“I can’t think of anybody who had more impact [on the 2004 election outcomes] than Dr. Dobson. He was the 800-pound gorilla,” the renowned Republican Party fund-raiser, Richard A. Viguerie, told U.S. News and World Report after President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004.
He was referring to Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family and founder of the Family Research Council, both of which have been powerful organizations within the Religious Right movement. In less than forty years, the landscape of stereotypical evangelical voters in the United States had shifted from an array of mixed perspectives and partisanship to a rather narrowed and dogmatic agreement around a few key beliefs and a wholesale endorsement of the Republican Party.
Gone are the days when discussing your preferred political party were as jovial a discussion as debating whether Ford or Chevy is better. In fact, I write this in 2020, having just completed another election cycle in which many conservative evangelical Christian leaders declared on social media or Fox News that “any true believer is going to be on your side” (speaking of republican incumbent, Donald J. Trump).
We have not simply lost an array of mixed perspectives; we have lost any distinction between the evangelical Christian faith and Republican politics.
How has this happened? How is it possible that leaders could so definitively state which political party is the party of “true believers”? The answer lies in the Religious Right.
Christians emboldened and busied with the work of the Religious Right Movement of the 1970s and 80s have indeed been getting a lot done, but who are they getting a lot done for? It would appear the efforts of the Religious Right are to advance the agenda of the Republican Party. However, the stated intentions of the origin of the movement claim to be focused on “Christian values,” such as teaching creationism in public schools, limited abortions and pornography, and fighting for a “biblical definition of marriage.”
In this article, we are going to evaluate how successful the Religious Right Movement has been in advancing “Christian values.” Has it helped the cause or hindered it?
We begin with some background to the movement and defining what it, exactly, the “Religious Right” is, then we will compare three specific values the movement sought to advance and how American culture responded to their advancement of these values. Finally, we will conclude by taking a look at the values Jesus says His followers ought to seek to advance and whether or not the Religious Right has truly helped or hindered the cause of Christ.
What Is the Religious Right?
The Religious Right has its roots in the Fundamentalist Movement of the twentieth century. One might call it the “political movement” of Fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism grew in reaction to the modernist movement of many Protestant churches. Initially, Fundamentalism abstained from political involvement, but after the humiliation of the Scopes trial in 1925, and growing concerns of communist infiltration, Fundamentalists realized they needed some kind of political leverage to advance Christian values and ensure continued religious freedom if they wanted to have any lasting impact on American society.
This led to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, both flagship organizations of the rising Religious Right in the 1970s. Since then, the Religious Right has represented “a loose network of political actors, religious organizations, and political pressure groups that formed in the United States in the late 1970s.” Their leaders include already mentioned Falwell and Robertson along with Tim LaHaye, Tony Perkins, and Dr. James Dobson.
A common explanation of the movement is that it emerged as a political movement in response to Roe v. Wade. However, it was not until 1979 than conservative activists seized on abortion as an issue worth fighting for. A closer look at the timeline of the history suggests the origins of the Religious Right had more to do with segregation than abortion. We will get into this further in the section addressing how the movement worked to undo Roe v. Wade.
How Has the Religious Right Sought to Advance Christian Values in America?
While the Religious Right has focused on several issues over the course of its movement, issues such as prayer and scripture reading in schools, limiting pornography, and questioning popular culture, for the purposes of this paper we are going to focus on the Big Three: creation/evolution, abortion, and gay rights.
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