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This chapter discusses the emergence of the New Christian Right or simply the Religious Right as a powerful new force in American politics. The rise of the Religious Right has been examined from all angles, and several key factors have been identified. It clearly depended on leadership. The most visible leaders were preacher Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority rallies at state capitals had been gaining attention in the late 1970s, and fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, whose popular 700 Club television program included discussions of social and moral topics. Both were canny entrepreneurs who knew how to attract media attention, and there were conservative political operatives eager to enlist their support. There were unifying issues as well, such as opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and promiscuity, and the more general sense that religion was under siege by secularity and humanism. And there were lingering divisions within Protestant denominations and among Catholics over such issues as social activism, the legacies of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, communism, gender equality, the ordination of women, and theology.

This chapter examines how conservative church leaders in Kansas continued the struggle against abortion and expanded their activities to include opposition to same-sex marriage. In the early 1990s, the Religious Right threw everything it had into making the right to life an issue that would arouse thousands of activists. By the decade's end, the Religious Right was moving into a new phase. The chapter first considers the institutionalization of the Religious Right before discussing its use of activist networks and its influence within the Republican Party. It then discusses George W. Bush's victory in the 2000 presidential elections and its significance for the Religious Right. It also explores the issue of regulation of abortion and the churches' campaign against same-sex marriage, the ongoing back-and-forth debate about evolution, the death of George Tiller, and Bill Clinton's 2004 Dole Lecture for the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University.

Politically conservative Christians are animate by a mythic ideal concerned with the “right-ordering” of society. They want the world in which they live reflect their own likeness. A legacy of a Christian origin is understood as providing a sense of ownership over America and “radical secularists” have taken this away. The effect is harming to America, and people of faith, marginalizing them in public life. Their response has been one of political engagement, often conflating Christian faith and national identity in the political imagination. There are changes occurring among the Religious Right. However, though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ—is identical to the longstanding approach of the Christian Right. This is because the underlying myth that defines their goals and strategy of action has not changed.

This chapter argues that many American Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, appear unwilling to take a critical view of an economy and a political culture that not only promise easy prosperity at the cost of an increasingly dehumanizing — and profoundly anti-Christian — atomism but also offer simplistic answers to complex global economic and social problems. These same Christians have thrown their support to leaders who have demonstrated themselves incapable of demanding any kind of real communal work or sacrifice from the American people for the privileges and freedoms they enjoy. Instead, these Christians have devoted their energies to shoring up the culture of easy prosperity and unrestrained power. They have become apologists for an imperialist foreign policy that places heavy burdens on the poor and the working class, while at the same time they press for reactionary solutions to complex social problems like terrorism, abortion, homosexual unions, and immigration.

This chapter examines the emergence of the Religious Right in Kansas. On May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller was murdered at the Reformation Lutheran Church in suburban Wichita. As one of the region's few providers of legal late-term abortions, Tiller had earned the ire of antiabortion activists. No issue brought churches as directly into the political arena during the late 1980s and 1990s as abortion. The Religious Right in Kansas gained national attention because of its role in encouraging the Kansas State Board of Education to approve science standards that downplayed the teaching of evolution. The decision raised questions such as: why Kansas was such a hotbed of religious conservatism; or why it mattered that independent evangelical Protestant churches were now on the same side of many issues as conservative Roman Catholics. The chapter explores the implications of the debate over evolution for Kansas religion and politics.

This chapter analyzes the tactics used by the Religious Right against the LGBT movement from 1974 to 2009. The Religious Right mobilized interested local activists, affected public opinion, and grew as a movement by fighting LGBT rights at the ballot box through direct democracy, the proposal and passage of laws through voters rather than legislators. Their tactics included everything from the most virulently moralist homophobic attacks to legalistic arguments about changing civil rights laws. The chapter studies the Religious Right’s “experiments” on referendums, such as the Colorado Amendment 2, and their formation of “stealth” initiatives that did not even mention sexual orientation and included same-sex marriage bans.

This chapter presents an overview of the progressive evangelical movement as an alternative to both the Religious Right and the political left from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. It examines the contributions of the three most prominent progressive evangelical voices over the past four decades: Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA), and The Other Side. As evangelicals, the leaders of Sojourners, ESA, and The Other Side affirmed a core set of definingtheological principles—the primacy of biblical authority, the need for personal conversion and faith in Jesus's atoning work, and a dedication to evangelistic and humanitarian efforts. Throughout their movement's history, progressive leaders' consistent appeals to biblical interpretations as the foundation for their political activism reflected evangelicals' hallmark commitment to the primary authority of the Bible.

This chapter examines the critical role that evangelical Christian support has supplied for the Republican Party in the South. It traces such support from the Cold War and 1950s McCarthyism all the way through the 2008 presidential contest pitting Obama-Biden vs. McCain-Palin. The candidacy of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 is seen as critical in shifting evangelical support from the Democratic to the Republican Party. The roles of Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, the Southern Baptist Convention, and others are explored through the presidential administrations of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. The chapter concludes that religious conservatism has been at least as important as racial conservatism, perhaps more so, in the making of a Republican South.

This chapter suggests that representatives participate in the public sphere in order to pursue public credibility, which does not necessarily require deliberation. However, not everyone pursues credibility in the public sphere. For example, the Religious Right pursues religious credibility in the public sphere, while the Religious Left does not. The historical domination of public debate by theologically and politically conservative religion representatives gives the Religious Right a structural advantage as those representatives continue to “own the space” of religion in public life. Yet the success of such promotion is measured not only by the prominence of religious representatives in the public sphere but also by the extent to which ordinary people recognize prominent representatives in public life and think of one set of representatives rather than another set as religious.

This chapter discusses the views of Jim Wallis and Sojourners regarding the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Christians within churches. It also examines gay liberation and the different Christian responses to it. For Wallis, every Christian has the obligation to defend the lives, dignity, and civil rights of gay and lesbian people. On the other hand, Sojourners considered same-sex sexuality as immoral. During the 1960s, gays and lesbians pushed movements to end legal and social discrimination against them. As a result, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association overturned its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder and removed therapies to “cure” gays. Most Protestant and Catholic leaders strove to support civil rights of gays while maintaining their stand that a same-sex relationship is immoral. The responses of evangelicals to same-sex marriage demonstrates the conflict in their positions to both the political left and the Religious Right.

This chapter uses surveys of the general public and several governmental elite groups (political appointees from the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, congressional staffers, and member of the Senior Executive Service) to examine what conservatives believe and the degree to which the policies of the Bush administration resonated with those who call themselves conservatives. It documents the fact that self-identified conservatives in the general public want the federal government to take responsibility for many areas of American life. Though they tend to be less enthusiastic about conserving the nation's natural resources, promoting racial equality or reducing poverty than people who call themselves liberals, the differences are more ones of degree than direction. The data, overall, give strong support to the message of “big-government” conservatives and point to a continuing set of dilemmas for the conservative movement.

Christian conservatives experienced serious setbacks to their hopes to shape American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Following the legalization of gay marriage, the Religious Right, believing that it has lost its chance to remake America according to its values, increasingly identified with the persecuted Christians of other countries. The Christian persecution complex in America was a recursive consequence of American Christian identification with the intolerance faced by Christians in other countries. Characterizing themselves as persecuted, declaring themselves to be victims, conservative Christians in America nevertheless gained unprecedented power with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. They subsequently complained even more loudly that they suffered persecution in America, comparing their imagined plight to that of persons murdered or tortured overseas.

This chapter traces the extraordinary role that evangelical Christian colleges and universities have played in propagating right-wing values that have aided in the Republicanization of the South. Through a case study of Harding College in Arkansas, the reader gains insight into the inculcation of a particular brand of “Americanism,” proper religion, and economic rightism that fortified political conservatism and helped break the South away from its decades-long allegiance to the Democratic Party. The roles of long-time Harding president George Benson and Professor James Bales are especially noteworthy. The chapter follows developments at Harding and connects them to the outside world, through the Cold War and anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, civil rights, racial unrest, and Vietnam in the 1960s, the culture changes of the 1970s, and the active involvement of the Religious Right in politics since 1980.

This chapter provides an in-depth examination of how religion has acted as an extremely conservative device in the South, helping push the region from fealty to the Democratic Party to the GOP. It addresses such hot-button issues as school prayer, public religious displays like the Ten Commandments, gay and lesbian rights, war, honor, terror, abortion, traditional and family values, “cultural defense,” and the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. The chapter argues for southern distinctiveness. And it catalogues the roles of important Religious Right groups such as Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, Coral Ridge Ministries, and of individuals such as George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms.

With Ronald Reagan in the White House, religious conservatives expected the president to deliver on his promises regarding abortion, school prayer, and other cherished causes. But the White House did not address the political goals of the Religious Right, and religious conservatives divided over legislative policies and strategies. A brutal battle over two competing anti-abortion bills exposed the divisions within the movement, dooming a pro-life victory. School prayer failed partly from disinterest by Catholics and Mormons, but also because of disagreements between evangelicals and fundamentalists. Other issues, particularly debates over capitalism and national defense, demonstrated the diverse and often conflicting politics among religious conservatives. Reagan’s restoring diplomatic relations with the Vatican angered many evangelicals. His proclaiming 1983 the “Year of the Bible,” however, united evangelicals with other religious groups in promoting the scriptures throughout the nation, but evangelicals ultimately turned the movement into a proselytizing cause for the evangelical message.

This chapter examines the evolution of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest and probably most representative denominational institution in the American South, from 1945 to 1990. The findings suggest that though forces associated with the Religious Right decisively lost the battle over civil rights, they won the larger cultural war for the soul of white Southern believers. This victory took the form of the modern Republican Party in a partisan sense, and it meant a complete rout of the moderates by the conservatives in the SBC in the denominational sense.