax-exempt religious institutions, including schools and hospitals. In 1970, an internally divided Nixon administration ordered the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to institute new policy denying tax exemptions to racially discriminatory private schools. Ninety percent of Christian private schools were created after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, with 40 percent of such schools located in the South.60 Whereas nationally the overall school enrollment declined by 13.6 percent between 1970 and 1980, the number of independent Christian schools grew by 95 percent.61 To be sure, the growth of Christian academies wasn’t simply a response to desegregation; it also reflected a longer-term aversion to public schools among conservative evangelicals after the Supreme Court set in motion the banning of prayer from the public schools in 1962.62 Still, the schools were almost certainly a white refuge. The private academy operated by Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, for example, enrolled only five African-Americans in its 1,147-student body, despite Lynchburg being 25 percent black.63

The IRS move to deny the tax-exempt status of discriminatory private academies (including, later, the fundamentalist Bob Jones University) was prompted by a series of court decisions that culminated in Green v. Connally, a 1971 Mississippi case in which a federal district court ruled that a segregation-practicing school did not fit the definition of a charitable institution, and thus was not eligible for tax exemption.64 It took the IRS until 1978 to formalize the guidelines outlining the measures required for schools to avoid losing their tax exemption by proving that they did not discriminate racially in their admissions of pupils.65 Now identified with Jimmy Carter’s Democratic administration, the guidelines set off a political firestorm, prompting strong reaction from supporters of religious schools far removed from the Mississippi segregationist private academies.66 The IRS received more than 115,000 pieces of mail protesting the new regulations, the White House and members of Congress another 400,000. The agency was compelled to hold extended public hearings on the matter. Church school defenders, who included Catholics, claimed that IRS bureaucrats had usurped Congress and had improperly conceived of tax exemptions as federal subsidies. Under public and congressional pressure, the IRS backed off. Conservatives in Congress secured an amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds for investigating or enforcing alleged violations of IRS regulations by Christian schools.67 The IRS threat prompted the formation of some of the earliest organizations of the new Christian right, including Christian School Action, the Christian Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Christian Action Coalition. The private school issue also contributed to the softening of the longstanding animosities between Catholics and evangelical Protestants.

A similar conflict involved the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC). The EEOC filed suit in 1977 against Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the largest of the six seminaries operated by the Southern Baptist Convention, to compel it under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to disclose the number and duties of seven categories of employees, their compensation and tenure, and their race, gender, and national origin. The EEOC routinely used such data to determine whether an organization’s hiring practices were discriminatory. The seminary refused to file the form on the ground that such compulsion and potential EEOC jurisdiction violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.68

A year earlier, the IRS had proposed a regulation to implement Congress’s mandate in the Tax Reform Act of 1969, that is, a definition of the term “integrated auxiliary of a church.” The IRS declared that bona fide auxiliary activities would need to be exclusively religious, hence church activities such as homes for the aged, hospitals, and colleges would not come under the tax exemption of their sponsoring church.69 This, too, generated much concern amongst a multitude of religious denominations and their associated agencies. And in another instance, in 1976 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) became involved in an effort by lay teachers to organize unions in Roman Catholic-operated schools in Chicago and Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana. The NLRB also asserted its authority to compel collective bargaining in the archdiocesan schools of Philadelphia and Los Angeles on the ground that such schools were not “completely religious.” Although the Supreme Court ruled in a five to four decision in favor of the Catholic bishops and against the NLRB on the issue of compelled collective bargaining of lay teachers in Catholic schools, here was yet another instance where religious organizations felt that the federal government had become hostile to religion.70

The decline of religious discrimination and discrimination in general in the 1950s and 1960s led to a more pluralistic public sphere and fed a dynamic deployment of the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections, precipitating the government actions with regard to conservative evangelical institutions and in so doing triggering their resentment. The emergence of an aggrieved traditionalist Christian community thus may have been an almost inevitable reaction to increasing pluralism. Pluralism endangers committed religious faith.71 Evangelicals interpreted the various government actions as distinctly related, and as further steps in the progression of the state’s adoption and promotion of secularism. In the evangelical perception, the federal courts played a central role in the advance of secularism, having earlier prohibited prayer in the public schools, relaxed laws against pornography, and legalized abortion. Until the 1960s, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals could safely say that Christians did not need to be involved in politics because their basic moral values were embodied in American culture. Indeed, this is why Robert Bellah’s civil religion thesis – that the Protestantism of the founding generation had seeped into and had become American culture, even if the provenance of those values was no longer visible – had such salience.72 By the 1970s, this assumption about the culture could no longer be sustained. The state’s moves to act neutrally toward non-religious groups and to question religion’s embedded privileges were experienced by the previously dominant social grouping as an attack on its institutions, a denial of its worldview even. These moves were then further experienced – because of the particular nature of that grouping’s worldview – as abetting “bad” social behavior, even as manifestations of the work of Satan.

In short, while conservative evangelicals hitherto had always found secularism objectionable, the new course of secularization now was seen to pose a grave danger to their traditional structures and life-world. With their embedded privileges under threat, conservative evangelicals came to the realization (with robust help from political entrepreneurs of the new right, to be discussed shortly) that they could not pursue separation from the secular world. This served to intensify the evangelical critique of secularism, and led evangelicals to cast themselves as victims. They described themselves as surrounded and threatened by social decadence, seen in the various “excesses” of the 1960s – sex, drugs, rock and roll, rebellion against authority, women’s rights, divorce, homosexuality, parental permissiveness. They understood these excesses as a lack of self-discipline and self-control, the decline of an ethic of personal responsibility, and the triumph of the untrammeled self.73 Perhaps more than anything else it was the fear of subversion of the traditional family that lay at the core of the conservative evangelical anxiety about the new secularism. Conservative evangelicals evaluated nearly all symptoms of cultural crisis – especially the sexual revolution, the emancipation of women, and permissive childrearing practices – according to the effects on the family. The “vicious assault upon the American family,” Jerry Falwell wrote, came from television and popular culture, pornography, abortion, the failure of parents to discipline their children, drugs, feminism, and the omission and commission of government.74 The perceived threat to the family by permissive childrearing underlay the particular growth of what became Focus on the Family, the organization established by the right-wing child psychologist James Dobson in 1977.75 As the sociologist Martin Riesebrodt suggests, the sense of threat to the family revolved around the role of women, and more precisely the sexual aspect of the female body. Woman as potential seducer of man into sin is an important focus of the fundamentalist worldview. Female sexuality was no longer discussed as the instrument of Satan, as it was at the beginning of fundamentalism, but the danger of sexuality – male and female – remained a force that needed to be disempowered and subdued within a patriarchal family structure.76 Because the family also functioned as a metaphor for the nation, the assault on the family was also a threat to America itself. America’s freedoms, strength, and standing were imperiled.

The source of social decadence was a particular creed: secular humanism. As Falwell inveighed, the central problem with secular humanism was that it made man, rather than God, the measure of all things.

Humanism is man’s attempt to create a heaven on earth, exempting God and His Law. Humanists propose that man is in charge of his own destiny. Humanism exalts man’s reason and intelligence. It advocates situation ethics, freedom from any restraint, and defines sin as man’s maladjustment to man. It even advocates the right to commit suicide and recognizes evolution as a source of existence. Humanism promotes the socialization of all humanity into a world commune.77

The moral decay of society rests at the center of the conservative evangelical critique. Moral decay is the result of a turn away from divine law. And moral decay was now, in effect, government policy. Secular humanism and the unelected judges and bureaucratic elites had transformed the culture and the rules of the political game. From the institutions of political power, the secular elite acted to persecute religion, particularly traditional Christianity. The secular elite consciously excluded religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business.78

A key theoretical statement was Francis A. Schaeffer’s 1976 How Should We Then Live?, which was made into a film series widely popular in evangelical circles (and popularized again in The Battle for the Mind, a bestselling book by Tim LaHaye).79 A student of J. Gresham Machen, the fundamentalist theologian associated with Carl McIntire, Schaeffer challenged evangelicals to engage the ideas and history of western culture with a critically Christian mind. Drawn especially to art, Schaeffer argued that the best of western culture could be traced to a Christian foundation – which was now under attack from secular elites. By the mid-1970s, he called for political engagement on the part of Christians, particularly opposition to abortion. In contrast to the Catholic hierarchy, evangelical Protestants had been late to oppose abortion, but their newly found vehemence transformed opposition into a social movement. (Randall Terry said that to understand Operation Rescue, the violent anti-abortion group that he founded, one must read Francis Schaeffer.) Schaeffer’s declarations represented a McCarthy-like moment: akin to communism a generation earlier, secular humanism constituted a conspiracy to take over America.80 Secular humanists were in government, the courts, the classrooms, the media. In LaHaye’s version, secular humanists’ obsessions with sex, pornography, and drugs led directly to a culture of self-indulgence, of rights without responsibilities, and disillusionment with America. The ultimate result was rebellion at God, parents, and authority, and a tragic lack in skills, self-worth, purpose, and happiness. Like the communists of decades previous, secular humanists needed to be rooted out.81

Books, sermons, and pamphlets began telling a story of America as a Christian nation that had “fallen.” This was a chronicle about how God had promoted America to a greatness no other nation has ever enjoyed because of its heritage as a republic governed by laws predicated on the Bible. As Pat Robertson expressed these American exceptionalist sentiments in a later book:

As we review the history of the United States, it is clear that every one of those promises made to ancient Israel has come true here [the United States] as well. There has never been in the history of the world any nation more powerful, more free, or more generously endowed with physical possessions. … We have had more wealth than the richest of all empires. We have had more military might than any colossus. We have risen above all the nations of the earth. … But these things did not happen by accident, nor did they happen somehow because the citizens of America are smarter or more worthy than the citizens of any other country. It happened because those men and women who founded this land made a solemn covenant that they would be the people of God and that this would be a Christian nation.82

While the Founding Fathers may have metaphorically separated church and state, they never intended to establish a government devoid of God. But the liberals and secularists had managed to do just that, Robertson claimed. They had gained control over the government and sin now permeated the land, seen in pornography, abortion, divorce, feminism, homosexuality, and so on. Because of secular amorality, America has grown weak and decadent. It had lost its course and teetered at the edge of defeat from world communism. Only a return to God could save the nation.83

The symbolic importance of Watergate and Jimmy Carter’s apostasy

The anguish of conservative Christians was understandable. But what prompted their political mobilization in the late 1970s? There is no automatic or immediate connection between changes in the social environment and any particular response. Here a suggestion by the sociologist Robert Wuthnow is helpful. His analysis moves beyond the material threat to evangelical institutions and resources to a more symbolic level. Wuthnow suggests that conservative Christians were galvanized by two events that blurred the distinction between private morality and public institutions: Watergate and Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. The Watergate scandal and the behavior of White House officials, President Nixon foremost among them, challenged the hitherto assumed separation between personal, private morality and public institutions. The reigning (secular) cultural assumption was that private morality among political figures was mostly a personal matter, largely irrelevant to their leadership of public institutions. Conservative evangelicals had never shared this assumption, of course; they always believed that private conceptions of morality posed serious repercussions for public morality and for the society as a whole.84 The bad behavior of the Nixon White House found the evangelical view being expressed in the culture generally and articulated pointedly by Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, himself a born-again whose public witnessing of his evangelical faith was new and noteworthy. Wuthnow’s argument is not quite correct, in the sense that Nixon’s lies concerned his public not his private behavior. Still, Watergate stunned evangelicals.85

Jimmy Carter gained traction among evangelicals because of the contrast of his promises of sincerity with Nixon’s dissembling. “I will not lie to you” was a staple of Carter’s campaign against Republican candidate Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential campaign. Calling for “a government as good as its people,” Carter affirmed the virtue of the American public and the need for morality in its leaders. This, Wuthnow suggests, allowed the forging of a symbolic link between the identity of evangelicals and that of the larger society, giving them a sense of political entitlement that made it more conceivable to speak out on moral and political issues. Historically, evangelical Christians always conceived themselves as the moral custodians of American culture. Watergate permitted their reentry into public life in a direct way. A large number of evangelical churches and organizations were drawn toward and into the Carter campaign, even though many parted company with the campaign in the end because of Carter’s desultory position on abortion, another issue that challenged the presumed separation between public and private morality.86

If the symbolism of Watergate and candidate Jimmy Carter’s open born-again faith allowed many evangelicals to enter the political arena, it was the threat to their institutions – specifically the Christian schools – that brought together conservative Christians and created the foundation for a politically effective movement. The perceived attacks on conservative evangelical institutions by the courts and government agencies discussed earlier were set in motion well before Carter occupied the White House. But because the initiatives came to fruition during his administration, he was seen as their cause. Because Carter was himself an evangelical who had promised better, governmental “attacks” on conservative evangelicals were seen as apostasy and betrayal on his part. Carter, of course, was a Democrat.

In sum, as secularization proceeded through the life-world, particularly via government action, conservative evangelicals were motivated by feelings that their way of life was under attack. They saw themselves as victims of governmental and judicial overreach, realizing their political identity on the basis of victimhood. As victims of the liberal secular agenda, conservative Christians in the mid- to late 1970s became receptive to entreaties from former Goldwater movement operatives, figures such as Richard Viguerie, Phyllis Schlafly, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich. Having helped build the web of conservative political institutions discussed at the end of the previous chapter, these leaders operated as political entrepreneurs for the conservative political renaissance that was being called the “new right.”87

Building a Christian political movement: The importance of political entrepreneurs

It was Paul Weyrich who saw political opportunity in the IRS initiative on Christian schools after years of unsuccessful attempts to politicize evangelicals. Weyrich helped form Christian School Action, recruiting James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker to the cause. Recall that some years earlier Weyrich and Edwin Feulner had taken the lead role in establishing the Heritage Foundation. Heritage produced policy analyses against the IRS private academies policy, establishing a connection between Heritage and conservative evangelical churches, and legitimizing Weyrich in those circles. In an interview with the sociologist William Martin, Weyrich asserted emphatically that it was the Christian schools/IRS conflict that really launched the relationship between conservative evangelicals and the new right.

What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.

The IRS threat, according to Weyrich,

enraged the Christian community and they looked upon it as interference from government, and suddenly it dawned on them that they were not going to be able to be left alone to teach their children as they pleased. It was at that moment that conservatives made the linkage between their opposition to government interference and the interests of the evangelical movement, which now saw itself on the defensive and under attack by the government. That was what brought those people into the political process. It was not the other things.88

An important strain in the sociology of social movements emphasizes the importance of the resources available to groups as they become organized and mobilize for collective action. A social movement must have robust, able leadership and sufficient resources – be they moral, material, or organizational – to be successful. The political system must be vulnerable to challenge and present opportunities for movements to exploit. Such political opportunities may stem from conflict between elites or access to elite allies or increased ability to affect political decisions.89 But “resource mobilization” and “political opportunity” theories have tended to neglect the grievances or bases for solidarity that give life to group consciousness. Conservative evangelicals had to mobilize specific resources to become a group capable of political action, of course. But they had to see themselves as a group capable of action first, and this emerged from their sense of themselves as both victims of secularism and government policies, and politically entitled, in Wuthnow’s phrase, to rectify secularism’s evils. This is where the mobilization of resources plays out, after a sense of focused (rather than diffuse and abstract) grievance. Evangelicals felt aggrieved about the general state of society; Watergate shocked them. Still, according to Paul Weyrich, evangelical leaders typically blanched at becoming directly involved in the political process.90 What changed that reticence was the perception of a specific, palpable threat to the material resource of Christian schools and, by way of extension, the existential challenge it posed to the conservative evangelical way of life. The very government that had helped evangelicals finance their private schools and obtain their broadcast licenses was now threatening to withdraw that assistance and in the process embroil these Christians in the evil secular whirlwind. The brilliance of the new right political entrepreneurs, Paul Weyrich perhaps foremost among them, lay in their ability to bring those Christians who were frustrated and angry about the culture into conservative political organizations. The prior existence of vibrant conservative organizations meant that the religious right emerged in an already open political opportunity structure blessed with all manner of institutional resources.

It is perhaps foolish to fix one event or conflict as the key to the formation of the Christian right. Obviously, in addition to the Christian schools/IRS conflict the opposition to abortion played a major role in the making of the movement (although, as many have pointed out, the anti-abortion struggle was led initially by Catholics, and it took several years before evangelicals took heed of the issue). And the national movement against the Equal Rights Amendment in the early to middle years of the 1970s was surely another moment when conservative evangelicals, particularly women, began to shift from an internal, family-based orientation to an external agenda of acting to halt or transform public policies. With the ERA, the nascent leaders of the religious right became convinced that they would have to go on the political offensive in order to win their defensive battles against the threats of feminism, gay rights, and state interference in the domestic sphere. The anti-ERA movement mobilized religious conservatives as victims who were now fighting back against the secular humanist tide. Indeed, the anti-ERA movement united major elements of the conservative critique of American politics. As the political scientist Jane Mansbridge writes, if the primary cause of the ERA’s defeat was the fear that it would lead to major changes in the roles of men and women, a major subsidiary cause was backlash against “progressive” or “activist” Supreme Court decisions, starting with the 1954 school desegregation decision.91

The growth of these single-issue campaigns – the ERA, religious schools, abortion, and so on – revealed the skills and importance of new right entrepreneurs: that is, the Phyllis Schlaflys, the Richard Vigueries, the Paul Weyriches, most of whom had long histories in anti-establishment conservatism and intensive experience in the 1964 Goldwater campaign.92 Long considered a brilliant, intemperate organizer on the far right of the GOP, it was Schlafly, more than any other figure, who breathed life into the campaign against the ERA.93 Viguerie, who worked for the Christian anti-communist crusader Billy James Hargis in his early career, discovered his direct mail prowess in service as executive secretary of the Young Americans for Freedom as that organization was mobilizing for Goldwater. Weyrich, too, had been active in the Goldwater campaign. After Goldwater’s defeat and the purge of his followers from Republican Party positions, these activists returned to the political trenches and began looking for new issues and new ways to reenergize the conservatives who had mobilized for the Arizona senator. They eventually found those in the “social” issues that so exercised the conservative evangelicals. Just as the success of the conservative mobilization for Goldwater had lain in the ability of gifted organizers to weave an otherwise inchoate web of resentments and criticisms of the post-war liberal order into a coherent political movement by naming them and finding them an articulator in the Arizona senator, so, in the late 1970s, Goldwater veterans helped add a new set of resentments – and constituencies – to the old. Schlafly, Viguerie, Weyrich et al. were a part of the link between the anti-establishment Goldwater right, the “new” right, and the Christian right. They brokered the intellectual affinities and institutional and financial contacts. Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress was a case in point. Established in 1974 with, like the Heritage Foundation, a grant of money from beer magnate Joseph Coors, it trained and mobilized conservative activists, reaching into evangelical churches for recruits.

This is not to say that there was some direct line from the Goldwater campaign to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. But the differences were less about ideologies and principles than they were about style, tactics, and organization. The new right called itself the new right to distinguish its leadership from what it believed to be the effete, overly moderate Republican leadership of the East Coast, and the polite politics of established conservative organizations – in other words, it was a new label for the old anti-establishment conservatism.94 The overly moderate leadership that the new right vilified came to include, rather astonishingly, the intellectual leaders of the earlier generation of anti-establishment conservatism, including William F. Buckley, Jr. and the old National Review leadership. One new right strategist dismissed the brand of conservatism represented by Buckley and the National Review crowd as “a surviving High-Church religion” struggling to remain “uncontaminated by mass culture and politics.”95 In that combative spirit, a new right effort by Viguerie and Weyrich, with financial backing from Coors, battled traditional conservatives for control of the old American Conservative Union and the newer American Legislative Exchange Council. The new right influenced the GOP through a quasi-insurgency strategy, setting up hard-line anti-establishment conservatives to run against establishment Republicans in congressional primaries, and roiling the waters through direct mail attacks on Republican moderates.96 New right operatives even attacked Barry Goldwater himself as too compromising and undependable when the former standard-bearer declined to back Ronald Reagan’s challenge of Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.97

The organizational coming together of the new Christian right in the late 1970s centered on four main groups that built on local actions and organizations: the National Christian Action Coalition (NCAC), the Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, and the Moral Majority.98 The NCAC, as we saw, was launched in 1978 in response to the Internal Revenue Service’s attempts to revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools believed to practice racial discrimination. The Religious Roundtable was the brainchild of Ed McAteer (field director for the Christian Freedom Foundation and called by some the “godfather of the religious right”) and formed in 1979 among other reasons to recruit conservative ministers into politics, with the expectation they would bring their congregations with them. The televangelist James Robison was vice-president of the Religious Roundtable. Christian Voice, launched in 1978, published the original “Congressional Report Card” assessing how congressional representatives had voted on key issues of concern to conservatives. Paul Weyrich in particular tried to steer a middle course between the new right and the Christian right, recasting the “social” issues in terms of a general cultural conservatism, with the intention of bringing on board other religious denominations – even in principle culturally conservative atheists.

But the alliance between the new right and the Christian right wasn’t fully cemented until the birth of the Moral Majority in 1979. The most important organization of the right-wing alliance, the Moral Majority came out of a series of Jerry Falwell-led rallies called “I Love America.” The rallies, a mix of patriotism and religion, were staged in 1976 to celebrate the country and attack the ills threatening to bring it down: pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment. They marked Falwell’s transition from preaching theology to speaking publicly against secular evils. In the context of those rallies, Falwell was approached by the new right entrepreneurs. Viguerie, Howard Phillips, McAteer, and Weyrich were convinced that if they could create a religious umbrella under which all of the hot button, single-issue groups would gather, they could mold the new conservative thrust into a very powerful political force. The idea was to unite the groups concerned with school curricula and pedagogy, birth control, sex education, abortion, homosexuality, the Panama Canal treaty, gun rights, and so on, and bind them to the old anti-establishment conservative organizations dedicated to lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, reducing the size of the federal government, and suspending government regulations. The Conservative Caucus, under Phillips’s leadership, had the goal of bringing the single-issue groups under one roof in preparation for the 1980 presidential election. Viguerie’s National Conservative Political Action Committee brought several smaller single-issue groups for planning conferences.99 The new right entrepreneurs approached Falwell to establish and lead the umbrella organization, the Moral Majority.

Falwell, it should be noted, early on exemplified a version of fundamentalist insularity – with a racist tinge. His Thomas Road Baptist Church founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1966. In the plain words of the Lynchburg News, it was “a private school for white students.” Segregation was a biblical mandate, in Falwell’s view. He was initially reluctant to move beyond that fundamentalist comfort zone. The abortion question, which so fed Francis Schaeffer’s theological and political rage, was not on Falwell’s agenda until later in the 1970s. Falwell’s decision to lead the Moral Majority signaled a move from a race-based, but muted enmity toward government to a more generalized political hostility that put a moral spin on the broad new right agenda. The Moral Majority transformed the old libertarian concern that governmental power would undermine individual initiative at the economic level into a concern that federal power was the source of the decline of individual responsibility and family authority, religiosity, and morality. This broad socio-moral program marked the ascendance of the traditionalist strain in anti-establishment conservative fusionism and distinguished the Moral Majority-led right-wing alliance from the older anti-establishment conservatism. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the new “social conservative” or traditionalist orientation departed widely from economic conservatism. As Falwell declared:

The free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. Jesus Christ made it clear that the work ethic was a part of His plan for man. Ownership of property is biblical. Competition in business is biblical. Ambitious and successful business management is clearly outlined as a part of God’s plan for His People. Our Founding Fathers warned against centralized government power, concluding that the concentration of government corrupts and sooner or later leads to abuse and tyranny.100

After paying obeisance to the conservative economist Milton Friedman, Falwell continues in Listen, America!, “More and more today, we are seeing our government run by thousands of bureaucracies that destroy the productive institutions they supervise.”101

A brief aside on Catholics and the right

Unlike fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Protestants, it can reasonably be argued that there really was no Catholic right until the 1970s. Father Coughlin had been the most visibly engaged, inflammatory Catholic in the public arena in the 1930s. Notwithstanding his support among many Catholics and despite some claims that the Coughlin phenomenon was a dangerous example of irrational, anti-democratic mass behavior (especially by 1938, when he mounted radio attacks on the New Deal for its “dictatorial” and “communistic” policies), Coughlin’s support among Catholics was mixed, and his appeal more populist than right wing per se.102 Although Coughlin was protected by the bishop under whose ecclesiastical authority he operated, there was no clear sense that the Church hierarchy supported him generally. As a voting bloc, Catholics remained decidedly in the Democratic camp.103 Coughlinism did not represent any right-wing Catholic movement.

A similar assessment can be made of Catholics and McCarthyism. The Catholic Church long condemned communism as an atheistic and materialist doctrine. In some church circles, communism was said to represent the Antichrist. Of course, Catholicism had its own version of collective obligations, including the papal encyclical calling on Catholics to oppose unjust economic conditions and the exploitation of labor. Catholic doctrine called for the protection of the social fabric and help for the poor. Unlike conservative Protestants, Catholics never supported strict laissez-faire capitalism. But they did share strong anti-communist sentiments. The suffering endured by the Catholic Church in eastern European countries under Soviet domination after World War II only stoked the animosity of the church and its adherents against communism. Moreover, the combination of Catholic hatred of communism and Joseph McCarthy’s Catholic upbringing meant that the senator’s following included a great many in that church. However, while McCarthy’s anti-communism may have had roots in his Catholic faith, he tended not to tie the two together in any public way. And though Catholic anti-communism may have been a way for Catholics to demonstrate their fundamental Americanism,104 McCarthy’s Catholic support was not that much higher than his support among Protestants, and there was no sense that his anti-communist crusade was a Catholic movement.105 Despite the senator’s various charges of treason against Democratic leaders, Catholics did not depart the New Deal coalition. The political positioning of American Catholics made it unlikely that they would develop a right-wing political movement. They were constantly under siege by Protestants for the authoritarianism of the church hierarchy and accused of “dual loyalty.” In part because Protestants dominated the Republican Party, Catholics tended to be dependable Democrats. Catholics began departing the Democratic Party only in the 1970s, when the Great Society programs and court-mandated rulings on busing and affirmative action began affecting their communities. Catholics voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Since then the Catholic vote has become a swing vote.106

To the extent that there is a Catholic right wing, its roots lie with the liberalization of the abortion laws in the late 1960s. Catholic conservative political action took off after the Roe v. Wade decision. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) declared it would not accept the Supreme Court’s judgment and called for a major legal and educational battle against abortion. The NCCB put together a strategy for the church’s anti-abortion campaign, and used the parishes to mobilize a political machine to influence national and local elections to change the abortion laws. Still, as the political scientist Rosalind Petchesky argues, the organized anti-abortion movement was distinct from the new right. “Unlike the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) or the Catholic bishops, the individuals, organizations, publications, and political action committees that define themselves as the new Right are not ultimately concerned with fetal souls or moral purity but with achieving state power.”107 For the most part, Catholics wanted to end abortion; anti-abortion Protestants wanted to change the political system that sanctioned abortion rights.

The mobilization of resources

The mobilization of what became the Moral Majority depended on the tight linkages and personal networks among church leaders, particularly independent Baptist clergymen connected through the Baptist Bible Fellowship.108 They were buttressed by sizeable contributions of seed money from right-wing businessmen such as Nelson Bunker Hunt, Joseph Coors, Amway Corporation founder Richard DeVos, and, following those, direct-mail donations and televangelist appeals.109 Direct mail and religious broadcasting constituted powerful resources that expanded the Moral Majority’s appeal beyond the churches. Pioneered by Richard Viguerie, direct mail used computer technology to target conservative households with specific political appeals.110 Collecting contributions from small donors, direct mail became especially important after the Watergate-inspired campaign finance laws limited large campaign donations. Viguerie saw direct mail as a way to break through the power of the “liberal media,” which, in conservative eyes, had long thwarted the conservative message.111 Radio broadcasting, as we know, was important in certain kinds of religious appeals in twentieth-century America. Broadcasting became a contribution cash cow when revivalist-style preachers transformed religious television into an electronic ministry in the 1970s. Television preachers found a formula to cater to their audiences’ religious needs and bring in immense numbers of cash donations. It is no accident that many of the preachers most active in the new Christian right were conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals who were able to transform small ministries into mega-church organizations in part through the use of television. Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour, the videotaped recording of his 11 am Sunday service, was a key element in the rise of the several ventures aligned to his Thomas Road Baptist Church.112 James Robison’s Evangelistic Association established a large television apparatus to preach the word about public morality in the late 1970s before he ceased speaking publicly about politics.113 Pat Robertson’s signature television program, 700 Club, and his Christian Broadcast Network laid the basis for his run for the presidency in 1988. Later, in a kind of squaring the circle, Robertson shared his direct-mail presidential campaign list with Viguerie and new right organizations.

An interlocking network of activists and groups bound the new Christian right to the less overtly religious new right, coordinated by select forums for otherwise independent conservative organizations and serviced by a comprehensive set of think tanks, media watchdog groups, and organizations devoted to proposing legislation and the training of candidates and recruitment of future leaders. Sharing issues, leaders, and members were the National Christian Action Coalition, the Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, and the Moral Majority, as well as the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Council for National Policy, the Christian Freedom Foundation, Concerned Women for America, and the Traditional Values Coalition, among others. The networks had myriad ideological and financial connections. For example, Rousas Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, was able to get his Chalcedon think tank and the creationist Discovery Institute bankrolled by the southern California billionaire Howard Ahmanson. Ahmanson also funded James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, and the conservative intellectual Claremont Institute. Another example of the network is the Council for National Policy (CNP), which functioned as one of several important gathering points for a variety of powerful leaders, whether religious (Pat Robertson, Rousas Rushdoony, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson), corporate (Nelson Bunker Hunt, Robert Perry, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, Howard Ahmanson), military (John K. Singlaub, Daniel O. Graham), think tank (Edwin Feulner, John Bolton, Grover Norquist), or political entrepreneurial (Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Ed McAteer). Founded by Tim LaHaye in 1981 and operating largely below the public radar, the CNP continues to act as a policy and funding conduit for anti-establishment conservative projects, both political and religious.114 The American Legislative Exchange Council, which has brought together conservative activists, corporate leaders, and state legislators to rewrite state laws under a cloak of non-partisan discussion since 1973, is another fruit of conservative networking.115

Conservative networks of intellectual affinity and organizational interpenetration coalesced in the Religious Roundtable-sponsored August 1980 National Affairs Briefing of religious leaders. This was the setting where Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, opened with the pronouncement that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” and candidate Ronald Reagan famously declared his endorsement of the efforts of the 15,000 assembled religious luminaries.116 The creation of interlocking and umbrella coalitions, mobilization of material resources, and articulation of a powerful political ideology of victimhood coalesced around Reagan’s candidacy. Reagan, from his pro-business, anti-union work at General Electric, to his electrifying nomination speech for Barry Goldwater, through his counterculture-bashing California governorship and his anti-government and pro-family candidacies for president, became the fount of the hopes of the religious and economic right.

Religious ideology and political action

There is one final piece to this puzzle: religious ideology. Recall that evangelical Christians divided roughly into two camps: post- and premillennialism. Postmillennials believed in intervening in the world through good works. Premillennials saw the world as evil and counseled separation from it. Why would premillenialist Protestants become politically engaged if they view the secular world as Satan’s and biblical prophecy assures that things are going to get worse until Armageddon? Indeed, witnessing the reaction of religious leaders at the famous National Affairs Briefing addressed by candidate Reagan and from which emerged a politically passionate Christian voting bloc, the postmillennialist Gary North observed:

Here were the nation’s fundamentalist religious leaders … telling the crowd that the election of 1980 is only the beginning, that the principles of the Bible can become the law of the land. … Here was a startling sight to see: thousands of Christians, including pastors, who had believed all their lives in the imminent return of Christ, the rise of Satan’s forces, and the inevitable failure of the church to convert the world, now standing up to cheer other pastors, who also have believed this doctrine of earthly defeat all their lives, but who were proclaiming victory, in time and on earth. … Thousands of people were cheering for all they were worth – cheering away the eschatological doctrines of a lifetime, cheering away the theological pessimism of a lifetime.117

North was crowing for good reason. In his view all these premillennialists had jettisoned their doctrine and come over to the postmillennial position. What happened to their pessimism, their separation from the secular world? Often neglected by scholars, this is addressed quite brilliantly by the anthropologist Susan Harding. Harding points out that in addition to inevitable doctrinal disputes and disagreements within the premillennialist tent, including the Rapture’s timing, the free play in the interpretive zone between current events and biblical imagery creates an opening for alternative views of Christians’ role in their world. Did the 1967 Arab–Israel Six-Day War, for example, confirm Book of Revelations prophecies? How should one interpret the fall of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the expected future attack on Israel by Revelations’ “armies of the north”? The heterogeneity, instability, and partiality of narrative framings of current events, Harding argues, undermine the absolute futurism of Bible prophecies. Premillennial doctrine posits that the tribulation is a time when God will judge the Jews according to immutable, irreversible, biblical prophecy. But by 1980, major national evangelical preachers and writers such as Hal Lindsey, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Tim LaHaye were postulating new narrative frames on the end-times, writing of a “pretribulational judgment” that would precede the tribulation, during which God would judge Christians, not Jews. After denouncing the evils of secular humanism for an entire book, in the last few pages of The Battle for the Mind Tim LaHaye writes:

The seven-year tribulation period will be a time that features the rule of the anti-Christ over the world. … It originates with the signing of a covenant between Israel and the anti-Christ, which he breaks after three and one-half years. That tribulation is predestined and will surely come to pass. But the pretribulation tribulation – that is, the tribulation that will engulf this country if liberal humanists are permitted to take total control of our government – is neither predestined nor necessary. But it will deluge the entire land in the next few years, unless Christians are willing to become much more assertive in defense of morality and decency than they have been during the past three decades.118

In the pretribulation, God’s judgment is not fixed by biblical prophecies. If Christians respond to God’s call through holy living and moral action, God will spare them and the American nation. As Harding writes, “Thus, with this little tribulation, bible prophecy teachers opened a small window of progressive history in the last days, a brief moment in time when Christians could, and must be, agents of political and social change.”119

Jerry Falwell’s great achievement was to moderate fundamentalism such that its adherents could maintain their religious integrity and engage the world by calling for a fusion of morality and politics. Indeed, the pretribulationist theological opening created a compulsion to do so. As Harding puts it, unless born-again Christians acted politically, they would lose their religious and moral freedom, which was what enabled them to spread the good news and fulfill Bible prophecy. Unless they acted politically, they might even lose their status as God’s “elect.” If fundamentalism’s traditional critique of the world abandoned it to Satan, the new appraisal argued forcefully that the whole world belongs to God. This was a powerful instance of what the sociologist Bennett Berger called “ideological work.”120 With the pretribulation, the task of good Christians was not to avoid the world, but to enter it, even infiltrate it.121 In this regard, Carl McIntire was the unacknowledged model.

And infiltrate they did. Although the claims are difficult to document with accuracy, it seems clear that evangelicals registered millions of co-religionists to vote.122 Under the leadership of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition of America, the more-or-less successor organization to the Moral Majority fashioned on the coattails of Robertson’s 1988 run for the presidency, claimed to have distributed 45 million “voter guides” between 1990 and 1994, promoting the candidacies of conservative Republican candidates for federal office and attacking their opponents. These voter guides presented single-phrase statements of complex problems with “supports/opposes” comparisons of candidate positions on issues of concern to the Coalition. Robertson received almost 1.1 million votes in the 1988 GOP primaries, 9 percent of the vote. By 1995, the Christian Coalition claimed to dominate the Republican Party in eighteen states and exercise significant influence in thirteen others. Even if these numbers are self-serving, the perception has consequences. The national Republican Party is now loath to antagonize its religious base. Indeed, the perceived power of conservative evangelicals is such that all Republican presidential candidates must essentially make pilgrimage to the fundamentalist bastions of Bob Jones University and Falwell’s Liberty University (including 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who in 2000 had pointedly denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance”).123 Republican candidates for high office seek the endorsement of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson or Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, the heirs to Falwell’s influence in the evangelical community.124

An associated trend has seen new Christian right efforts to capture local political offices, particularly school boards. To some degree these efforts are informed by doctrines known as Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism (the dominant form of Dominionism), which hold that America is a Christian nation, and that Christians need to reassert control over political and cultural institutions. Pat Robertson was instrumental in promoting elements of Dominionism through his books and especially his Christian Broadcasting Network. Derived from Genesis 1:26, in which God gives mankind dominion over the animals of the earth, Dominion doctrine holds that Christians are commanded to bring all societies under the rule of God’s word. As Rousas Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, declared, the only answer to rampant social problems is for Christians to capture and occupy elected offices.125 (As a postmillennial doctrine, Dominionism doesn’t have to jump through theological hoops in justifying its intervention in the world.) Rushdoony had a particular fixation on public education. Government-based education is offensive to God because it usurps family authority. Reconstructionist thinking informs (if in a largely hidden way) the general right-wing Christian passion for home schooling and the efforts to re-traditionalize public education through the capture of school boards.

To counter what it sees as the prevailing anomie of American society, this faction of the new Christian right offers an eternally valid order of divine salvation, now no longer as a distant historical ideal but as an immediate political program. The “Christian economics” coming out of Reconstructionism finds warrant in the Bible against inflation, welfare, and labor unions, and in favor of a gold standard for money. The publications of Gary North, Reconstructionism’s post-Rushdoony leader and one-time speechwriter for Texas Congressman Ron Paul, are influential in the intellectual world of the new Christian right and reveal how and where its social moralism meets up rather effortlessly with a biblically sanctioned economic libertarianism.126 Reconstructionism’s basic positions resound throughout the anti-establishment right: capitalist self-reliance, personal responsibility, opposition to welfare, denunciation of the “nanny state.”

For the most extreme of the politically engaged Christian right, the ideal order in the future is the theocratic republic. The ultimate aim is to apply to America the alternative Christian legal system that evolved in the shadow of the Roman Empire. The model is Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts: cleanse the land of sin by seizing the reins of government and (re)establish divine law.127 Dominionism marries the historic understanding of the Bible (in fact, primarily the Old Testament) as a blueprint for every area of life with a politics of theocracy – hence its theory of “theonomy” (the state of being governed in accord with divine law). What theorists such as Gary North pose is in some essential respect an almost exact obverse of Marxism, or of any totalitarian doctrine that insists that modernity’s differentiation of spheres must be dissolved. This is even true of Francis Schaeffer, although Schaeffer was no proponent of theonomy. If Marxism insisted that everything is politics, that political inflection and judgment were to be inserted into all spheres of human activity, so Schaeffer et al. substitute the Christian worldview and Christian morality for politics. For Schaeffer, the problem with historical Christianity in America was its tendency toward pietism, and the division of the world into the spiritual and the material. He believed that Christianity “is true to total reality. … True spirituality covers all of reality … In this sense there is nothing concerning reality that is not spiritual.”128 This is a religious messianism no less utopian than its Stalinist secular counterpart. Indeed, borrowing from the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, both derive from the framework of religious eschatology – descent into Hell, absolute break, the arrival of a “new time.”129 Granted, this is an extreme version of the new Christian right; most talk or worry about theocracy is overwrought, and the mainstream of conservative evangelicalism mobilized by the Moral Majority and its subsequent organizational manifestations declares obeisance to the Constitution and disclaims any theocratic intention. Still, a utopian anti-modern impulse to dissolve the separation of spheres, to obliterate the distinction between public and private, is an essential feature of the new Christian right as a whole.

The new Christian right, foreign policy, and rationality

The sociologist Steve Bruce posts a warning to scholars trying to understand the new Christian right. Breaking with the old “status anxiety” paradigm associated with Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, Bruce writes:

[L]ike Hofstadter and Lipset I want to identify a discrepancy between the actual social forces which threaten the world of fundamentalists and their perceptions of that threat, but I do not want to conceptualize the thinking of those who believe they are threatened by a conspiracy of secular humanists as being radically different from styles of thought found in “institutionalized” patterns of social action. Nor do I want to overlook a cultural explanation for them thinking like that. Where others see conspiracy thinking as a reasoning disorder brought on by status anxiety or structural strain, I see it as being at least partly a simple continuation of a style of thought which lies at the heart of most traditional religions.130

Bruce provides a compelling corrective to scholarship that fails to take at face value what evangelicals say about what worries them, imputes the root of those concerns to hidden or unconscious material or class- or status-based interests rather than an open clash about values, and, finally, judges their beliefs and actions as irrational.131 Fair enough. Still, when one moves to the realm of religion and foreign policy, the question of irrationality is harder to ignore or dismiss. And because the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was so consequential for American foreign policy, attention must be paid to the support for war on the part of the new Christian right.

The new Christian right got involved in foreign policy issues via its general anti-communism and the globalized extension of its concern over secularization’s threat to the family. Signature issues included halting U.S. underwriting for abortions abroad and protecting Christian populations that were perceived as under threat. Christian right opposition to President Jimmy Carter in part orbited around the perception that his weak-kneed foreign policy permitted the spread of communism to countries such as Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. The Christian right thus sided with the general conservative demand in the 1970s to rebuild the American military and halt the Soviet Union’s depredations in the Third World.

With Reagan administration operations in Central America a motivating introduction to foreign affairs activism, the support of “freedom fighters” absorbed a noteworthy part of the new Christian right’s attention during the 1980s, as evidenced in publications, broadcasts, rallies, and fundraising efforts. Indeed, the network of religious right groups associated with the Reagan administration policy in this area was extensive. As Sara Diamond revealed through Hoover Institution papers, more than fifty religious right and neoconservative groups met secretly with White House personnel on a regular basis to coordinate media and lobbying activities on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras.132 They also gave much support, including impressive amounts of money, to private groups that aided the evangelical General Efrain Rios Montt in the Guatemalan dirty war, anti-guerilla forces in El Salvador, and the mujahideen in Afghanistan, as well as the Contras. They aided Reagan administration covert operations by distributing “humanitarian” supplies to paramilitary forces in Central America. In 1984, Pat Robertson alone raised $3 million for the Nicaraguan Contras. Religious right leaders provided theological justifications, as well. The conservative Catholic intellectual George Weigel, for example, devoted much of his energies in the 1980s to defending Reagan’s foreign policy using concepts derived from the Catholic “just war” tradition.133 The Christian right also opposed the nuclear freeze movement. In 1986, U.S. evangelical broadcasters engaged in a pro-apartheid South Africa publicity campaign.134 In many respects these stances represented a continuation of the long-ongoing battle of conservative evangelicals against the Protestant mainline churches. The latter typically espoused positions critical of American policy in Central America and southern Africa. Some of the more liberal mainline churches signed on to the movement giving sanctuary to Central American refugees and supporting the corporate divestiture of assets in apartheid South Africa. Conservative evangelicals attacked these positions with gusto.

The above stances of the new Christian right could be integrated easily enough into a normal, “rational” conservative foreign policy paradigm of supporting American interests against leftist gains in the Third World. Less able to be integrated in a rational metric were their efforts to lobby for nuclear build-up in the 1980s and, later, their support of U.S. wars in the Middle East. New Christian right support for nuclear build-up was not just for the purpose of protecting the United States from Soviet aggression, but because of the connection of nuclear bombs to the end-times. Jerry Falwell used a television appeal to raise funds for pro-nuclear newspaper ads and circulated a pamphlet in 1983, Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, linking the two events to belief in the Rapture. The pamphlet could be read as welcoming, or at least not condemning, a nuclear war: “ ‘Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ’ – the one brings thoughts of fear, destruction, and death, while the other brings thoughts of joy, hope, and life. They almost seem inconsistent with one another, yet they are indelibly intertwined.”135

Likewise, new Christian right support for the U.S. wars in the Middle East derived in some significant measure from the belief in the end-times. If not the Antichrist himself, suggested conservative evangelical organizations and preachers, Saddam Hussein could well be a forerunner of the “Evil One.” During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for example, Jews for Jesus took out full-page newspaper advertisements declaring that Saddam “represents the spirit of Antichrist about which the Bible warns us.”136 For premillennialists, the Euphrates River in Iraq represents the eastern border of what God intends to be the state of Israel, hence support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was tied to the belief in the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.137 In many evangelical readings, the return of Christ to earth requires first that Jews return to the biblical boundaries of ancient Israel. This in part underlies the Christian right’s strident support of Israel. As the prominent evangelical activist Ed McAteer declared, “I believe without any reservation whatsoever that every grain of sand on that piece of property called Israel belongs to the Jewish people. It’s not because I happen to think that. It’s not because history gives a picture of them being in and out of there. It’s because God gave it to them.” And “[w]hen the nations gather against Israel, I believe at that time the Scriptures will be fulfilled.”138 To point to another example, the Christian Coalition’s Road to Victory conference of 2002 was organized around the evangelical right’s support of Israel. Keynote speaker Ehud Olmert, then Jerusalem mayor, later the Prime Minister of Israel, was joined in person or through videoconference by a parade of luminaries on the Christian and new right, among others, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms, Oliver North, Alan Keyes, former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Robertson, who said his support for Israel was longstanding, cited the Book of Genesis, in which God granted Abraham and his descendants the ancient land of Canaan, now believed to be modern Israel.139 In the name of the Bible and the premillennialist view of the end-times, Christian Zionists and their fellow travelers in the conservative evangelical movement routinely exercised their lobbying muscle and connections inside the George W. Bush administration to object to even the slight diplomatic pressure the United States occasionally applied to Israel.

What to make of this? In a discussion of evangelicals and foreign policy in the respected journal Foreign Affairs, the foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead revived the distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, arguing that evangelicals constitute a middle path between fundamentalism and liberal Protestantism. Sharing common roots with fundamentalism but moderated by endemic American optimism, evangelicalism comprises churches such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Convention, USA and National Baptist Convention of America, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and parachurch organizations such as the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Promise Keepers. Mead reminded readers that evangelicals, less pessimistic than fundamentalists, believe that the benefits of salvation are potentially available to everyone, and that God gives everyone just enough grace to be able to choose salvation if he or she wishes.140 In Mead’s view, these evangelicals in some ways hark back to their nineteenth-century co-religionists, who fought slavery and supported humanitarian and human rights policies on a global basis. Their moderate beliefs aren’t changing U.S. foreign policy in any drastic manner.

But Mead’s view does not comport with the complexity of the reality. It is true that when Richard D. Land, president of the vital Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, backed the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, he did so on the basis that using military force against Iraq would fit the theological definition of a “just war” – that is, because it would amount to a defensive action against a biological or nuclear strike from Saddam Hussein – rather than on the basis of end-times prophecy.141 But many leading conservative evangelicals long advocated war in the Middle East because they saw Saddam as the Antichrist or held that war would restore Israel’s biblical boundaries and bring about the second coming of Jesus.142 Even when they did not directly allude to Revelations or end-times, evangelical pastors claimed God in their support of the Iraq War. Encapsulating the union of theological certitude and militant nationalism that could be said to typify the foreign policy agenda of the Christian right since the late 1970s, Jerry Falwell stoutly defended the U.S. invasion of Iraq in a baldly entitled article, “God is Pro-war.” Falwell called attention to where Scripture sanctions war and where God strengthens individuals for war:

President Bush declared war on Iraq to defend an innocent people. This is a worthy pursuit. In fact, Proverbs 21:15 tells us: “It is joy to the just to do judgment: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.” One of the primary purposes of the church is to stop the spread of evil, even at the cost of human lives. If we do not stop the spread of evil, many innocent lives will be lost and the kingdom of God suffers.143

Likewise, Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared in a sermon in support of the Iraq War, “The government is ordained by God with the right to promote good and restrain evil. … [G]overnment has biblical grounds to go to war in the nation’s defense or to liberate others in the world who are enslaved.” Moreover, in a strong warning to the war’s opponents, Stanley intoned, “God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.” These are hardly the moderate beliefs to which Walter Russell Mead refers. Nor were they unrepresentative of evangelicals in general: 87 percent of white evangelical Christians in the United States supported Bush’s invasion decision in April 2003, compared to 62 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.144

While it is always difficult to speak in general terms about the new Christian right, its pervasiveness, who belongs to it, and who speaks for whom, the dominant trend – contrary to Mead’s analysis – has been the re-enfranchisement of fundamentalism to political activism and its largely successful effort to bring other evangelicals into its ideological tent. The new Christian right represents an alliance struck between fundamentalist and conservative evangelical traditions. There still exists an extreme fundamentalism that separates from the world, exemplified by Bob Jones and his namesake university. But that is no longer the fundamentalist norm. That Falwell and others were able, in Susan Harding’s words, to stitch together rhetorics and styles across the old fundamentalist–conservative evangelical divide was not an accident.145 Harding relates a crucial meeting in 1982 at the home of Carl Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today and among the most eminent evangelical spokesmen in the United States, at which Falwell, Francis Schaeffer, and other top pastors and professors from Falwell’s community met with the heads or former heads of various church associations and theological seminaries. The purpose and result of the meeting were to acknowledge that there was little difference theologically between fundamentalists and evangelicals, act to erase any lingering tensions or divisions, and secure a promise that they would defend each other.146 The new Christian right is part fundamentalist, part Pentecostal, part charismatic, and part evangelical. Jerry Falwell was a premillennial Baptist fundamentalist; Carl Henry was a New Evangelical who helped launch the National Association of Evangelicals; Pat Robertson is an eclectic postmillennial Pentecostal; Francis Schaeffer was a Presbyterian traditionalist with some sympathies toward Christian Reconstructionism. Far from the differences Mead sees between fundamentalists and evangelicals, for the most part the rise of a new Christian right over the past thirty-five years or so has brought together those once-divided religious movements. And the politics of that coalition tend to be far less moderate, and are infused with a far more eschatological bent, than the evangelicals Mead commends. The new Christian right’s organizational takeover of the two main conservative Protestant denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, in the 1980s, is testament to the power of the radical right.147

There may be good reasons to increase the American nuclear arsenal. But a rational justification is not that it will hasten Armageddon and the second coming.148 Wondering whether and how U.S. policies may have contributed to the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001 is necessary and important. But declaring the attacks as God’s judgment on America owing to its domestic moral decay by secular humanism simply does not qualify as thoughtful argument.149 The United Nations may be a largely ineffective broker of international understanding. But a legitimate position opposing the U.N. is not that the international body is the institutional base of the Antichrist.150 There may be reasons to support Israel and be wary of Palestinian statehood. But one reason should not be the conviction that God promised all of the biblical land of Canaan to the Israelites, and Christ’s second coming first requires the ingathering of Jews to Israel and Jewish supremacy over all of Jerusalem.151 There may be good reason to have supported the Bush administration’s proclaimed “global war on terror,” but a rational basis for such support cannot be the belief that George W. Bush was chosen by God to lead the United States in that effort (a belief held in 2006 by at least 29 percent of Republicans and perhaps as many as 57 percent152). There may be good reasons to have considered an invasion of Iraq, but rational justifications cannot be because Saddam Hussein is the Antichrist or that redrawing a defeated Iraq’s borders would restore Israel’s biblical boundaries or that a larger conflagration in the Middle East confirms the second coming of Jesus Christ.153 Whether self-identified as evangelical or fundamentalist, belief continues to trump rational, fact-based policy-making among members of the Christian right. How, then, did this belief-based thinking find an ally in the neoconservative intellectual elite? That is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes

1 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 11–39.
2 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969). The overall thrust of the differentiation of spheres argument derives from Max Weber’s concept of the “disenchantment” of the world. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1922], Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
3 Hugh Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 15, 20.
4 Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
5 This summary is drawn from George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Jack Rogers, Claiming the Center: Churches and Conflicting Worldviews (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995); Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
6 Ronald C. White, Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, 1877–1925 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990).
7 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday, 1955).
8 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835], Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (New York: Library of America, 2004); Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 386–509. By 1850, the “upstart” democratic and emotional Baptist and Methodist sects far outpaced the more hierarchical and intellectual Episcopalian and Congregationalist denominations that had dominated religious life in the colonial period. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 54–108.
9 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1–21.
10 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, pp. 11–39, 135–57.
11 Noll, America’s God, pp. 386–438; Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, pp. 648–73.
12 Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, pp. 429–54.
13 Rogers, Claiming the Center, pp. 16, 139.
14 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 24–5, 53.
15 Ibid., pp. 62–3; Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 27–144.
16 William Jennings Bryan, Prince of Peace (Independence, MO: Zion’s Printing and Pub. Co., 1925); Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Michael S. Evans and John H. Evans, “Arguing against Darwinism: Religion, Science and Public Morality,” in Bryan Turner, ed., The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (New York: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 286–308.
17 Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy.
18 Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
19 Jack Rogers, personal letter to author (October 2009); George Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987); Marsden, “Introduction,” in George Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), pp. vii–xix.
20 Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, pp. 237–75; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” (2012), at http://religions.pewforum.org/reports/ as of October 2012. The percentage of people without religious affiliation has grown in recent years, to 16 percent of the population.
21 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 184–8.
22 James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).
23 Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy, p. 110.
24 Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism, p. 5.
25 Cited in Bill J. Leonard, “Independent Baptists: From Sectarian Minority to ‘Moral Majority,’ ” Church History, Vol. 56, No. 4 (December 1987), p. 513.
26 Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); James C. Juhnke, A People of Two Kingdoms: The Political Acculturation of the Kansas Mennonites (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1975).
27 Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 101–2; Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).
28 Cited in Leonard, “Independent Baptists,” p. 513.
29 Warren L. Vinz, Pulpit Politics: Faces of American Protestant Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 109–20.
30 Rogers Smith, “An Almost Christian Nation? Constitutional Consequences of the Rise of the Religious Right,” in Steven Brint and John Reith Schroedel, eds., Evangelicals and Democracy in America, Vol. I: Religion and Society (New York: Sage, 2009), pp. 329–55.
31 Richard Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservatism Revisited – 1965,” in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 74–6.
32 Joel A. Carpenter, “From Fundamentalism to the New Evangelical Coalition,” in Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America, pp. 3–16.
33 Heather Hendershot, What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 109.
34 Gary K. Clabaugh, Thunder on the Right: The Protestant Fundamentalists (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), pp. 83–92.
35 Cited in Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), p. 197.
36 Diamond, Roads to Dominion; Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed,” in Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963), pp. 1–45; Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right.
37 Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 33–6; Hendershot, What’s Fair on the Air?, pp. 170–205.
38 K.A. Courdileone, Manhood and American Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 82; Stephen P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 22.
39 Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, pp. 137–57; William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 81–9.
40 Jerry Falwell, “Ministers and Marches,” sermon delivered March 21, 1965, subsequently published in booklet form (Lynchburg, VA: Thomas Road Baptist Church, 1965), pp. 3, 10.
41 Frances FitzGerald, Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), p. 170.
42 Robert Wuthnow, “The Political Rebirth of American Evangelicals,” in Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right: Mobilization and Legitimation (New York: Aldine Publishing, 1983), pp. 167–85.
43 Corwin Smidt, “Born Again Politics: The Political Behavior of Evangelical Christians in the South and the Non-South,” in Tod A. Baker, Robert P. Steed, and Laurence W. Moreland, eds., Religion and Politics in the South: Mass and Elite Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 27–56.
44 Steven Waldman, “Evangelicals Made Up a BIGGER Part of the Republican Coalition This Time,” beliefnet (November 10, 2008), at http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/evangelicals-made-up-a-bigger.html as of October 2012.
45 “How the Faithful Voted: 2012 Preliminary Analysis,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (November 7, 2012): http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/How-the-Faithful-Voted-2012-Preliminary-Exit-Poll-Analysis.aspx as of November 2012.
46 Rebecca E. Zietlow, “The Judicial Restraint of the Warren Court (and Why It Matters),” Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2008), pp. 255–94.
47 Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).
48 Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Quentin J. Schultze, Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003), pp. 145, 382.
49 Philip T. Rosen, The Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and the Federal Government, 1920–1934 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
50 Federal Radio Commission, In the Matter of the Application of Great Lakes Broadcasting Co., 3 FRC Annual Report 32 (1929).
51 Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 23–6.
52 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 89–120.
53 Hangen, Redeeming the Dial; Schultze, Christianity and the Mass Media in America; Arthur H. Matthews, Stand Up, Standing Together: The Emergence of the National Association of Evangelicals (Carol Stream, IL: NAE, 1992), p. 47.
54 Federal Communications Commission, Report and Statement of Policy Re: Commission En Banc Programming Inquiry, 44 FCC 2303 (1960).
55 Ben Armstrong, The Electric Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1979).
56 Robert B. Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 244–63; Hadden and Shupe, Televangelism, pp. 47–52.
57 FitzGerald, Cities on a Hill, pp. 124–5.
58 Federal Communications Commission, In the Matter of Revisions of Rules Permitting Multiple Ownership of Non-Commercial Educational Radio and Television Stations in Single Markets, et al., Memorandum Opinion and Order, 54 FCC 2d 941 (1975).
59 Janis Johnson, “Mail Protests Alleged Religious Broadcasts Ban,” Washington Post (February 17, 1977).
60 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Smith, “An Almost Christian Nation?” p. 334.
61 James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 6.
62 Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).
63 Daniel K. Williams, “Jerry Falwell’s Sunbelt Politics: The Regional Origins of the Moral Majority,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 125–47; David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976).
64 Green v. Connally, 330 F. Supp. 1150 (D.D.C.) aff’d. sub nom. Coit v. Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971).
65 U.S. Department of Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Proposed Revenue Procedure on Private Tax-Exempt Schools, Federal Register, Vol. 43, No. 163 (August 22, 1978), p. 37296.
66 Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
67 Editorial, “Bureaucratic Government Regulation of Churches and Church Institutions,” Journal of Church and State, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring 1979), pp. 195–207; Peter Skerry, “Christian Schools versus the IRS,” The Public Interest (Fall 1980), pp. 18–41; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Oversight, Hearings on Proposed IRS Revenue Procedure Affecting Tax-Exemption of Private Schools (February 20, 21, 22, 26, 28; March 12, 1979), Serial 96–11.
68 Editorial, “Bureaucratic Government Regulation of Churches and Church Institutions,” pp. 205–6.
69 U.S. Department of Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Integrated Auxiliary of a Church, Federal Register, Vol. 42, No. 2 (January 4, 1977), p. 767.
70 National Labor Relations Board v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, 440 U.S. 490 (1979); Editorial, “Bureaucratic Government Regulation of Churches and Church Institutions,” pp. 201–4.
71 Berger, The Sacred Canopy.
72 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.”
73 Martin Riesebrodt, Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran, Don Reneau, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
74 Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (Garden City: NY: Doubleday, 1980).
75 Focus on the Family grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, with Dobson achieving the kind of influence in conservative circles on a par with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. At its height in 2002, Focus on the Family employed 1,400 people. It had an operating budget of $160 million in 2008. Dobson’s daily radio show had an audience of 1.5 million listeners a day on about 1,000 stations by the end of 2009. Dan Gilgoff, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007); Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (New York: Nation Books, 2009); Laurie Goodstein, “Founder of Focus on the Family is Starting a New Radio Show,” New York Times (January 17, 2010).
76 Riesbrodt, Pious Passion, p. 64. An important line of Christian popular culture marketed to women explores how female submission within the patriarchal family is both God’s will and – in an unacknowledged adoption of the transformational politics of the 1960s – a form of female empowerment. Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
77 Falwell, Listen, America!, pp. 65–6.
78 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).
79 Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1976); Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1980).
80 In a later Schaeffer tract, highly influential in galvanizing anti-abortion activism to a more radical stage, a list of three key books appears on the page prior the introductory chapter: The Communist Manifesto (1848), Humanist Manifesto I (1933), Humanist Manifesto II (1973). Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1981).
81 LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind, p. 136. LaHaye’s history demonstrates the fluidity of the movement of ideas and persons within right-wing circles. He received his BA from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, was active in Christian Voice, one of the early Christian activist groups around school issues, and helped found the politically influential, publicity-shy Council for National Policy in 1981. LaHaye is a conspiracy theorist with historic ties to the John Birch Society. Besides his premillennial dispensational publications, including the immensely popular Left Behind novels, he has written on the global conspiracy of the Illuminati and other groups – such as the NAACP, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood – to destroy Christianity. Other subjects of LaHaye’s ire include Catholicism. A Christian educator and psychologist, LaHaye uses his writings on personality and temperament to help fund his ministry. At https://timlahaye.com/ as of October 2012.
82 Pat Robertson, The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense (Dallas: World Publishing, 1993), pp. 293–4.
83 Falwell, Listen, America!; LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind; Robertson, The Turning Tide.
84 Wuthnow, “The Political Rebirth of American Evangelicals.”
85 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), pp. 144–54.
86 Ibid.; Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
87 Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Pantheon, 1980); Gillian Peele, Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 51–79.
88 Cited in Martin, With God on Our Side, p. 173.
89 John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 82, No. 6 (May 1977), pp. 1212–41; McCarthy and Zald, Social Movements in an Organizational Society: Collected Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987); Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David S. Meyer, “Protest and Political Opportunities,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 30 (August 2004), pp. 125–45.
90 Martin, With God on Our Side, pp. 171–2.
91 Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 5, 174; Matthew D. Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 13–28; Marjorie J. Spruill, “Gender and America’s Right Turn,” Schulman and Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound, pp. 71–89.
92 Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
93 Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
94 Richard A. Viguerie, The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead (Falls Church, VA: The Viguerie Co., 1981).
95 Kevin Phillips, quoted in John B. Judis, William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 378.
96 Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, pp. 128–31.
97 Richard A. Viguerie and Lee Edwards, “Goldwater: Leader or Legend?” Conservative Digest (January 1976), pp. 6–8; William A. Rusher, “What’s Happened to Barry?” Conservative Digest (April 1976), p. 16. Goldwater, who hewed toward the libertarian pole of conservative fusionism, objected to much of the new right’s social agenda. He was pro-choice on the abortion question, supported Planned Parenthood, and endorsed gay rights.
98 Other prominent Christian right organizations established in the late 1970s and early 1980s included the American Family Association (under the leadership of Donald Wildmon), Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council (led by the anti-permissiveness psychologist James Dobson), the Council for National Policy (Tim LaHaye), Concerned Women for America (Beverly LaHaye), and the Traditional Values Coalition (Louis Sheldon).
99 FitzGerald, Cities on a Hill, pp. 178–80; Erling Jorstad, The Politics of Moralism: The New Christian Right in American Life (Minneapolis: Augsberg, 1981), p. 71.
100 Falwell, Listen, America!, p. 13.
101 Ibid., p. 74.
102 Seymour Martin Lipset, “Sources of the ‘Radical Right,’ ” in Bell, ed., The Radical Right, pp. 307–71.
103 Brinkley, Voices of Protest, pp. 143–68, 265–83.
104 Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt – 1954,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, pp. 41–65.
105 Donald F. Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).
106 “Presidential Vote of Catholics,” Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University, at http://cara.georgetown.edu/Presidential%20Vote%20Only.pdf as of October 2012.
107 Rosalind Pollock Petchesky, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom, revised edition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), p. 254.
108 Leonard, “Independent Baptists,” pp. 504–17.
109 Robert C. Liebman, “Mobilizing the Moral Majority,” in Liebman and Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right, pp. 49–73.
110 Peele, Revival and Reaction, pp. 55–65.
111 Richard Viguerie and David Franke, America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power (Chicago: Bonus Books, 2004).
112 Falwell claimed in 1983 that the Old-Time Gospel Hour was carried on approximately 400 television stations each week and aired on nearly 500 radio stations daily, with the ministry employing more than 2,000 people. Jerry Falwell, Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (Lynchburg, VA: Old-Time Gospel Hour, 1983), p. 45. According to Frances FitzGerald, revenues from the Old-Time Gospel Hour rose from $7 million in 1973 to $22 million in 1977, and raised about $115 million between 1977 through 1980 from the two and a half million people on its mailing lists. These revenues enabled Falwell to subsidize the Thomas Road Baptist Church’s other ventures, including the Liberty Baptist College campus, and to bail out the church from its financial difficulties in 1980. FitzGerald, Cities on the Hill, pp. 152–5.
113 Armstrong, The Electric Church; Hadden and Shupe, Televangelism.
114 Research Articles – The Council for National Policy, at http://www.seekgod.ca/topiccnp.htm as of October 2012; Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, pp. 32–46.
115 American Legislative Exchange Council, at http://www.alec.org/ as of October 2012.
116 Cited in Hadden and Shupe, Televangelism, p. 28.
117 Cited in Donald Heinz, “The Struggle to Define America,” in Liebman and Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right, p. 136.
118 LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind, pp. 217–18.
119 Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, p. 241.
120 Bennett M. Berger, The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
121 Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, pp. 143, 165, 244.
122 See Smidt, “Born Again Politics.”
123 John McCain, speech in Virginia Beach, VA (February 28, 2000), at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/29/us/the-2000-campaign-excerpt-from-mccain-s-speech-on-religious-conservatives.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm as of October 2012.
124 Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006); Gilgoff, The Jesus Machine.
125 Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law: A Chalcedon Study, with Three Appendices by Gary North (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1973); Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1986); Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: Norton, 2006).
126 Gary North, An Introduction to Christian Economics (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1973).
127 Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstruction: What It is, What It isn’t (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991).
128 Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, pp. 19, 20.
129 Leszek Kolakowski, My Correct Views on Everything, Zbigniew Jankowski, ed. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), p. 137.
130 Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in America, 1978–1988 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 79–80.
131 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962); Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays; Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960); Lipset with Earl Rabb, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Bell, ed., The Radical Right.
132 Sara Diamond, “The Thread of the Christian Right,” Z Magazine (July/August 1995).
133 George Weigel, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America under Siege (New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 117–46.
134 Diamond, Roads to Dominion, pp. 214–25, 236–41.
135 Falwell, Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
136 Cited in Paul Boyer, “When U.S. Foreign Policy Meets Biblical Prophecy,” AlterNet (February 20, 2003), at http://alternet.org/story/15221/ as of October 2012.
137 Clark, Allies for Armageddon.
138 Cited in Mark Wingfield, “Evangelical Theology Drives American Attitudes toward Israel and the Middle East,” Baptist Standard (April 15, 2002), at http://www.baptiststandard.com/2002/4_15/pages/mideast_evangelical.html as of October 2012.
139 Aparna Kumar, “Christian Coalition Calls for Solidarity with Israel,” Religion News Service (November 11, 2002), at http://www.baptiststandard.com/2002/11_11/print/israel.html as of October 2012; Chip Berlet and Nikhil Aziz, “Culture, Religion, Apocalypse, and Middle East Foreign Policy” (December 5, 2003), at http://rightweb.irc-online.org/pdf/0312apocalypse.pdf as of October 2012.
140 Walter Russell Mead, “God’s Country?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 5 (September/October 2006), pp. 24–44.
141 Dr. Richard D. Land, Letter to President George W. Bush (October 3, 2002), at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Land_letter as of October 2012.
142 Joseph Chambers, A Palace for the Antichrist (Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Press, 1996); Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times? (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1999).
143 Jerry Falwell, “God is Pro-war,” WorldNetDaily (January 31, 2004), at http://www.wnd.com/2004/01/23022/ as of October 2012.
144 Charles Stanley, “A Nation at War” (February 2003), at http://biblestudyplanet.com/s138.htm as of August 2012; Charles Marsh, “Wayward Christian Soldiers,” New York Times (January 20, 2006).
145 Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, p. 25.
146 Ibid., pp. 149–50.
147 Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). In the era of the founding and early republic, Baptists had always been perhaps the strongest supporters of the separation of church and state. Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America (New York: Random House, 2008). In keeping with the denomination’s historical stance against the oppression of state religion, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) eight times over a period of two decades affirmed support for the Supreme Court ruling that school prayer was unconstitutional. The SBC passed a near-unanimous resolution in 1971 upholding the right of abortion if a mother was in any physical or emotional peril. By 1982, as Moral Majority members became powerful within the SBC, both of those positions were reversed. And at its 1984 convention, the SBC passed a resolution against the ordination of women as ministers because “God requires” their “submission.” Sidney Blumenthal, “The Religious Right and Republicans,” in Richard Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, eds., Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987), pp. 271–86. By 2000, the SBC effectively renounced its traditional democratic principles in favor of the dominance of male pastors. Stephen M. Tipton’s historical analysis of the conservative challenge to the United Methodist Church’s Social Gospel provides yet another piece of evidence of the conscious strategy of the right to undermine mainline liberal Protestantism. Tipton, Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
148 Falwell, Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
149 Jerry Falwell, Christian Broadcast Network’s The 700 Club (September 13, 2001), at http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/f/falwell-robertson-wtc.htm as of October 2012.
150 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of Earth’s Last Days [book one] (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995). The series now extends to sixteen books and several movie spinoffs.
151 John Hagee, Final Dawn over Jerusalem (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998).
152 The political scientist Gary Jacobson conducted one piece of a survey for Polimetrix, Inc. following the 2006 midterm congressional election. After responding to an initial question about belief in divine intervention in general, respondents were asked, “Do you believe that George W. Bush was chosen by God to lead the United States in a global war on terrorism?” Twenty-nine percent of Republicans (N = 219) responded “yes”; 28 percent responded “don’t know”; 43 percent responded “no.” Jacobson interprets the “don’t know” responses as indicating that they believe Bush might be God’s chosen instrument. Gary Jacobson, Cooperative Congressional Election Study – UCSD Module (Palo Alto, CA: Polimetrix, Inc., 2006).
153 Tim LaHaye and Ed Hindson, Global Warning: Are We on the Brink of World War III? (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2007).