Religious Right Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The religious right refers to the political movement of Christian conservatives, most of whom are evangelical Protestants, which began in the United States in the 1970s, gathered momentum in the 1980s, and became institutionalized in the 1990s. Some supporters actually see the term religious right as derogatory, preferring instead the appellation profamily movement. The religious right is best classified as a social movement, although many of its social movement organizations are well-established interest groups. The movement is perhaps most noteworthy for the significant extent to which it has mobilized grassroots activism at the state and local levels, especially in recent years. Although the religious right has not brought about large numbers of substantial, transforming policy victories, the movement has had great success in affecting electoral outcomes from the top of the ballot to the bottom. The roots of this success lie in the religious right’s thoroughgoing partisan realignment of millions of evangelical Protestant voters. At least three-quarters of all evangelicals are Republicans.

Religious And Political Orientations

From a religious perspective, evangelical Protestants are distinctive in three major ways. First, they take the conservative view that scripture is the revealed word of God. Second, they emphasize the “born-again” experience, in which Jesus Christ is intentionally accepted as one’s personal savior. Third, they engage in evangelism, which means that they actively seek to convert others to Christianity. They constitute 25 to 30 percent of the U.S. population, and their numbers have grown steadily since the 1970s.

The religious right’s political and social agendas traditionally have been rooted in an overriding desire to preserve a traditional, nuclear, heterosexual model of family. The movement’s opposition to abortion and gay rights is well known and rooted in a worldview that rejects nontraditional interpretations of gender roles, family structure, and sexual morality. Certain factions of the movement also emphasize education policy (including advocacy of home schooling and the battle over biology and sex education curricula in public schools), religion’s place in the public square (by supporting school prayer and other public expressions of Christian faith), and obscenity in the media.

The Early Years

Evangelicals first attracted attention as a political force in 1980 when they voted in large numbers for Ronald Reagan. Their intense and sudden mobilization in that election year marked a sharp departure from a long-standing evangelical tradition of political avoidance. For generations, evangelical Protestant leaders had argued that politics was a dirty and sinful forum; Christians, they felt, were better served by avoiding politics. Events of the 1960s and 1970s, however, caused a sea change in evangelical opinions about the propriety of political participation. Many evangelicals felt threatened by the sweeping social changes of the 1960s. They lamented the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions decreeing school prayer unconstitutional and abortion constitutional. There was also great disappointment in evangelical circles with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a professed born-again Christian and Sunday school teacher. During the 1970s, evangelical leaders began to conclude that their political views were not being represented by what they viewed as an increasingly secular American government.

Evangelical Baptist minister and religious broadcaster Jerry Falwell noticed this sense of unease and responded to it by founding the Moral Majority, an interest group designed to represent religiously and politically conservative Americans. Along with several smaller interest groups, the Moral Majority mobilized millions of evangelicals to vote for Reagan in 1980 and attracted substantial attention (first from the media, later from scholars) to itself and its high-profile leader. For example, Falwell was listed among the ten “Most Admired Men in America” in Good Housekeeping magazine several times in the 1980s. As the decade wore on, however, the religious right began to lose some of its energy. Several evangelical religious broadcasters became embroiled in various sexual and financial scandals in the late 1980s, and despite its great visibility, the Moral Majority had won few victories on Capitol Hill. Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989.

The Christian Coalition

A new leader emerged in 1988 to lead the religious right into the next decade, however: Rev. Marion “Pat” Robertson. A Yale-educated lawyer and religious broadcaster, Robertson made a surprisingly strong run for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination (he came in second in the Iowa Caucuses, ahead of George H. W. Bush). His presidential bid ultimately failed, but Robertson used the momentum his campaign had generated to launch a new interest group to represent the religious right—the Christian Coalition. Robertson’s organization went on to become one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington in the 1990s. Its lobbying tactics were much more refined than those of the Moral Majority. It also solidified evangelical voters’ commitment to the Republican Party and its candidates, in large part because of the voting guides it published and distributed in evangelical churches across the United States. The Christian Coalition is a shadow of its former self. It has endured many changes in leadership, a dramatic falloff in membership and fund-raising, and a messy (and ultimately unsuccessful) battle with the Internal Revenue Service, which accused the organization of illegal electioneering because its voter guides almost always scored Republican candidates favorably and Democratic candidates unfavorably.

Despite the decline of the Christian Coalition, the religious right remains alive and well as a force in American politics. Its strength lies not in one visible national-level organization but in its sophisticated networks of evangelical (and, increasingly, traditional Catholic) activists at the state and local levels. Many conservative Christians have been elected to school boards, city and county government posts, and state legislatures. Conservative Christian activists also hold enormous sway over many state and local-level Republican Party organizations. The primary strategy of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004 focused on mobilizing so-called values voters, a code word for conservative Christians, in battleground states. The religious right displays little of the Moral Majority’s political inexperience. Instead, conservative Christians are savvy participants in the American political process.

Bibliography:

Green, John C., James L. Guth, Corwin E. Smidt, and Lyman A. Kellstedt, eds. Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Green, John C., Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, eds. The Christian Right in American Politics: Marching to the Millennium. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003.
The Values Campaign? The Christian Right in the 2004 Elections. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006.
Oldfield, Duane M. The Right and the Righteous: The Christian Right Confronts the Republican Party. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Wilcox, Clyde, and Carin Larson. Onward Christian Soldiers? The Religious Right in American Politics. 3rd ed. Boulder, Colo.:Westview, 2006.

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