Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (review)

Foster's deeply researched and clearly argued book details the relationship between a small number of Protestant Christian lobbyists and the Federal Congress. While readers will learn much about the organizations associated with the Christian lobbyists, this, ultimately, is a book about the "reconstruction of the American state" (p. 7). The Christian lobby, which traced it roots back to the Civil War and was most active from the mid-1890's to 1920, pressed Congress for laws which would "expand the moral powers of the federal government and to establish the religious authority of the state" (p. 1). As a whole the lobbyists (like the multitudes that they represented) saw morality mostly in terms of personal virtue and thus they sought laws which would "control drinking, obscenity, polygamy, divorce, Sabbath observance, gambling, smoking, prizefighting, prostitution, and sex with underage girls" (p. 3). Many of the lobbyists, but not all of them, also sought the adoption of the so-called "Christian Amendment" which would have changed the language of the preamble of the constitution to include explicit recognition that the government derived its power from God.

In seeking these goals, the lobbyists sought to overturn what Foster calls the antebellum moral policy, which left "the regulation of morals to the states and the promotion of morality among its citizens primarily to the churches" (p. 10). In the period leading up to the Civil War, Democrats, especially Southern Democrats worried about the crusade against slavery, emerged as the organized political force against any expansion of the federal government's role in regulating morality. Thus, when the Christian lobby first emerged, its allies in the Congress were Republicans who came into the party out of the reform tradition. But after Reconstruction and the establishment of white supremacy in the South, the Christian lobbyists formed working partnerships with Southern Democrats. With their new allies, the lobbyists (and the groups they represented), pushed through Congress effective federal policies against polygamy, laws banning obscenity and prizefight films from interstate commerce and the mails, and laws that would restrict prostitution, sex with underage girls, and divorce. Most significantly, they were crucial in the creation of the prohibition of alcohol constitutional amendment.

While the lobbyists did expand the power of the federal government, the Congress never fully gave them what they wanted. Much of the antebellum moral polity remained intact. Congress never accepted the idea of a federal police power over morality; rather it merely patched together a functional police power from existing delegated federal powers. Congress mostly left it to the states to deal with the regulating of morality. Also, "Congress refused altogether to establish the religious authority of the federal government" (p. 229). Indeed, Congress repeatedly refused to embrace the Christian Amendment and refused to enact nation-wide Sunday closing laws. Moreover, the Christian lobbyists won their victories not by converting Congress to their point of view, but by the mobilizing of political pressure; they expanded the powers of the federal government, but that government "despite their efforts, remained essentially secular" (p. 231).