Some ponderings on the religious right

The rise of the Christian Right coincided with a seismic shift in American politics that has its roots in the racist reaction to the Civil Rights movement and desegregation laws and court cases. As much as Evangelical African-American churches led the Civil Rights movement, Evangelical fundamentalist churches such as the Southern Baptist Church were the bastion of white resistance to integration. The monolithic South was Democratic through the 1960s. As the Democratic Party became the party supporting racial justice and antipoverty programs, Republican candidates such as Richard Nixon and subsequently Ronald Reagan played the race card to precision stripping away typically Democratic voters into the Republican camp. With the introduction of abortion as a social issue, conservative churches that were already organized around racial intolerance began to formally organize themselves into political entities starting with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1970s and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the 1980s.
The social issues of abortion and gay rights were used by these organizations to drive a massive drive of Southern evangelicals into the Republican Party. The organizations minimized any type of engagement on economic issues except to advocate for lower taxes. The role of the Christian right in moving the country conservative can not be understated. Religious conservatives now dominate all three branches of the federal government and have made significant progress on their policy agenda.
Whether this is a long-term change in American politics remains to be seen. Some Evangelicals are tacking back to the center or (heaven forbid!) left of center. Jim Wallis contends that his religion has been hijacked in some much that “Evangelical Christianity has come to represent a very potent political force and the more important power bloc within the Republican Party� (10). He cites the need and attempts to provide an alternative evangelical Christian voice that empathizes with the Right on social issues like abortion, but focuses more on economic and environmental justice issues. Ron Sider similarly calls for an agenda that includes attention to the poor, human rights and social justice. Along with Tony Campolo, these three men have attempted to stem the tide against the Religious Right groups throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A number of new groups from Catholic, mainline, evangelical and ecumenical traditions have sprung up in the last five years to articulate a progressive Christian political view and to organize themselves.
Even many conservative evangelicals are disenchanted with the leaders such as Falwell and Robertson. Ed Dobson issues a number of warnings to fellow conservatives about the role of the church in politics and to what degree Christianity should be used to promote a certain political agenda. He has drawn vehement criticism from other conservatives for separating his church from political activity such as petition signing and voter registration. He also takes issue with some of the framing of issues such as “God kicked us out of pubic schools�. He looks at such statement as theological heresy since God is omnipresent and hypocrisy from leaders who refuse to engage their own children in the public school system.
Overall, a major shift has occurred in American politics, but political history is that of a pendulum as different sides organize themselves and articulate a political vision with varying degrees of effectiveness over time. Whether the next wave moves Evangelicals back to a sense of progressivism reminiscent of the turn of the last century remains to be seen, but much of it will depend on the ability of the left to articulate a meaningful vision and political agenda.