The image of a Christian army rising up and remaking American politics has been exaggerated, either in hope or fear, over the last two decades. The movement's rise seemed rapid and unexplained, and its demise has been prematurely announced, whether for celebration or lament. Pat Robertson's campaign last year seemed to incorporate all the false perceptions of this phenomenon, looming with apocalyptic force for about 15 minutes, then fading away as if it had not happened.
Beneath these moments of panic or promise, the aspects of right-wing religiosity picked out by the restless spotlight of publicity, there is a more solid and enduring religious reality that has been negotiating a new relationship with our political system. That reality is not going away, and its time of political influence is still in an early stage.
The real beginning of political activism among the low-church Protestants who make up the core of the Religious Right was in the 1950s, and was the result of court decisions and public demonstrations affecting racial segregation. This threatened deep social attitudes, large patterns of behavior, in which religion was an important factor. It had been necessary to the psychic health of white Southerners, to their, self-esteem and sense of dignity, to believe that their relations with blacks were right and moral -- that is, sanctioned by their own deepest beliefs. The care of blacks in their place was an act of Christian charity in their minds, not a violation of fundamental human values. Jim Crow always had a Bible in his pocket.
The challenge to the laws of the South thus became a challenge to its religion, which was forced to respond. Southern religiosity had tended to be non-institutional when not anti-institutional. Since everyone is open to evangelical theology, to the immediate action of the Spirit, not only for conversion but for the call to preaching, strong moral consensus could exist without priestly or hierarchical enforcement. Thus an anti-pornography ethos precluded the need for anti-pornography laws. Sometimes laws did follow the moral consensus -- for example, "dry" laws. But more often, the moral code was enforced more by social pressure than by statute.
Paradoxically, the very ease of access to evangelical churches, and even to the ministry, caused them to be rather isolated from the formal structures around them. Thus, though Baptists were in the majority among American Protestants, the public style of the nation's religion was set by high-church Protestantism -- by Episcopal and other "mainline" denominations. The recognition of an "Eastern establishment" in politics was a pale reflection of the hold the mainline minority had on public styles of worship. There was a de facto establishment of religiosity, if not religion, and that establishment was certainly not based in the South, where some of the most ardent clusters of Christians worshiped.
ALL THAT BEGAN to change with integration. Southern believers felt that they had to rally to their beliefs in organized and institutional ways. The movement for separate schools was racist in its most obvious form, but it also represented a more general attempt to "preserve Southern ways" (and, very specifically, Southern religious ways). Segregated schools were only part of the story; prayer in the schools was another part -- and a part that would live longer as an issue than did the first racial reactions.
The prayer in the schools would be Christian, not Jewish, and low-church in style, not mainline.
Baptists, as Jimmy Carter liked to remind people in his campaigns, have a long tradition of separating church and state. That boast was true but misleading. The churches had so much social influence in Bible areas that they did not have to establish formal political claims.
But that began to change when new institutions -- schools, parties, movements -- were called into being to oppose the officially integrated institutions. Sects that had discouraged open politicking now rallied to leaders like George Wallace, who always included a touch of religion in his appeal. Keeping God in the schools was connected with keeping blacks out of them. Jerry Falwell was opposed to integration at this stage; and less refined preachers more crudely opposed the "godless" Supreme Court that had, just incidentally, made the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The "takeover" of the court was seen as a threat to patriotic and religious values; and former scruples about direct church activism began to fade.
The near-monopoly on public styles of religion was being challenged. Jimmy Carter's candidacy was a turning point in our political history, not so much because a Southerner was elected president as because a man was elected whose religion was not "cool" and mainline, but marked by a "hot" fervor formerly considered unacceptable in the public realm. Those not disturbed by Nixon's church services in the White House became covertly hostile to President Carter, who never held a church service in his executive mansion. Even Billy Graham had been more an ambassador from the South to the established sects than a genuine "hot gospeler" of the sort people feared in Carter.
But Carter's defeat in 1980 was even more significant, in religious terms, than his 1976 victory. He lost the evangelical and fundamentalist vote to Ronald Reagan, a non-churchgoer. Why was that? Because Reagan openly embraced the political agenda of the Religious Right -- prayer in schools, opposition to abortion, legal action against pornography, and a religious crusade against communism as a godless theology and not simply an ideology held by opponent nations.
The low-church style had not only entered national politics; its practitioners were confident enough then to punish one of their own when he did not follow their political program. This program was increasingly spelled out by secular technicians who serviced religious activists by direct mail, keeping them in touch with each other and making their names available to political candidates.
THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT was never the "moral majority" it claimed to be, and it has always been misrepresented when it was treated as a separate threat. This is the problem Pat Robertson understood and tried to obviate by turning himself from televangelist into CEO.
But the Religious Right has been a powerful and growing force as part of a new de facto religious establishment in the United States -- an increasingly low-church instead of high-church Protestantism. The Religious Right gave Reagan his greatest electoral gains of 1984, after he told one of their conferences that he endorsed them though they could not endorse him. He also made fundamentalism an acceptable posture in the White House, saying the answers to all life's problems are in the Bible and declaring the Soviet Union an evil empire.
Reagan's own denomination, the Disciples of Christ, had been so anti-establishment in its origins that it would not even call itself a church: There were no churches, only Christians. One could hardly get lower-church than this "no-church" position. So Reagan, despite his casual attitude toward church attendance in later years, had a genuine childhood connection with the style and even the theology of the Religious Right -- something that popped out, to some of his followers' embarrassment, when he speculated on the millennium and "all of those prophecies."
George Bush, by contrast, was educated at Andover, a prep school slavishly imitative of the Anglican "public" schools in Britain. At Andover, Bush led a missionary organization, called the Society of Inquiry, something as WASPish as Yale-in-China. Despite this background, he has spent years trying to deny that he is a member of the Eastern establishment in political terms. He dwells on his Houston years, his preference for Tex-Mex cuisine, and the ties to the Goldwater and Nixon party when it was still fighting the legacy of a Taft-Dewey-Rockefeller establishment. All this makes political sense in terms of the demographic and electoral shift of power toward the "Sunbelt," the growth of the Republican Party in formerly Democratic areas.
But a less noticed transition in Bush is even more striking for the future of American culture. Unlike Reagan, Bush was entirely mainline in his religious roots and training; yet he, too, has taken to calling himself born again (a thing offensive to many Americans as recently as a decade ago, when Carter was in the White House). Bush assures Southern evangelicals that he accepts Jesus as his personal savior, and cultivates Jerry Falwell so successfully that he got more of the Religious Right's primary votes on Super Tuesday than did Robertson himself.
Some of this, but not all, can be attributed to the blunders Robertson made in the campaign. William Scott Malone, in a December 1988 Washington Post article, shows that Bush had been carefully cultivating the Religious Right for years, reaching out to many other preachers than Falwell. He even courted Jim Bakker, whose PTL Club show he professed to watch "from time to time." As early as 1985, Bush went to Charlottesville for a special meeting with Bakker. Tammy Faye Bakker was invited to the vice-presidential mansion to visit with Barbara Bush, and Bush staffer Pete Teeley was made a consultant to PTL, receiving $120,000 to keep the religious leader in touch with official Washington. When Bakker was driven out of the PTL and Falwell took over its management, the vice president called Falwell to offer his encouragement.
There could not be a more vivid symbol of the cultural-religious changes in recent times than this reliance on a new low-church establishment by a scion of the high-church tradition. And this could never have taken place without the increased political activism of evangelicals, fundamentalists, and others who once thought of religion as an essentially private matter, without social consequences.
So we are looking at a larger, broader, more important change in the United States than has been indicated by most studies of the Religious Right as a separate phenomenon. If the fears and hopes raised by such shallow treatments were exaggerated, there are, nonetheless, things to be regretted as well as things to be welcomed in the changes taking place.
IT IS PROBABLY a gain in the long run to have the private-religion branch of Christianity recognize social responsibilities, even if one disagrees with the specific political policies that recognition takes. At least the moral basis of public policy is being connected with theology and brought into the open for discussion. Already we can see this open discussion moderating and maturing the Religious Right in some areas: The blatant racism of the George Wallace period has yielded to the conciliatory tactics of the Robertson campaign. Separate schools are now justified in terms of Christian training, not of racial purity (though the former may often coincide with the latter). Anyone familiar with the Wallace rallies of 1968 can only approve of the civilized dissent brought to the debates by Robertson.
Furthermore, a public religious style reflecting low-church views accords better with the religious character of the United States than did the incongruous high-church tone. We have historically been a country more of revivals than of ritual, and the old mainline monopoly disguised the real sources of religious energy in our people. (It is interesting that Christian Century placed on its list of the 10 most important religious news stories in 1988 the economic and organizational shrinking of the principal mainline bodies -- a development important enough to make this the magazine's second most important story, right after the return of some religious freedoms to the Soviet Union.)
Then what is to be regretted in this activism of an authentic American tradition in our politics? The thing to be regretted about the low-church establishment is the fact that it is an establishment at all. The old high-church establishment was fading in part because its representatives had come to admit that the separation of church and state is a boon to religion as well as to politics; that moral issues can be debated in politics without specific sectarian appeals; that the de facto Christian (and Protestant) style had to yield to the ecumenical politics foreseen by the creators of our First Amendment position on religion -- by Madison and Jefferson and Washington. In fact, the Baptists and other low-church activists of our time have lost one important aspect of their own tradition when they soften their old view on separation of church and state.
The new Republican coalition, with its religious style endorsed by George Bush, may unite a party; but it can divide a nation. And a theology of private vision, prophecy, and apocalypse is not suited to a technological age of nuclear destruction, to an evolutionary science that must be tamed, not merely disdained.
As has normally happened in U.S. history, religious gains introduce new and subtler perils. But these cannot be addressed if we have a dismissive or diabolizing view of the Religious Right. It is here to stay; but, by the laws of change and history, it will not stay the same -- any more than the rest of us can.
Garry Wills was a Sojourners contributing editor when this article was published.
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