The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel

7. The Political and Religious Landscape Shifts, 1980–2008

| 189 7 The Political and Religious Landscape Shifts, 1980–2008 “To stand against Israel is to stand against God,” declared Jerry Falwell in his 1980 missive, Listen America.1 Falwell’s explosion on the political scene with the formation of the religious political activist group, the Moral Majority, signaled a dramatic shift in the relationship between religion and politics in America. The cultural and political relevance of liberal mainline Protestants dissipated in the 1980s, the result of a trend begun in the previous decade. It was replaced by the growing numbers and power of a new political player—American evangelicalism. Falwell’s declaration about God and Israel represented a new strain of religious foreign policy interests, which, in the midst of the Cold War, emphasized the coming Armageddon and the role Israel would play in the end of days. Although the tendency to emphasize end times eschatology among certain fundamentalist and dispensationalist evangelicals had existed since the turn of the century, its adherents had remained small in number and politically unimportant. Reaction to the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s catalyzed a sophisticated counterattack to liberalism among many American Protestants . Mainline Protestants reeled from the shock of their seemingly sudden displacement. Contemporary assessments of religious definitions echo earlier scholarly frustration. In the scholarly literature of the 1980s, one can easily detect a collective hand wringing among religious scholars and other academics over the question of evangelicalism. Reaction to the waning of liberal, mainstream Protestants in numbers and influence produced a range of responses from shock to self-examination to surprise. Who were the evangelicals and how had they risen to power in numbers and political influence? The rise of Ronald Reagan and the birth of the New Religious Right (and its many forms, including the Moral Majority and later the Christian Coalition) had rapidly shifted the political and religious landscape in the United States and 190 | The Political and Religious Landscape Shifts had profound implications for U.S.–Israeli policies in the following decades. Moreover, a particularly potent tendency within conservative Protestantism —dispensational premillennialism—appeared to be growing increasingly influential politically. With it came distinct views of the role of Israel in endtimes eschatology and the responsibility of American Christians to remain faithful to pro-Israeli policies. Liberal Protestants and intellectuals worried that their evangelical brethren of this particular strain appeared to be trigger -happy endorsers of “Armageddon theology.”2 Figuring out who these Protestants were and what they believed became a near obsession among researchers and liberal Protestant leaders alike. Far from appearing to be the “consensus religious landscape” described by historians in the 1950s, the American religious landscape of the 1980s appeared more fractured than ever.3 Americans abandoned their historical mainline denominations in the heart of the city and struck out to form new suburban evangelical churches with increasing emphasis on orthodox Protestant theology. “The fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and evangelical churches have clearly gained in visibility, morale, and strength: their code-words have become part of American culture,” religious scholar Martin E. Marty explained.4 Once considered “marginal,” these churches could no longer be viewed as such, he argued, especially when one evaluated the Gallup Poll statistics that revealed an increasing number of Americans self-identifying as “born-again,” the evangelical claims made by Presidents Carter, Ford, and Reagan (and third-party candidate John Anderson), and the decline of mainline church memberships.5 One scholar, in 1991, referred to the newly powerful set of Protestants as “the evangelical mainstream.”6 What seemed to startle Marty and others, however, was the nature of the rise of evangelical power. Marty characterized it as “organized, belligerent and aggressive, lumpish, unwilling to be filtered.”7 All defined it as a reaction against modernity . Most important, all recognized it as a force to be reckoned with. Theological Considerations While many liberal mainline Protestants embraced the spirit of ecumenism that pervaded the mainline churches and world church organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals defined themselves as defenders of orthodox theology. Such a protective stance of traditional Protestant theology resulted in ever larger evangelical congregations as the laity increasingly distanced themselves from their leaders. James R. Kelly, in an article assessing the nature of ecumenism in the United States in 1979, concluded that “a spirit of The Political and Religious Landscape Shifts | 191 ecumenism was found to be widely affirmed and generally non-relativistic, but it still is not...