This, of course, has proved a grave mistake. Though “it would be almost a half century before large numbers of evangelicals again discovered an elite diabolic enough to make the building of their own mass movement seem both imperative and possible,” the fundamentalist churches were not really undermined in their geographical and cultural heartlands, and in those areas, the insults and contempt of the metropolitan elites blended with other resentments to make their views, if anything, even more popular.74 By the 1990s the fundamentalist counterattack against the teaching of evolution in schools was back with a vengeance.
Although the churches were largely absent from politics and government, they did not withdraw from society. On the contrary, these decades saw the evangelical churches spread both to new media—with the appearance of Billy Graham, and later the “televangelists”—and to new areas of the United States.75 Although Graham himself was in most ways a political moderate, the world he represented also played a great part in McCarthyism.
The American churches, and especially the evangelical and fundamentalist ones, were able not just to retain, but in some respects expand their followings at a time when in the rest of the developed world religious belief and practice was in steep decline. One reason for this is that they have played a significant role in softening some of the harsher aspects of change for many Americans—especially migration from country to cities, and consequent social atomization.
Given the speed of socioeconomic change in America, the consequent atomization of society, and the lack of welfare and health safety nets comparable to those of other developed countries, this role has been all the more necessary and has helped them to retain their hold on important sections of society. Across much of America, churches have in a sense continued the formative role they played on the American frontier; and in doing so, they have helped maintain the cultural worlds that generate American populist nationalism.
It is important to recognize the immense amount of work and self-sacrifice that goes into these efforts, and the deep religious faith that inspires them. Liberals who mock conservative Christians as nothing more than bigoted hicks who swallow a religious opiate fed them by the capitalists are guilty of bad manners, bad politics, and bad analysis. They fail to understand both the tremendous importance of religion in much of American society, and the ways in which religion is a force for good—in some parts of America, perhaps the only organized force for good.
This is even true of some figures rightly seen by liberals as extreme and negative forces in American life, like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. To understand both their appeal to so many people and the real force and drive of their personalities, it is necessary to understand—and respect—the religious faith that led Bachmann to foster (and apparently greatly help) 23 troubled teenage girls, and Sarah Palin’s decision to give birth to and care for a child prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome.
Many large American Protestant churches, with their associated web of schools; study groups; parents’ groups; children’s, adolescents’, men’s, women’s, and seniors’ clubs; marriage counseling services; excursions; sports activities; and even collective tourism (often to the Holy Land), form dense communities with a strong aspect of social welfare. They have in fact played a central role in bringing a sense of community to what would otherwise be the flat, arid social plains of many American suburbs—or in the words of Garrison Keillor, “if you want to meet single women in Minnesota, maybe you should join a church.”76
In this sense, the churches resemble the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century (which played a related role among the new inhabitants of the great cities in Europe and America) much more than the anemic European churches of today.77 And as with the Catholic Church in the past, this has also given conservative Protestant tendencies a formidable capacity for political mobilization and organization, both in the past and today in the “Christian Coalition” and associated movements.
The shift of the Southern Baptist Convention to de facto support for the Republican Party since the 1970s has stemmed from a general white Southern move in that direction, but has also reinforced that trend. It has left Democratic Southern Baptists like Bill Clinton and Al Gore in a decidedly minority position within their own church. In most of the South, their faith was of limited help to them among whites in either 1992 or 1996, and Gore’s failure to carry the region in 2000 doomed his bid for the presidency.78
Also of great importance has been the replacement of urbanization with suburbanization. Urbanization around the world has generally marked a radical shift in environment and values from culturally homogeneous small towns and rural areas to heterogeneous, ethnically, culturally, and even racially mixed cities. A transformation in values, including most often a decline in religious faith, has been the general long-term result, stemming of course from the disintegration of small, relatively isolated communities.
Suburbanization is a rather different matter. It allows—and, in its American form, is often explicitly or implicitly intended to allow—the preservation of a “small-town” world as far as family life and culture are concerned: racially homogeneous, and also potentially at least culturally homogeneous, traditional, church-going, and patriotic.79 The spread of (softened and modernized) forms of Southern culture, including country music, to much of the rest of the United States can be traced in part to the move of “middle class” whites away from urbanism and toward suburbanism.80 Therefore, if American nationalism in 2004 sometimes resembles European nationalisms before 1914, that is because in some American regions, aspects of society and culture are closer to Europe in 1914 than Europe in 2004.81
In the preservation of this re-created small-town atmosphere, the evangelical Protestant churches have played a very important role, and as noted, this has helped not only preserve them in their traditional heartlands, but expand them to much of the rest of the United States.82 Indeed, the strong recovery of religious belief and practice in the United States after World War II was contemporaneous with the astonishing growth of suburbia, and probably closely associated with it.83
The figures both for religious belief in the United States and for the strength within this sector of the “fundamentalist” element are somewhat disputed. A Gallup poll of 1993 showed 42 percent of Americans describing themselves as “born again.” However, this figure includes both many members of the so-called mainline churches for whom this is more a formal statement of theological belief than a deeply felt personal statement, and black evangelicals, who with rare exceptions are not led by this belief to vote Republican. A study of 1996 by George Barna found 66 percent of Americans saying that they had made a “personal commitment to Jesus Christ,” up from 60 percent in the 1980s. About one-third of the public attends church once a week, and another third at least once a month. The remaining third never attends.84
According to a survey published in 2011 by the University of Michigan, white evangelical Protestants (including churches defining themselves as “fundamentalist”) made up 26.3 percent of the U.S. population in that year—an increase of almost 5 percent since 2000, which led to them overtaking the Catholics as America’s largest religious grouping. Although the evangelicals have spread all over the United States, by far their greatest concentration of strength remains in the “Bible Belt” of the greater South and its outlying regions.
“Mainline Protestants” (Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and so on) declined to 18.1 percent, from 21.2 percent in 2000. This continued the historic shift in balance between the evangelicals and the mainline churches that began in the 1960s.85 According to a Pew survey, in 2011 black Protestants were 6.9 percent, Jews 1.7 percent, and other non-Christians in general 3 percent. In a really striking divergence from Europe, only 10.3 percent of respondents described themselves as atheists, agnostics, or “secular unaffiliated.”86 As the term “Bible Belt” suggests, these figures include striking regional variations. In 1986, according to Gallup, 48 percent of southerners (more than twice th
e national average) described themselves as “born again” Christians, compared to 31 percent of midwesterners, and only 19 percent of northeasterners (the wicked, atheist “East Coast” again).
Determining how many of these possess truly “fundamentalist” beliefs, or support the agenda of the Christian Right in politics (closely associated in turn with nationalist attitudes and the Tea Parties) is a difficult question.87 A Pew poll of March 2004 indicated that in that year 40 percent of Americans believed in the literal, word-for-word truth of the Bible, with another 42 percent declaring that it is the word of God, but not necessarily literally true.88 Of course, most of these people do not actually even attempt to render their beliefs into real behavior, but nonetheless this does give the more determined minority a wide ocean of public acceptance in which to swim, something that simply does not exist elsewhere in the developed world. According to Gallup, 18 percent of Americans polled in 1993 believed that floods that year were a punishment by God for the sins of the people living on the Mississippi River.89
In Britain, even Tony Blair’s far more moderate religious beliefs were toned down by his advisers for fear of public mockery and alienation. Advisers would never recommend this in the United States. By 1976, the overtly “born again” religious identity of presidential candidate Jimmy Carter of Georgia was already sufficiently appealing to the electorate that President Gerald Ford felt compelled to declare himself “born again”—though he was an Episcopalian!90
With the exception of George Bush the elder, all subsequent U.S. presidents have also declared themselves “born again”—and in the case of Reagan and George Bush the younger, it would seem, quite sincerely. In a poll conducted in 1998, 56 percent of Americans declared that they would not vote for an atheist as president (admittedly a big change from 1958, when 82 percent said this).91 Playing on this, George Bush the elder, like all Republican candidates over the past generation, declared in 1992 that “I believe with all my heart that one cannot be president without a belief in God.” In 1996 more than one-fifth of registered members of the Republican Party described themselves as belonging to the Christian Right.92 In the 2004 Democratic primary campaigns, several candidates declared, most improbably, that they had discovered religion while campaigning.93
It has been suggested that between one-third and one-half of the white evangelicals (including the fundamentalists), or about 7 percent to 12 percent of the entire population of the United States, support the Christian Right or at least share its ideology, with a large majority of these also supporting the Tea Parties.
However, the strength of the fundamentalists, like the strength of some ethnic minorities, lies not so much in numbers, but in relatively greater commitment—including high rates of turnout in elections—willingness to vote and agitate over particular issues, readiness to make personal sacrifices of time and money, and concentration in politically strategic regions. As in the Republican Party as a whole, this may have given the Christian Right an influence in the Tea Parties considerably greater than their proportion of the grass-roots membership—though not enough to turn the movement as a whole toward moral and cultural issues rather than tax cuts and the Constitution. In the words of former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey: “Government goes to those who show up.”94
As Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed has noted, concern over education and other local issues made Christian conservative activists over time into a formidable force in local politics (on school boards and so forth), laying the basis for their later success in national politics: “The advantage we have is that liberals and feminists don’t generally go to church. They don’t gather in one place three days before the election.”95 Christian conservative colleges have also proved a useful source of Republican campaign workers.96 This has probably also given Christian Rightists in the Tea Parties an influence much greater than their actual proportion of the rank-and-file of that movement.
The power of the fundamentalists, like that of other highly motivated minority groups, has been greatly increased by the very low voter turnout in U.S. elections. Thus in the Congressional midterm elections of November 2010, the Republicans made extensive gains in the Senate and House of Representatives with the votes of barely 15 percent of those registered to vote in the districts concerned. Of a figure this small, the fundamentalists can obviously form a very large and powerful proportion.
The Christian Right of the 1970s arose above all as a reaction to the legalization of abortion. This was indeed a matter of deep concern to Christians, and one that united evangelical Protestants and Catholic conservatives like William Bennett. However, as in earlier periods, the fury over abortion also formed part of a much wider sentiment of fear and resentment that motivated both the Christian Right and the wider new Right of which it was part.97
The 1960s and 1970s saw defeats for the culture of the white South and the heartland that together were greater than anything experienced since the Civil War. The term “Negro socio-economic revolution,” used by Kevin Phillips to describe aspects of the 1960s, is overdrawn, but certainly reflects the way many whites felt then, and even to a degree still do today.98 Civil rights for blacks, coupled with inner-city rioting and pressure for concessions in education and housing, terrified and infuriated large portions of the white middle class, creating a new alliance between the white South and the Midwest along similar lines to the original “Jacksonian” alliance that for more than a century formed the foundation of the Democratic Party. The enforced “busing” of white children to black majority schools in order to encourage racial equality helped spread fear and hatred of government from the South to the white working classes of northern and midwestern cities. Not just that, but the more fashionably radical sections of the intelligentsia began actively to celebrate supposed “black” values, and sneer at “white” ones in ways that hit unfashionable, poor, small-town whites on the very rawest of nerves.99 The legacy of this is still reflected in widespread hostility to Barack Obama, despite his stable marriage, public displays of religiosity, and complete espousal of respectable “white” values.
The sexual revolution, of which legalized abortion was part, struck at the very foundations of the conservative idea of the family. The sexualization of adolescence (which sits so oddly alongside savage laws against teenage sex in a number of states) became central to the marketing strategies of vast sectors of American capitalism. The appearance of open homosexuality was viewed by some fundamentalists as a sign of the impending end of the world. The reaction of conservative society to this became more, not less intense in the 1990s as homosexual and lesbian characters began to appear in positive roles on mainstream TV, and even have whole sitcoms like Will and Grace devoted to them and their society. This potentially brought gay influence to every American family with a television.100 In 2003–2004, a push to legalize gay marriage provided a new stimulus to Christian Rightist mobilization in support of the Republicans. As of 2012, this continues to be a major theme of the Christian Right and of Republican presidential candidates close to the Right, though it played only a very small part in Tea Party rhetoric.
To conservative Christian America, the “counterculture” in general appeared as an unspeakably hateful, diabolical attack on its idea of society. Limited but vocal sections of American youth revolted against military service and patriotic values, and for the first time in its history, America was defeated in a war.101 The Catholics had been hated in the past, but at least their ideas of family, sexual morality, and manly behavior were not significantly different from those of the hard-line evangelicals. To a traditional mind, the American culture that developed after the 1960s by contrast seemed like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, literally a pandemonium of scarcely credible monsters and abominations, and much of television constitutes nothing less than a daily assault on their world of faith and culture. Finally, beginning with the oil shock of 1973, the 1970s saw the end of the long postwar boom and the beginning of three decades of unprecedente
d decline in real incomes for the American middle classes, followed after 2007 by a very sharp downward plunge. The old white working and middle classes of the Midwest had got used to a world in which respectability and steady work guaranteed a steadily rising income and social status. The end of this world has been a dreadful blow to their “moral economy.”102 This combination of defeats provides much of the explanation for the embittered, mean-spirited, defensive, and aggressive edge to the contemporary American right-wing, and to the American nationalism that it espouses. Even when apparently in power, they still feel defeated. Its proponents have essentially spent many years trying to wipe out the defeats of the 1960s and early 1970s.
A hope exists—strongly reflected in the Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America” and in the Tea Parties—that given sufficient will, America can somehow be turned back to the perceived golden age of Eisenhower in the 1950s.103 Since it cannot be admitted that American capitalist development itself is largely responsible for hated social and cultural change, the failure of this program must necessarily be explained by the “devil theory of politics”: the resistance of wicked forces at home and abroad, notably the “liberal elites,” especially in the media, their supposed allies in Europe, and the national enemies they supposedly pamper elsewhere in the world. President Obama has been only the latest in a series of such constructed “devils.” And bizarre though it may seem in view of the power of conservative groups, if the standard for a healthy conservative society is the America of the 1950s, then of course the conservatives have been defeated, and always will be.
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