In the 1970s distress over rapidly changing public standards regarding sexuality and the family combined with longstanding anti-communist patriotism to make fundamentalistic evangelicals ripe for political mobilization. Some of the foundations had been laid by conservative financiers of conversionist religious groups. Sun Oil Company’s J. Howard Pew, for instance, financed Howard Kershner’s Christian Freedom Foundation in the 1950s30 and the free enterprise journal Christian Economics. Pew was also a principal supporter of the influential evangelical journal Christianity Today. When during the turmoil of the late 1960s that magazine seemed insufficiently conservative, founding editor Carl F. H. Henry was replaced with a regime that better reflected Pew’s very conservative political and economic views. Perhaps typical of this transitional era was Bill Bright, leader of Campus Crusade for Christ, one of the largest parachurch evangelistic agencies. During the 1960s and 1970s Bright, whose theology was essentially fundamentalistic, supported the Christian Freedom Foundation, one of the earliest groups attempting to directly mobilize conservative Christians politically. Bright aided such causes and in return they and their financial sponsors, such as Richard M. DeVos of the Amway Corporation, supported Campus Crusade. Nevertheless, Bright’s highly visible evangelistic campaigns, such as the massive youth rally, Explo ’72, in Dallas or the much publicized national evangelistic campaign, “Here’s Life America,” or even his Christian Embassy in Washington, D. C, for evangelizing politicians, remained, technically speaking, non-political, although they blurred the line between evangelism and politics.31
The issues of family and sexuality proved the key that unlocked evangelical potential for overt political involvement, but remarkably several of those most responsible for turning that key were Roman Catholics. For conservative Catholics, of course, issues regarding sexuality had long been seen as preeminently political. Phyllis Schlafly was one of the first Catholics to effectively reach across the longstanding divide as she enlisted support against the Equal Rights Amendment, designed to end discrimination against women, which had been easily passed by the U. S. Senate in 1972. Aided by direct mail expert Richard Viguerie, Schlafly’s Eagle Forum waged an eventually successful campaign throughout the decade, drawing Protestants and Mormons into alliances against ratification in the states. Schlafly and her allies convinced a large constituency that the amendment was not essentially about legal equality but rather an effort by aggressive feminists to impose their individualistic anti-family agenda on the whole culture. The white South, where the traditional family and sexual purity had long been sensitive issues, was especially susceptible to mobilization in this national campaign.32
As late as 1976 it was not at all clear what the evangelical vote might mean. It could not be assumed that conservative evangelicalism would translate overwhelmingly into political conservatism, let alone support for the Republican Party. When Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter announced that he was “born again” many conservative evangelicals were delighted. Meanwhile, it sent reporters on the coasts scurrying to find out what this ominous phrase from the heartland might mean. Carter’s election, thanks in part to evangelical support, led Newsweek to declare 1976 “Year of the Evangelicals.”
Disillusionment with the Carter White House soon set in as it became clear that the president would not forsake core Democratic constituencies to take up the Religious Right agenda on issues of family, sexuality, or religion in public life.33 Opposition to gay rights emerged as a grassroots political issue as singer and evangelical activist Anita Bryant led a campaign that helped overturn an anti-discrimination law in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. An IRS threat to deny tax-exempt status to Christian schools, on the basis that they were de facto segregationist, was the catalyst for widespread and effective mobilization of evangelical. Catholic, and other counterforces in 1978. By 1979 alarm about the nation’s perceived continuing drift toward secularism and promiscuity made it an auspicious time for the founding of the Moral Majority. Jerry Falwell, a true fundamentalist connected with the Baptist Bible Fellowship, a group whose lineage went back to Frank Norris, soon became its leading spokesperson. Once again, however, two Catholics, Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, were instrumental in creating the new movement. Supporters of Republican conservatism, especially as embodied in the candidacy of Ronald Reagan, were recognizing the potential usefulness of the Religious Right. The feelings were mutual. Falwell brought with him a large television ministry and soon turned the Moral Majority into a major political lobby. Among charismatics and pentecostals his efforts were paralleled by Pat Robertson, who had an even larger television ministry and was instrumental, along with Demos Shakarian of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Association and Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright, in organizing a “Washington for Jesus” prayer rally that attracted 200,000 in April 1980.34
Revivalist Protestantism, drawing on two centuries of experience in reaching mass audiences, had proved itself a master of modern media ever since the emergence of commercial radio in the 1920s. By the 1970s that mastery had spread to the use of television both for reaching huge audiences and for massive fund-raising. Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960, was the leading pioneer and innovator in this area. In the 1970s hot-topic issues regarding politics and sexuality proved effective in fund-raising and helped demonstrate that conservative Christian politics had significant grassroots support.35
Remarkably, it was not until the end of the 1970s that abortion emerged as a leading evangelical concern. Prior to the 1970s strict opposition to abortion had been viewed primarily as a Roman Catholic position. Earlier fundamentalists and their mid-century heirs viewed abortion with disfavor, largely because it was a manifestation of sexual permissiveness, but it was not unthinkable to discuss exceptions to the general rule. As late as 1968 Christianity Today, the leading voice for the new evangelicalism associated with Billy Graham, sponsored a colloquy on abortion at which Carl F. H. Henry, evangelicalism’s best-known ethicist, spoke equivocally on the topic36—something that would be almost impossible for a card-carrying evangelical to do with impunity fifteen years later. The United States Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in 1973 did not at first spark a major evangelical or fundamentalist reaction. As late as 1976 most regarded it as just one more sad sign of declining public moral standards, but only a few saw it as an issue around which cultural militants should rally, and it was not thought of as a major factor affecting grassroots born-again support for Jimmy Carter. By the early 1980s, however, strict anti-abortion had become the centerpiece of a new Catholic-Protestant political alliance and a virtual test of faith in militant evangelical circles.
NEW ALIGNMENTS
If we think back to the strength of moderate and liberal mainline Protestantism during the fierce controversies of the 1920s, we can get a better sense of how dramatically the cultural upheavals precipitated by the 1960s changed the American religious landscape. As late as the 1950s mainline Protestants could think of themselves as near the center of a cultural consensus that was then expanding to “Protestant, Catholic, and Jew,” and which stood for progressively tolerant and scientifically informed thinking and championed laudable causes, most notably civil rights. By the end of the 1970s the major mainline Protestant denominations, such as United Methodist, American (formerly Northern) Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ were losing members at alarming rates as older generations died off and they could not attract comparable numbers among the young. As the leadership of these denominations moved toward the moderate left in politics and ethically centered theologies, they had relatively less to offer constituents that could not be found outside the churches. Ironically, to the extent that they identified with the political left they recognized that they themselves had been part of the WASP establishment and that it was discriminatory to speak as white Protestants, hence leaving themselves with a serious identity problem when it came to recruitment. Furthermore, despite these efforts to keep
up with the times, after the mid-1960s the permissive left generally found the churches irrelevant.37
These developments in mainline Protestantism helped shift the center of gravity of fundamentalism. In the 1920s the liberalizing trend in the mainline churches was a major cause of concern in itself and also helped foster a sense of wider cultural crisis. So what was happening in the mainstream white Protestant denominations was arguably the primary focus of fundamentalist alarm. By the later twentieth century most fundamentalists had already written off the predominantly northern mainline denominations. While each of those denominations (and now Catholics could be included as well) generated activist conservative parties that gained strength toward the end of the century, in opposition to theological liberalism, radical feminism, ordination of gays, and similar causes, those conservatives played a relatively minor role in fundamentalistic Christianity as a whole.
Once again the South provides the striking exception as the conservative (sometimes known as “fundamentalist”) takeover of the huge Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s and 1990s recapitulated the denominational controversies of the 1920s. The remarkable difference, however, is that, contrary to many predictions during the early stages of the Southern Baptist controversies, in this case the fundamentalists did win. In one of the most remarkable developments in American ecclesiastical history, conservatives gained control of the central boards of the denomination and took over its theological seminaries. Although characteristic fundamentalist theological concerns, often encapsulated under the rubric of “the inerrancy of Scripture,” were major elements in defining Southern Baptist conservatism, most observers believed that the cultural-political issues were just as important, or perhaps more so, in enlisting popular support.38
SECULAR HUMANISM OR A RETURN TO CHRISTIAN ROOTS?
While, with the major exception of Southern Baptist conservatives, alarm over doctrinal erosion in major denominations played a relatively smaller role in the new fundamentalism, opposition to the expansion of the powers of civil government played a far greater role. That in turn related to the times. The decades after 1945 were a time of expansion of government, especially the federal government, in a way the 1920s were not. Alarm over secularizing trends accordingly focused on governmental intrusion on people’s lives, as the national trends were toward creating a more pluralistic and inclusive, and hence more secular, society.39 Once again, opposition to racial integration and continuing bitterness over matters like affirmative action and school busing fueled anti-government resentment. Related concerns focused on the welfare state of “the Great Society.” At the same time the courts were taking more aggressive positions in declaring that the First Amendment entailed a “wall of separation” between church and state, most notoriously implemented in the ban on Bible-reading and prayer in public schools. In the same era, the 1960s, courts became far more permissive regarding what had previously been regarded as pornographic in publications, film, and other public entertainment. Fundamentalistic fundraisers could point with alarm to courts that removed the Bible from public life but made Playboy available at every corner convenience store. Conservative evangelical alarm over Roe v. Wade could be generated initially in part because it fit this permissive pattern. The fierce and often effective opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment for women in the later 1970s grew naturally out of well-established resentments against governmental attempts to alter essential basic patterns of American life.
“Secular humanism” came to be the shorthand framework for understanding the convergence of these cultural and political trends. Francis Schaeffer was the key person in articulating this new comprehensive yet simple paradigm. Schaeffer had studied briefly under J. Gresham Machen at Westminster Theological Seminary and after Machen’s death in 1937 followed the more strictly fundamentalist and dispensationalist Presbyterian separatist Carl Mclntire. In 1941 Mclntire founded the American Council of Christian Churches, made up of small separatist denominations. After World War II he became one of the most widely heard fundamentalist preachers, featuring attacks on communism and the World Council of Churches. In the 1950s Schaeffer split with Mclntire and established L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, which by the counterculture years become well known as a mission to disillusioned young people. Schaeffer was an effective popularizer of the Reformed idea that Christianity had powerful implications as a cultural critique. In 1976 he brought these ideas to fundamentalist and evangelical churches all over American though a film series. How Shall We Then Live? Imitating Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, Schaeffer provided conversionist Christians with an overview of Western culture and civilization, as illustrated in its art, architecture, and literature, emphasizing the point that the great Christian synthesis that culminated in the Protestant era had been replaced by secular humanism, which had proved empty and destructive in the fragmentation and moral relativism of the twentieth century.40 Schaeffer was also instrumental in raising Roe v. Wade to a position of preeminence as an example of the secular takeover of government to promote an anti-Christian and licentious agenda.41 In 1979, working with Dr. C. Everett Koop (soon to be surgeon general under Reagan), Schaeffer came out with a follow-up film series. Whatever Happened to the Human Race? which focused on abortion-on-demand as the culmination of the secular humanist creed of freedom and self-indulgence that had led to the wholesale murder of the weakest of the human race.42
“Secular humanism” quickly became the code word for enemy forces in the dichotomized world of the emerging mentality of culture wars. Tim LaHaye seized on the term and simplified and popularized it further in The Battle for the Mind (1980), dedicated to Schaeffer. LaHaye, along with his wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America in 1979, were among the most effective of fundamentalist promoters of the new political consciousness. According to Tim LaHaye, secular humanism was not so much a cultural trend as an organized conspiracy. Hard-core humanists numbered only about 275,000 but they controlled much of American media, entertainment, and education. The estimated sixty million born-again Christians, if properly organized, should be able to defeat the secular humanists, who were supported by naive moralists and religious liberals.43
The times were propitious for mobilizing an army of militants around such rhetoric. At the grassroots level the viewpoints of American schools and textbooks had long been volatile issues, sparking various local controversies over teachings of moral relativism, sex education, and biological evolution. Campaigns to counter the teaching of biological evolution in the public schools, boosted by the “creation-science” movement that claimed a scientific basis for a young earth, reached levels comparable to those of the 1920s. At the local level, anti-evolution was one of the most effective means of enlisting grassroots political support. Now, however, in contrast to the 1920s, it was only one part of a larger anti-humanist political package.44 In the meantime, since the 1960s and 1970s the Christian School movement had gained immensely in popularity as a practical sort of cultural separatism and as an alternative to government controlled secular education. Especially in the South, one motive was to avoid racial integration, but resistance to other cultural trends soon became more basic to the national movement. The rationale that Christian schools offered an alternative to the threat of government-supported secular humanism provided a way of clearly articulating the positive religious justification for what these schools were already doing.
The separatism of these school movements usually involved a subtle shift in emphasis from that which prevailed among fundamentalists from the 1920s through the 1950s. During that earlier era some fundamentalists founded their own schools, from lower schools to colleges and Bible institutes, as part of their attempt to live the “separated life,” teaching people how to stay pure from behavioral and ideological corruptions of the society and how to relate to society primarily through evangelism and missions. While these traditions continued to shape the rapidly expanding Christian school and home school movements, by the 1980s these movements i
ncluded more explicitly political dimensions dealing with civic and legal issues designed to prepare the next generation not only to resist secular humanism intellectually, but to take back America or at least resist politically.45
The larger framework was the necessity of restoring America’s original Christian heritage.46 That the United States was founded as a Christian nation and had abandoned that heritage had long been part of fundamentalist outlook.47 Even during the mid-century separatist era fundamentalist rhetoric invoked political and social threats, such as communism or declining morals, as urgent concerns. But the solution was essentially the old standard of personal and national reli gious revival. The implication was that righteous individuals and leaders would turn the nation back to God. But how that would happen usually remained vague.
The dramatic transformation of cultural fundamentalism (as opposed to strictly theological or ecclesiastical fundamentalism) into a major national political power involved more than resourceful evangelical leaders rallying their people around an alternate vision for America. It was also the result of the shrewd leadership of non-evangelicals who were building the new conservative coalition that reshaped the Republican Party in the late twentieth century. In a sense the professional politicians “used” the Religious Right, as became apparent in some of the latter’s frustration with the Reagan administration’s reluctance to move on the politics of sexuality.48 Yet the relationship was two-sided. Evangelical leaders “used” the Republican Party and the national perception of their own political power to build their religious movements and spread their cultural ideologies. Being market driven, the greater the perception of potential political power, the more the message of some ministries brought out longstanding cultural themes that readily resonated with their constituencies.
Fundamentalism and American Culture Page 35