Search Results

Ronald Reagan’s religious convictions were crucial to his understanding of the world and performance as president, but few scholars have provided substantive analysis of his faith and its impact on his policies during his tenure in the White House. Although the circumstances of Reagan’s life and the seeming inconsistencies between his beliefs and his practices make his faith difficult to explain, it appears to have been genuine, very meaningful to him, and essential to his political philosophy. Reagan firmly believed and often declared that God intended America to be a beacon of hope, faith, freedom, and democracy — “a city on the hill”. Reagan was deeply influenced by his godly mother, Nelle, and raised in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Reagan’s firm belief that God had a plan for his life was fortified by his survival of an assassination attempt in March 1981. In many addresses, proclamations, letters, and private conversations, Reagan stressed his faith in God and prayer, the inspiration of the Bible, and the divinity of Jesus. Numerous leaders of the religious right were troubled by his infrequent church attendance and his wife’s interest in astrology. Although historians debate the nature of Reagan’s personal faith, they concur that he used religious rhetoric, discussed religious themes, and spoke to religious groups more than any other 20th-century president. Religion played a very important role in Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. Reagan’s personal life was not a paragon of evangelical piety, but his worldview was strongly shaped by his understanding of biblical teaching. His faith affected many of his policies, most notably his endeavors to curb abortion, pass a school prayer amendment, secure tuition tax credits, and oppose communism.

This chapter examines conservatism in American society. It argues that conservatives have become the most conspicuous feature of American politics in terms of intellectual engagement and ideological conviction. In effect, they have set out to redefine the moral and historical basis of the liberal mainstream. Organic conservatism, individualist conservatism, the conservative matrix, the religious right, neoconservatism are discussed.

This chapter develops three interrelated claims about the politics of governing social difference through religious rights and freedoms. First, conceiving and governing social difference through religious rights singles out individuals and groups for legal protection as religious individuals and collectivities. Second, governing through religious rights shapes how states and other political authorities distinguish groups from each other, often in law. Third, contemporary international religious freedom advocacy emphasizes belief as the core of religion. The chapter unfolds in three parts, each elaborating on various aspects of these claims through a combination of empirical illustrations and theoretical discussion. The first section on the global political production of religious difference draws on an extended discussion of the Rohingya in Myanmar. The second section on the creation of a landscape populated by faith communities and the effects on those excluded from such designations incorporates examples from the Central African Republic, Guatemala, India, and South Sudan. A final section on the mutually supportive relations between religious freedom advocacy, the creation of a believing religious subject, and the ideology of the free religious marketplace builds on the work of anthropologists and religious studies scholars who complicate the notion of belief as the core of religion.

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.

The growth of the Sunbelt, along with evangelicals’ rapidly rising socioeconomic status, gave evangelicals the financial resources and voting power to attract national political attention. When televangelists and megachurch pastors began speaking out on political questions, they attracted the notice of New Right political activists such as Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie. Several evangelical political organizations, including the California-based Christian Voice, mobilized evangelical voters on behalf of conservative Republican candidates in 1980, but the most successful of these organizations was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Though Falwell’s organization appealed to only a small segment of evangelicals, it attracted widespread media attention. Other evangelical leaders, such as Pat Robertson and James Robison, mobilized charismatic and Pentecostal Christians on behalf of politically conservative causes. Together these leaders created an interdenominational Religious Right that quickly established itself as a powerful interest group within the conservative Republican coalition.

This chapter examines leading figures and institutions of the Religious Right in the United States and the distinctive narrative form its public and political activism has taken from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present: namely, the jeremiad. The resurgence of publicly assertive religion has become the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny and the source of much political concern. Social scientists and policymakers have long presumed that as the world modernized it would inevitably secularize. The political ascendancy of the Religious Right in the United States and, more recently, the consequential militancy of radical Islamism confounds conventional wisdom of inevitable secularization. The chapter closes with a cursory comparison of the jeremiad with the jihad, the distinctive narrative form of radical Islamism, which reveals that despite strong rhetorical similarities between them, crucial differences persist in their political effects. Moreover, such a comparison reveals an important irony: just as the specter of resurgent religion has been undermining the longstanding academic confidence in the self‐evident inevitability of secularization, the perceived threat of secularization has been busy mobilizing the faithful both at home and abroad.

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 examines how a social movement/counter‐movement focus illuminates the attempt by some members of the religious right to change the orientations and assumptions of mainstream bioethicists. The mainstream of bioethics had developed in the last half century. Although discussion of ethical issues in medicine date at least back to Hippocrates in the fourth century BCE, bioethics as a specialized academic topic, combining medical choices and analysis, and as an explicit part of hospital and general practice, is a fairly recent development. The chapter shows how the conflict over whether Terry Schiavo should be taken off of life support provided a window for the religious right to challenge the then‐current standards of when someone's life could be terminated. They did it by using a variety of social movement tactics, including use of the media, court battles, and demonstrations. But they also set up alternative curricula, founded institutes and used the discourse of bioethics. In turn, mainstream bioethicists developed tactics that mirrored those used by the religious right. In the end, the assumptions of an academic sub‐discipline had been put in political play.

“The Divine Terrorist: Religion and Violence in American Apocalyptic Christianity.” Through an analysis of the psychological-religious themes found in the popular novels the Left Behind series, this chapter examines the connections between Christian theology and violence in American apocalyptic Christianity. The analysis reveals many important commonalities between the outlook found in the Left Behind series and that of religiously motivated terrorists from around the world. The expression of some of these themes in the rise of the religious right is also pointed out, and the violent potential of American apocalyptic Christianity is explored.

This chapter offers a brief history of evangelicalism. It traces the origins of fundamentalism and notes the distinction between the evangelicalism that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, as represented by a Billy Graham, and fundamentalism in its modern sense. The chapter discusses the rise of the religious right, then notes the three camps into which born-again Christians can be divided: traditionalists, including Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell; centrists, represented by Rick Warren; and modernists, for whom Jim Wallis is a leading spokesman. The chapter then presents the main characteristics of evangelical faith and adumbrates the variety and diversity of born-again beliefs. It also notes unexpected convictions expressed by born-again leaders including Robertson and Ted Haggard prior to his fall from grace.

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.

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 begins with a discussion of the 1832 secession crisis involving South Carolina, reminding us that the popular violence enacted against the Mormons occurred in the immediate context of national debates and crisis over the states' rights question. Constitutional interpretation unfolded against, and under the influence of, this backdrop. The same prevailing views favoring state autonomy over federalism that facilitated eventual civil war also facilitated Mormon oppression. The chapter thus offers a rare political and constitutional context for understanding the Mormons' difficulties, the development of Joseph Smith's political views, and his own involvement in the national campaign of 1844.

Chapter 2 details the evolution of the conservative movement and its interaction with the Republican Party from 1945 to the present. It provides a periodization of the modern American right which divides its growth into four distinct time spans. It distinguishes between the different strands of the conservative movement and it delineates the role of intellectuals, political leaders, organizational professionals and publicists as well as the role of specific components such as the neo-conservatives and the religious right. Particular attention is paid to the building of the conservative movement's infrastructure. Comparisons are made with developments on the right in other political systems, notably the United Kingdom. The chapter offers an interpretation of the causes of disunity on the right and their possible resolution.

In liberal democracies, one is unlikely to hear a principled case for religious intolerance, disabilities, and persecution. However, state and societal practices in many contemporary Islamic states are a reminder that religious liberty in the most fundamental sense cannot be taken for granted as the birthright of modern societies — even those which have entered international legal commitments affirming freedom of religion. This chapter first considers the broad nature of religious freedom and briefly outlines the various constitutional laws that confer protection for religious liberty in different nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, as well as the guarantees in international law for religious rights. The chapter concludes by exploring the difficult question of how ‘religion’ is defined based on three approaches: the subjective-functional approach, the substantive-content approach, and the Strasbourg approach.

Recent decades have produced a myriad of attempts by religious groups to influence public affairs. From the efforts of clergy in the 1960s to advance the cause of civil rights to the protests organized by religious groups in the 1980s against abortion, the last part of the 20th century has given us ample opportunity to consider the ways in which religious convictions can make a difference in public life. The formal dismantling of Moral Majority marked a significant turning point. It brought an important chapter in the efforts of conservative Christians to influence American politics to a close. The religious Right is a particularly instructive case for considering how believers with firm convictions in the divine truth of their cause confront the pluralism inherent in American public life. The religious Right underwent changes that are themselves valuable lessons in the pragmatic norms of public policy. The chapter also provides a helpful case for considering how morality functions in the public arena. Above all, it represents a movement that was remarkably adept in the use of symbolism for political purposes.

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.