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65 AmeriCAn CHAnge And religiouS engAgement, 1942–1976 2 In a 1965 sermon called “Ministers and Marchers,” a young Rev. Jerry Falwell criticized liberal ministers because of their involvement in the political process, which took away from what he saw as a minister’s primary responsibility to preach the gospel. By 1979, Falwell would seemingly do an aboutface on this position, utilizing his stature as a popular television preacher to mobilize, alongside other prominent ministers, a network of religious conservatives for involvement in conservative politics. In that short span of fourteen years, Falwell’s mission morphed from political isolation for the sake of gospel preaching to a new “three-fold” ministerial vision to “number one, get people saved; number two, get them baptized; number three, get them registered to vote.”1 What occurred to fashion such stark transformation in Falwell, I contend, probably has less to do with an internal shift in one man’s conscience than an external shift in the culture around him, for there were several foundational changes in American culture and politics during the 1960s and 1970s that led Falwell and millions of other like-minded religious conservatives to mobilize as a political force. With a broader view aimed at trying to determine why politics took a sustained religious turn in 1976 and, more importantly, in 1980, I seek in this chapter to distill the marketplace for religious rhetoric as it emerged leading up to those years. That is, what occurred in the political environment to make religion salient in American politics by the late 1970s? Without much reflection, one could opine that the sudden 1979–1980 rise of Falwell’s Moral Majority, as well as other similar groups that came to constitute the new Religious Right (nRR), caused candidates to “spiritualize” their strategies in order to curry the favor of a new cadre of religious voters 66 g Stumping god in 1980; then, when these groups stuck around, so did the strategy. on the one hand, I do not dispute this interpretation, for there is much truth to it, and indeed, we should view the emergence of the nRR in 1979–1980 as the full realization of an ongoing process of engagement for religious conservatives . But the religious turn in campaigning that began in 1976 occurred several years before the nRR emerged, and the nRR did not emerge out of nowhere. Thus, to gain a fuller and more accurate understanding of why presidential campaigns began to employ religious arguments (as well as why presidential politics developed a particular religious tenor), we must first dig a little deeper to begin to understand the engagement of religious conservatives in the political process, which was a gradual, but still traceable , process well before it reached a fever pitch in 1979–1980. our task, then, is to determine when, why, and how religious conservatives began to engage in the political process on the basis of particular religious beliefs—to elucidate the marketplace for religious rhetoric as that marketplace developed prior to the 1976 election.2 Social movement theorists have articulated some sophisticated theories related to the mobilization of religious conservatives in the United States. I am less interested in the specific combinations of macro-level independent variables (social, economic, political, or otherwise) that brought social movements such as the nRR into being than I am in understanding what contributed most to religious conservatives’ permanent mobilization in presidential politics. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is important, I think, to acknowledge that I am not identifying, nor do I aim to identify, every single contributing variable. Instead, having identified in the previous chapter that movement conservatives gained interest in religious conservatives leading up to the 1980 election, it is now important to identify some of the specific reasons why religious conservatives in turn became interested in politics generally and mobilized in such a way that drew the attention of presidential hopefuls more specifically. The answer to this can be found by examining five main factors. The first has to do with the emergence of evangelical Christianity from the backwaters to the mainstream of American life. After World War II, liberal and many mainline Protestant denominations lost members, while more conservative denominations grew. By the 1970s evangelicalism caught many people, including the elite media, off guard with its growth and popularity , culminating in a born-again president and Newsweek’s proclamation of 1976 as “The year of the evangelical.” This newfound stature was [3.133.12.172] Project MUSE...

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