The Christian Right's Partisan Commitment

In the midst of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign of 1984, Jerry Falwell gave a clear partisan message to the 2 million new voters that his Moral Majority had registered. "The Democratic party," Falwell said, "is basically controlled by the radical ideas of a dangerous minority—homosexuals, militant feminists, socialists, freezeniks, and others of the ilk." By contrast, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, he said, were "God's instruments in rebuilding America."¹

Observers at the time were shocked that religion and politics had become so entangled and that conservative evangelicals had brought a political platform into their churches. But the pundits may have missed the real story. Most of the popular and scholarly analysis of Falwell and his Moral Majority focused on what had prompted evangelicals, who many journalists erroneously believed had long been apolitical, to leave their pews and enter the political arena.² But conservative Protestants had been politically active for decades. They had campaigned against evolution in the 1920s, denounced communism in the 1950s, and mobilized against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. What was new in the 1980s was not evangelicals' interest in politics, but rather a partisan alliance between the GOP and evangelical leaders. After 1980 conservative evangelicals became one of the Republican Party's most loyal constituencies. In turn, evangelicals' commitment to the Republican Party gave them a degree of political influence that they had never previously enjoyed. An explanation of the Christian Right's success thus revolves around two central questions: What prompted evangelicals to make a lasting commitment to the Republican Party, and what prompted the Republican Party to make an alliance with evangelicals? In other words, how and when did the GOP become God's Own Party?

In the early 20th century evangelicals and fundamentalists (two closely related groups of conservative Protestants who were sometimes at odds with each other but shared a common belief in the authority of the Bible, salvation through faith in Christ, and the importance of personal conversion) did not have the support of any major party in their political campaigns. As a result, they exercised little national political influence. Their most well-known political campaign during the 1920s, the crusade against evolution, was nonpartisan. Although conservative Protestants in both the North and the South were united in their desire to restore a Christian-based moral order in the nation and in their belief that alcohol, Catholic political power, and secularism threatened that moral order, they were divided along regional lines when it came to party politics. Many Midwestern evangelicals, including the revivalist Billy Sunday, were staunch Republicans, but in the South, evangelicals were Democrats, as was the country's most famous anti-evolutionist, William Jennings Bryan. In 1928 conservative Protestants throughout the nation briefly united against Al Smith, a Catholic Democratic presidential candidate who opposed Prohibition. But by the 1930s the brief moment of evangelical partisan unity was over. Fundamentalists in the North decried Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as socialistic and castigated the president for ending Prohibition. Southern Baptists, on the other hand, welcomed the New Deal. While they were deeply disappointed in Roosevelt's decision to legalize alcohol, their appreciation of his relief programs was sufficient to win them back to the Democratic fold.³

The Cold War brought a new generation of evangelicals, including Southerners, into the Republican Party. Evangelicals and fundamentalists had been speaking out against communism since the early 1920s, so when the federal government made opposition to communism the central platform of its foreign policy, conservative Protestants eagerly enlisted in the campaign and began to view the government as God's instrument in the fight against evil. At first, their support for the federal government's anticommunism did not result in a partisan commitment. A majority of evangelical voters supported Democratic president Harry Truman, a Southern Baptist and strong Cold Warrior, in the election of 1948. But Truman's failure to win a decisive victory in the Korean War and stem the spread of communism prompted evangelicals and fundamentalists to look elsewhere for leadership. In December 1950, Bob Jones, Jr., denounced the "inexcusable stupidity or vicious betrayal" of...