How Would Jesus Vote? The Prehistory of the Christian Right

Gaines M. Foster. Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xv + 318 pp. Figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cl), $19.95 (p).

Conservative political leaders tend to be terrible historians, Leonard J. Moore has argued, because their Whiggish views of American civilization collapse under the weight of the evidence. ¹ Gaines M. Foster would agree with Moore, albeit in a different sense. His Moral Reconstruction counters the Christian Right's claims that their forebears were abolitionists or civil rights activists. Instead, in this impressively researched book, Foster finds a precedent for their politicalactivism in the "Christian lobby" of the late nineteenth century. He has combed Congressional records to recount the tale of a loose coalition of groups including the National Reform Association (NRA), the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), that fought to establish the religious authority of the state and to expand the moral powers of the federal government.

Foster is, of course,not the first to tell the tale of such reformers. His intent is to stress some novel themes, primarily how they established a permanent network of lobbyists on Capitol Hill. These Christian lobbyists, Foster argues, were pioneers of "special interest politics" who sharply altered the government's role in imposing morality in the late nineteenth century. Their crowning achievement, national prohibition, found its strongest advocates among northern Republicans and southern Democrats, bringing them together in a way that would have been unthinkable before the Civil War.

The Christian lobby's mixed record suggests why the Christian Right has never claimed it in their search for a usable past. For every victory—in addition to national prohibition (1919), the best known was the Comstock Law (1873)—there were countless defeats. The book is full of phrases like "no legislation resulted," "only marginal success," "none ever became law," and "the lobbyists could not work their will alone." Many of the proposed bills never made it out of committee, and prohibition passed more than half a century after it was first proposed. Early temperance legislation sometimes met with "as much merriment as serious consideration" by members of Congress (p. 31). Time and again, the lobby was forced to settle for regulation of morals in the District of Columbia rather than the entire country, or for scientific temperance education in federally sponsored schools rather than sweeping national temperance laws. Foster is keen on this ambiguous record in a way that the descendants of the Christian lobby cannot afford to be. For in the end, he writes, moral reconstruction "did not alter in any fundamental way the religious authority of the government," and in fact, the "government's commitment to personal liberty . . . deepened." The Founders built a tension into the moral polity of the United States that remains in the twenty-first century: "a democratic state needs a moral citizenry but cannot force its citizens to be moral" (p. 234).

Foster begins to lay out his argument in a brief summary of the antebellum and Civil War background to postwar debates over federal moral legislation. The rich implications of his findings complement the work of Richard Carwardine on evangelicals and politics. ² Before the war, most Americans thought, "the federal government had no religious authority and no power to legislate morality, which belonged solely to the states" (p. 12). "Most Americans" included most southerners. One of Foster's most significant contributions is to demonstrate that the South as the "Bible Belt" did not emerge until after the Civil War. ³

Like other Americans, and even more fiercely so, antebellum southerners emphasized personal liberty and moral suasion. They did so not only because of a culture of honor that prized drinking, gambling, and dueling, but also because of the politics of slavery. Voting on moral legislation consistently split along the same regional...