The Christian right are Christian political factions characterized by their strong support of socially conservative and traditionalist policies. Christian conservatives seek to influence politics and public policy with their interpretation of the teachings of Christianity.
In the United States, the Christian right (otherwise known as the New Christian Right or the Religious Right) is an informal coalition which was formed around a core of conservative Evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics. The Christian right draws additional support from politically conservative mainline Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and LDS. The movement in American politics became a dominant feature of U.S. conservatism from the late 1970s onwards. The Christian right gained powerful influence within the Republican Party during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Its influence draws from grassroots activism as well as from focus on social issues and the ability to motivate the electorate around those issues. With the ongoing second presidency of Donald Trump, the influence of the Christian right and Christian nationalism have risen heavily within the United States.
The Christian right has advanced socially conservative positions on issues such as creationism in public education, school prayer, temperance, Christian nationalism, and Sunday Sabbatarianism, as well as opposition to the teaching of biological evolution, secularism, LGBTQ rights, abortion, euthanasia, pornography, embryonic stem cell research, and the use of drugs. Although the term Christian right is most commonly associated with U.S. politics, similar Christian conservative groups can be found in the political cultures of other Christian-majority countries.
Terminology In the United States, the Christian right is otherwise known as the New Christian Right (NCR) or the Religious Right, although some consider the religious right to be "a slightly broader category than Christian Right".
John C. Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life states that Jerry Falwell used the label religious right to describe himself. Gary Schneeberger, vice president of media and public relations for Focus on the Family, states that "[t]erms like 'religious right' have been traditionally used in a pejorative way to suggest extremism. The phrase 'socially conservative evangelicals' is not very exciting, but that's certainly the way to do it."Sarah Pulliam: Phrase 'Religious Right' Misused, Conservatives Say Christianity Today (Web-only), February 12, 2009.
Evangelical Protestant leaders like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council have called attention to the problem of equating the term Christian right with Evangelical Christianity. Although Evangelicals constitute the core constituency of the Christian right, not all Evangelicals fit the description, and a number of Roman Catholics are also members of the Christian right's core base. The problem of description is further complicated by the fact that the label religious conservative or conservative Christian may apply to other religious groups as well. For instance, Anabaptist Christians (most notably Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, the Bruderhof Communities, Schwarzenau Brethren, River Brethren, and Apostolic Christians) are theologically, socially, and culturally conservative; however, there are no overtly political organizations associated with these Christian denominations, which are usually indifferent towards politics. Evangelical theologian and pastor Tim Keller stated that conservative Christianity (theology) predates the Christian right (politics). Keller asserted that being a theological conservative does not require a person to be a political conservative, and that some political progressive views around economics, helping the poor, the redistribution of wealth, and racial diversity are compatible with theologically conservative Christianity. Conservative writer Rod Dreher has stated that a Christian can be theologically conservative while still holding left-wing economic views or even socialist views.
History
Background and predecessors In 1863, representatives from eleven Christian denominations in the United States organized the National Reform Association. The organization's goal was to amend the U.S. Constitution to make the country a Christian state. The National Reform Association is one of the first organizations through which adherents from several Christian denominations worked together in an attempt to enshrine Christianity in American governance. The Christian Civic League of Maine (founded in 1897), and other early organizations of the Christian right, supported the aims of the temperance movement. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were also a number of Evangelical Protestants who supported progressive causes. The Scopes trial in 1925 reportedly resulted in most Evangelicals abandoning the political arena in an organized fashion. An Evangelical political subculture emerged, largely isolated from the outside world, consisting of various organizations that laid the groundwork for the Christian right in the late 1970s.
While the beginning of the influence of the Christian right is typically traced to the late 1970s, Daniel K. Williams argues in God's Own Party that it had actually been involved in politics for most of the twentieth century. He also notes that the Christian right had previously been in alliance with the Republican Party in the 1940s through 1960s on matters such as opposition to communism and defending "a Protestant-based moral order". Similarly, scholar Celestini Carmen traces the John Birch Society (JBS)'s focus on culture war issues and rhetoric of apocalypticism, conspiracism, and fear to the rise of the Christian right through JBS members and Christian rightist activists Tim LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, and others.
In light of the state atheism espoused by communist countries aligned with the Eastern Bloc during the height of the Cold War (1950s–1960s), secularization came to be seen by many Americans sympathetic to proto-Christian right narratives as the biggest threat to American and Christian values.Merriman, Scott A. Religion and the Law in America: An Encyclopedia of Personal Belief and Public Policy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007. Print. "In 1956, the United States, changed its motto to 'In God We Trust,' in large part to differentiate itself from the Soviet Union, its Cold War enemy that was widely seen as promoting atheism." These fears resulted in a number of actions by the U.S. federal government throughout the 1950s, including the establishment of the National Day of Prayer, the addition of the motto "In God We Trust" to U.S. currency, and the addition of the phrase "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. The alienation of Southern Democrats from the Democratic Party contributed to the rise of the right, as the counterculture of the 1960s provoked fear of social disintegration amongst many conservatives. In addition, as the Democratic Party became identified with progressive and liberal policies, social conservatives joined the Republican Party in increasing numbers. Despite these trends, many White Evangelicals remained politically inactive and were not a unified voting bloc, with many on the Evangelical left believing political activism and engagement to be inconsistent with their beliefs.
Early history and rise, 1970s–1980s The movement that would become the Christian right had much of its origin in the work and activism of conservative operative Paul Weyrich, who had foreseen the potential to organize conservative Evangelicals and Roman Catholics into a political force in the early 1960s and had reportedly started trying to do so during the 1964 U.S. Presidential election. Weyrich tried a number of wedge issues throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, including abortion, pornography, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, and school prayer, without success. Weyrich was not successful until the legality of segregation academies began to be challenged in the early 1970s. In 1970, the Internal Revenue Service adopted a policy of rescinding the tax-exempt status of private schools that did not admit African–American students, and the following year, the Supreme Court ruled in Coit v. Green that organizations that voluntarily practice racial discrimination are not eligible for tax exemption. The origin of this case was a legal challenge to the tax-exempt status of a group of segregation academies in Holmes County, Mississippi. Many of the schools targeted by these rulings were church-sponsored, and these actions reportedly caught the attention of a number of evangelical leaders, including Jerry Falwell. The largest educational institution targeted by the IRS was Bob Jones University, which lost its tax exemption in 1976 due to its policy prohibiting interracial dating. This action reportedly further caught the ire of evangelical leaders, many of whom believed that the IRS was overstepping its legal authority. Weyrich also sought to frame the IRS crackdown on segregation academics as an issue of government intrusion and attacks on religious freedom, effectively diverting attention from the racial aspect of the issue.
During the 1976 U.S. Presidential election, Jimmy Carter, who described himself as an Evangelical, born-again Christian, received the support of a majority of American evangelicals and the emerging Christian right largely because of his much-acclaimed religious conversion. However, the issue of segregation academies carried over into Carter's presidency, and in 1978, the IRS proposed a new rule that would have revoked the tax exemption of private schools based on their racial demographic composition relative to that of their respective communities. While this rule never went into effect, it provoked fierce backlash and protests from evangelical leaders and church congregants alike, with many believing it to be an attack on non-discriminatory institutions and religious freedom. The IRS reportedly received over 150,000 letters in opposition to this proposal, mostly from Christians. This action reportedly encouraged many white evangelicals to become politically active for the first time, and turned them against Jimmy Carter. Weyrich later stated that what got evangelicals involved in politics was "Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation", and Richard Viguerie said that the 1978 IRS action "kicked a sleeping dog." Others, including religious right leader Ed Dobson and conservative activist Grover Norquist have affirmed this as the beginnings of the religious right.