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198 7 The Success and Failure of the Religious Right, 1970s– 2010 Religious conservatives still lack a theology of direct political action.1 — Ralph Reed The 1970s witnessed the continuation of national political trends that had begun in the previous decade. Republican strategists sought to capitalize on the anger of white voters evident in Alabama Governor George Wallace’s in- dependent presidential campaign in 1968. This Southern Strategy bore fruit for Richard Nixon in his successful 1972 reelection bid, as more conservative whites in the South and ethnic blue- collar voters in the North deserted the Democrats. The 1970s were also building years for what was becoming movement conservatism. Several key elements came together during this period. Sunbelt business interests helped bankroll new conservative think- tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation (founded in 1973) and the libertarian Cato Institute (established in 1977). Further, the passage of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 revealed how conservatives, like the campaign’s leader Howard Jarvis, could draw upon middle- class discontent over taxes. The decade also saw the emergence of two influential movement fund- raisers. Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich (both formerly active in the Goldwater campaign) made effective use of direct- mail campaigns and other techniques that others would employ successfully during the 1980s and 1990s. Although a traditionalist Catholic, Weyrich was instrumental in creating an essential building block of the Religious Right in 1978, the Moral Majority, led by Fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell (1933–2007). Ronald Reagan’s lopsided election victory in 1980 was built upon the energy these varied elements generated. Reagan drew upon the grassroots conservatism gaining ground since at least the Goldwater candidacy but also included antiregulation probusiness groups and neoconservative intellectuals. Finally, Reagan’s nostalgic invocations of a simpler American past and criticism of the cultural legacy of the 1960s attracted many Protestant conservatives.2 Protestants and American Conservatism: A Short History. Gillis J. Harp, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199977413.003.0008 199 The Success and Failure of the Religious Right 199 Thus, during the 1970s, the previously disparate collection of politically conservative evangelicals became a well- organized movement and received significant media attention. Indeed, the broader impact evangelicals came to enjoy prompted George Gallup to label 1976 “the year of the evangelical.”3 As evangelicals moved closer to the forefront of the public square, few of them grounded their political activism in fresh biblical study or historically informed doctrinal analysis. A handful did engage in systematic theological reflection about cultural and political matters. Arguably, two of the more influential evangelical Protestant thinkers during the 1970s were Rousas John Rushdoony (1916– 2001) and Francis Schaeffer (1912– 1984). Although they sought to root Christian political action in deeper philosophical and biblical analysis, their conclusions did not depart sig- nificantly from the well- worn paths established in the 1920s and 1930s. How they arrived at their political positions looked different in some respects, but the ide- ological destination was fairly familiar. Both Rushdoony and Schaeffer drew criticism from a few evangelicals, especially academics with confessional Reformed backgrounds, but this censure did not appear to hurt their popularity. Indeed, Schaeffer proved to have an especially broad influence. Furthermore, by the mid-1970s, systematic political mobilization of evangelicals emerged nationally, first under Falwell and the Moral Majority, which he founded in 1979, and then connected to the presidential candidacy of Pentecostal television personality Pat Robertson (1930- ). These and similar groups supported a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, allow prayer in public schools, censor pornography, oppose gay marriage, and restrict government intervention in the private economy. The limited success of both the Moral Majority and Robertson’s candidacy, at least in terms of producing concrete public policy, gave birth to a more pragmatic approach and a more reflective and refined message during the 1990s under political strategist Ralph Reed (1961- ) and academic and journalist Marvin Olasky (1950- ). The Moral Majority and similar organizations associated with the Religious Right brought a robust mor- alism to the political arena, and they served to strengthen traditional American concern for individual accountability and limited government with supposed biblical sanction. Yet, by identifying their opponents as champions of secular humanism, which they denounced as a radical philosophy opposed to nearly everything Americans had once held sacred, they made pragmatic political compromise more difficult. At the same time, their deepening attachment to the Republican Party made them vulnerable to accusations of simple partisanship. Despite the more nuanced writings of Reed and Olasky, the activity of Reed’s Christian Coalition (CC) became indistinguishable from other secular lobbyists or ideologically based pressure groups. Evangelical conservatives reverted to earlier limited government 200 200 Protestants and American Conservatism polemics by the turn of the millennium with the emergence of the Tea Party and the rise of Fox television host and Mormon convert Glenn Beck. Hence, despite some shifts in focus, agenda, and strategy during the last quarter of the century, religious conservatives came full circle, returning by 2000 to the kind of nostalgic constitutionalism or civil religion with a comparatively thin Christian gloss that had characterized their movement toward political conservatism earlier in the twentieth century. Movement Theologians: Rushdoony and Schaeffer Although he remained more of a fringe figure than Schaeffer, and his postmil- lennialism and his literalist application of Old Testament civil law were not embraced by most evangelicals, Rushdoony’s approach enjoyed a surprisingly broad influence during the last quarter of the century. In fact, his son- in- law, Gary North, argues that Rushdoony’s “writings are the source of many of the core ideas of the New Christian Right.”4 Rushdoony’s background and education made him an unlikely theorist for a movement of conservative, suburban white Protestants. Born in New York City in 1916, the son of Armenian immigrants, Rushdoony obtained his BA in English and MA in Education from the University of California at Berkeley, before studying divinity at the Pacific School of Religion, a mainline seminary founded by ecumenically minded Congregationalists. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church U. S. A. in 1944 but joined J. Gresham Machen’s more confessional splinter denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, in 1958— at about the same time he and his first wife (the mother of his six children) were divorced. As a young pastor in California, Rushdoony was influenced by James Fifield’s robust defense of free market capitalism and warnings about communist subversion (see Chapter 6). Rushdoony read avidly SM’s organ Faith and Freedom and was especially impressed by articles critical of public education penned by Congregationalist pastor Edmund Ortiz. Ortiz ar- ticulated what Rushdoony later termed a “libertarian theology of freedom” that sought to build a laissez- faire political platform on an evangelical foundation.5 In the early 1960s, Rushdoony took a position with the conservative William Volker Fund in Kansas City. The Fund brought together on its staff a number of classical liberal thinkers and promoted the wide distribution of their writings, including those of Hayek and Friedman. For example, the Fund underwrote American attendance at the seminal Mont Pèlerin Society gathering in 1947. Although Rushdoony’s controversial theological views soon prompted his dis- missal, the experience strengthened his commitment to libertarian economic ideas. After leaving Kansas City, Rushdoony returned to California and began the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965 to propagate his distinctive approach to 201 The Success and Failure of the Religious Right 201 political theory. In the wake of the failed Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, Rushdoony found an attentive audience. Both adherents of the Old Right and newly politicized evangelicals were interested in a nonsecularized conservatism. Rushdoony’s son Mark later recalled that “many of his [father’s] early supporters were in the John Birch Society and the Goldwater movement, and they were dis- illusioned with the loss of Goldwater . My father was trying to turn their attention to a different focus, to a more theological view, a moral view of culture, civilization.”6 These followers believed that Rushdoony’s meandering and heavily footnoted writings represented a thoughtful and thoroughly Christian approach. Always aspiring to be the grand theorist, Rushdoony began with epis- temology. His first book,By What Standard? (1959), sought to employ the presuppositionalist thinking of Westminster Theological Seminary’s apologetics professor, Cornelius Van Til. Drawing upon the Neo- Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper and others, Van Til had argued that the Creator– creature distinction meant that fallen humans needed to presuppose God in all of their thinking and that non- Christians would naturally oppose any such prerequisite.

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