Search Results

This chapter describes another important trend involving religion, liberalism, and conservatism. Actively religious Americans are more politically and socially conservative than less religious Americans. Regular churchgoing, moreover, now correlates even more strongly with some types of political and social conservatism than it did several decades ago. Rather than being associated with a particular type of religion, certain kinds of political and social conservatism have become more tightly linked to religiosity itself. As such, the most and least religiously active people are further apart attitudinally than they were several decades ago, but this trend does not yet warrant a declaration of culture war.

Ronald Reagan was the most dynamic force in American political conservatism in 1965, and any group that wanted to make a big media splash, raise funds for its cause, or simply energize its members, got the former Democrat to stop by on, as he called it, his “mashed potato circuit”. Like William F. Buckley, Jr.'s followers, Reagan's supporters saw him as a means to regrouping and partially reconfiguring the conservative movement. California was the perfect place to test whether conservatism had indeed weathered the storm. Reagan's campaign was engineered to spark wide-scale conservatism by capturing the most valuable state in the union. For many conservative Californians and non-Californians, Reagan embodied the hope for a conservative country. Reagan represented the conviction that conservatism could leave the realm of the extraordinary to become the ordinary, the status quo rather than the enfant terrible. The growth of conservative interest groups rose from a combination of the migration of extremists out of their own circles into areas devoted to more mainstream issues and years of work behind the scenes.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of political conservatism among British Jews since 1945. The study of Jewish political preferences is now long established, and can of course be justified on its own terms. However, the political conservatism of modern British Jewry needs to be set as well in two complementary historical contexts. The first is that in the diaspora communities of Western Europe, Australia, and North America, Jews—particularly immigrant Jews—gravitated toward the politics of the center or the left rather than those of the right. The second is to be found in the continuing propensity of Britain's Conservative Party to fall victim to a populist xenophobic or antisemitic discourse, which often translates into policies that, superficially at least, hardly seem capable of attracting Jewish support. Put another way, whereas the judgment of history should have ensured a reaction against conservatism by the Jews of modern Britain, an opposite development occurred; and this calls for explanation.

This chapter provides an empirical scrutiny of sprawl and liberal values—social trust, tolerance, and respect for diversity. It also provides an in-depth discussion of the neighbourhood characteristics of sprawl and its affinity with political conservatism—in conceptualizing the possibility of Rawls liberal egalitarian ideology as applied within the context of current American lifestyles. However, as Simone Chambers points out, for both notions of equal opportunity in political culture and conservative notions of present US distributive justice, which promote personal responsibility and legitimizing inequalities, Rawls' egalitarianism application on present US distributive justice is problematic. Results are not as “just” as Rawls would illustrate.

This chapter undertakes the difficult task of defining Russian conservatism. Many of conservatism's most commonly cited features appear at best to fit uneasily together and at worst to contradict each other entirely. Conservatism is universalistic, but also anti-universalistic; seems to oppose change, but also to promote it; can be vehemently anti-liberal, but also can be liberal; and so on. Different groups labeled “conservative” often hold views diametrically opposed to one another. But different conservatives do all have something in common. Tying them together is the thread of a preference for organic change. Following this thread, the chapter demonstrates that Russian conservatism is not a philosophy of the status quo. Rather, it is one that endorses change, but change of a certain, gradual sort that is in keeping, as much as possible, with national traditions.

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 book attempts to get at the intersection of politics and religion in the American South. The chapters in this book strongly suggest that in the South, religion has worked hand in hand with political and social conservatism and that the region's politics have, in turn, reflected its fundamentally conservative religious temperament. This book explores the Southern Baptist racial ideology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, factionalism and ethnic politics in Atlanta, Georgia, and traditional family values.

The dominant theme of the 1990s was the explosive potential of advanced technology. In Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, the high-tech phenomenon played out against a background of social and political conservatism. Virginia welcomed the New Economy, but on its own terms. Proponents of the New Economy argued that in order for companies to fully exploit new technology, they had to strip away the hierarchical arrangements of an earlier business model. At the center of the reengineered corporation was the demand for reduced labor costs. Despite the claims that the New Economy would democratize the workplace, liberate employees from the drudgery of routine, and allow them creative control over production, it fostered uncertainty and an environment in which business prerogatives went unquestioned.

Among the most significant outcomes of the complex relationship between evangelicals and political conservatism has been to make orthodox Protestants simultaneously both less distinctively Christian and less genuinely conservative. Since the late nineteenth century, evangelicals have drawn from the newer sort of classical liberal “conservatism” whose principles owe more to the Enlightenment than to Christian theology. Further, their unreflective activism and increasingly nondoctrinal pietism has made it easy for evangelicals simultaneously to compartmentalize their faith, while still becoming more active politically. Evangelicals’ perspective on public life thereby became more secular as it became more partisan and utilitarian. The choice to support candidate Trump in 2016 highlighted evangelicalism’s lack of a theological basis for political engagement. The preceding chapters show that this deficiency had deep historical roots.

Latter-day Saint apostle Ezra Taft Benson became Secretary of Agriculture in 1953 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Especially in the 1960s, Benson both reflected and guided Mormonism’s embrace of right-wing politics through his fervent anti-communism. He then became LDS Church president in 1985. As apostle and church president, Benson regularly preached from the Book of Mormon, and he encouraged church members to read it devotionally. Benson’s efforts helped bring the Book of Mormon to a greater position of prominence and familiarity within the church. Moreover, through his selective reading of the scripture, Benson highlighted particular passages and privileged certain themes that resonated with his own American exceptionalism, anti-communism, and arch-conservatism.

Unlike Rebecca West or Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Bowen was not a political journalist; nor did she ever aspire to be. She once described the taking up of the position of the ‘psychologically displaced person’ of the inter-war generation as ‘cerebrally brilliant but skin deep’. It is argued that it is in her postwar writing, particularly in her final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes, that Bowen offers her most provocative – and most affecting – image of the kind of moral and imaginative work the European novel could still do at mid-century. Her association of ‘rights’ with violent vengeance is in keeping with her political conservatism. Eva Trout is not an anti-novel, or at least not quite. Bowen's last fictional gesture is perhaps her most avant-garde, but it is also one of the most painfully affecting in her entire corpus.

This chapter focuses on the failure of Weimar's denizens to lift the town into a Silver Age in the second half of the nineteenth century. It first looks at some of the achievements of the period between 1861 and 1901, including the creation of the first master classes for piano ever by Franz Liszt, the ascent of Richard Strauss, and the anticipation of German Impressionism by members of the painters' academy. It then considers several developments in Germany that rendered the Weimar style of painting more mature; the decline in Weimar's music, theater, and literature after Strauss's departure; and the emergence of a Goethe cult that revered the late Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Finally, it examines Weimar's transition to political conservatism.

This chapter examines how Norman Vincent Peale disseminated his gospel using the “Guideposts” magazine, which used the motto, “More than a magazine.” Founded in 1944 by Peale, “Guideposts” gave Pealeism a public identity that was easily understood. Politically, early “Guideposts” found a home for the potentially antinomian message of positive thinking within Cold War conservatism. Its editorial philosophy reflected Peale’s civic and religious priorities, best summarized as the ideas of Americanism, free enterprise, and practical Christianity. The chapter shows how “Guideposts” emerged from Peale’s practical Christianity and political conservatism and how it fared in the 1940s. It also discusses the strategies adopted by Peale to build a new image for “Guideposts” and concludes by explaining how the magazine evolved from a political broadside of the Cold War to achieve a more enduring cultural status along the lines of “The Reader’s Digest” and “National Geographic.”

Since the 1960s, Mormons have staked out socially conservative positions on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage that has brought them into political alignment with other religious conservatives, particularly with conservative evangelicals. At the same time, however, conservative evangelicals increased their theological criticism of the LDS Church, accusing Mormonism of being a non-Christian or anti-Christian cult. They argued that Mormon theology led to un-American politics, weak personality, and a decadent lifestyle. Evangelicals and Mormons engaged in vigorous criticism of each other on matters of both theology and social practice, but both sides ultimately concluded that theological objections did not preclude civic cooperation.

At the height of his career and in the second year of his presidency, Calvin Coolidge lost his cherished second son, Calvin Jr. Barely sixteen, Calvin Jr. died suddenly from an infection resulting from a simple blister on his toe following a game of tennis on the White House court. Of his son’s death, Coolidge remarked, “When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him.” Most biographies of this chief executive suggest that young Calvin’s death aborted his father’s presidency. Yet the boy’s passing occurred in the summer of 1924, and Coolidge, though clearly devastated, decided to stay the course and run for reelection. And there are reasons to believe that the tragedy made Coolidge a more efficient president and more determined to act on his conservative principles and see them translated into governmental policy.