There have been two competing narratives about the rise of the Christian right in the United States.
The first story is the one we conservative evangelicals told ourselves: Religious conservatism arose as a force in the United States in response to the hedonism of the sexual revolution, the cultural intolerance of the New Left and the threat of the Soviet Union, an explicitly atheistic, Marxist empire.
According to this narrative, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was the seminal domestic event that inspired Christian conservatism. It represented a deadly corruption of our Constitution in service of a culture of sexual convenience in which human life was subordinate to sexual pleasure.
The response of the Christian right was both political and personal. That approach could be boiled down to a single sentence: Elect people of good personal character who will defend human life and religious liberty.
The movement placed a heavy emphasis on constitutional fidelity, seeing the Constitution as a bulwark against authoritarian overreach. And during Bill Clinton’s presidency it staked out the clearest possible ground on personal character.
As the Southern Baptist Convention declared at its annual meeting in 1998, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
The competing narrative is substantially different. It placed the rise of the Christian right in a much darker context — as a last-ditch, racist effort to maintain segregation in the South.
As Randall Balmer, a historian at Dartmouth, argued in 2014, “Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a ‘Catholic issue.’ ”
Instead, what really motivated the early leaders of the Christian right was a 1971 Federal District Court case called Green v. Connally, which stripped tax exemptions from so-called segregation academies, the term that critics applied to racially discriminatory private religious schools that sprang up all over the South in the decades after the Supreme Court decided that separate was not equal in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
As for abortion, the marriage between the religious right and the pro-life movement was more a marriage of convenience than conviction. As Balmer wrote, the early leaders of the Christian right were “savvy enough to recognize that organizing grass roots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge,” and so it embraced the pro-life movement as an instrument of mass appeal, particularly in the South.
In other words, was the Christian right a virtuous — however imperfect — movement born out of deep regard for the life and liberty of human beings created in the image of God? Or was it a corrupt movement born out of fear and spite that used religion to deceive the masses (including countless good and faithful Christians) and conceal its true nature?
If it’s the former, then it should have strong antibodies against cruelty and corruption. If it’s the latter, then cruelty and corruption are no impediment to success. What matters is power, and power is the measure of that success.
I found myself thinking about these competing narratives when I read a very sharp piece called “Evangelical Political Life After the Religious Right,” by Jake Meador, the editor of Mere Orthodoxy, one of my favorite evangelical journals.
In the piece, Meador argues that the religious right is essentially dead, overshadowed in the Republican coalition by the rise of the tech bros and barstool conservatives. It’s a coalition that’s very much anti-left, certainly, but what about it is specifically Christian?
As Meador notes, President Trump has watered down the Republican plank on abortion. The party no longer endorses a human life amendment, a constitutional amendment that would protect unborn life, and its platform left abortion policy up the states, the most pro-choice stance in more than 30 years.
The Trump administration has defunded evangelical ministries that focus on helping the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Trump’s allies have attacked the religious liberty of dissenting Christian institutions.
And is there any remaining commitment to character in leaders at all?
“It is becoming increasingly clear,” Meador writes, “that evangelical Trump voters are, by and large, not abandoning Trump’s G.O.P. for any reason.” Evangelical “views and policy priorities simply can be ignored by the real leaders of the current G.O.P. because there is no reason to concede anything to people whose vote you will have no matter what.”
At the same time, however, it seems very strange to argue that the religious right is gone. Trump owes his election to white evangelical voters. He welcomes faith leaders into the Oval Office, Trump’s Christian allies hold worship services in the White House, and the Republican Party is stocked top to bottom with elected officials who loudly broadcast their Christian faith.
But, as Meador observes, “Sure, Vice President Vance will make an appearance at the March for Life. President Trump will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast. But even when he does acknowledge a Christian event, it often will come loaded with hatred and vile self-aggrandizement.”
Trump’s Easter message on Truth Social, in which he insulted “radical left lunatics” and offered an insincere “Happy Easter” while he also accused them of “fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country” was a perfect example of Meador’s point.
What is going on?
I’d modify Meador’s thesis slightly. The Christian right is dead, but the religious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Another way of putting it is that the religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology, but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.
There is data to support this thesis. In a fascinating 2019 article, Ryan Burge — one of the nation’s foremost statisticians of American religion — took a close look at the political beliefs of evangelical and nonevangelical Republicans and made a sobering observation: “Looked at broadly, we see from this data there is essentially no difference between a Republican who is white and born-again and a Republican in general.”
In addition, there’s evidence that white evangelicals are unusually loyal to the Republican Party. In a 2020 piece, Burge analyzed a survey that asked members of different religious groups to place themselves in ideological space.
White Catholics and mainline Protestants, for example, saw themselves as left of the Republican Party. Black Protestants saw themselves as right of Democratic Party, while atheists saw themselves as left of the party. Among Christians, only white evangelicals precisely overlapped with their party. For the past decade there has been no daylight between white evangelicals and the G.O.P.
“If one were to believe that exposure to a religious belief or a religious community has an impact on the political perspective of the faithful,” Burge asks, “then why do the results for white evangelical Republicans look the same as Republicans in general?”
I believed the first narrative about the Christian right for many years. I never saw it as a perfect movement, but I defended it against its critics. Now, however, I see that they had a powerful point to make. There are many, many Christian conservatives who approach the public square with sincerity and good will, but the political actors and institutions of the religious right are far more Machiavellian than I ever wanted to believe.
How could I have been so wrong?
Let’s use an analogy from our personal lives to illustrate. Let’s imagine that you have a friend or family member who sees himself as both ambitious and honest. Sure, he wants to succeed, but not at the expense of his integrity.
If you know him and love him, you’ll take immediate umbrage at a person from outside your inner circle who sees his obvious ambition as his defining characteristic. “You don’t know my friend,” you might say. “How dare you question his integrity.”
But then, years later, you find out that in a moment of crisis, your friend lied to keep his job, or lied to close a deal. When his integrity collided with his ambition, he chose ambition — just as his critics believed he would.
The Christian right always had a commitment to political power. After all, why engage in politics if you don’t want to win elections and change policies? But that commitment to secular power was supposed to be secondary to its commitment to Christian principle. I had confidence that when the will to power collided with our principles, our principles would prevail.
Yet it turns out that the Christian right’s outside critics could see its true nature more clearly than many people inside the movement, including me.
It is no coincidence that as the religious right becomes less distinctively Christian, it is also becoming more intolerant of political dissent. If politics is the religion, then political disagreement is proof of apostasy.
Whenever I write about religion and politics, my inbox is flooded with poignant, emotional messages from people who once were both proudly evangelical and Republican, yet now find themselves unwelcome in their churches and sometimes even in their Christian families — all because they broke with the party.
They haven’t changed their view of Scripture. They haven’t backed away from their commitment to unborn life, to the dignity of all people or to religious liberty for all. They still believe in the historical creeds and confessions of the Christian faith. But if they’re not part of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, they’re deemed a heretic or a wolf — a biblical reference to an evil person who preys on the sheep, the people of God.
It’s hard to find anything distinctively Christian about Trump’s first 100 days. In fact, there’s been far more cruelty than Christianity on view over his first three months back in office. But white evangelicals still stand with him. As an April Pew Research Center poll found, they support him more than any other Christian group, by far.
There are still countless conservative Christians in the United States. Politics is not their faith, and they will break with any party or politician that contradicts the teachings of Christ. But there is another, more powerful faction in the American evangelical church. For its members, Republicanism is the new political religion, and its creed is whatever Trump wants it to be.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about Trump’s clash with Harvard. As a conservative graduate of its law school, I’m very familiar with the university’s long history of censorship and intolerance. I’m very familiar with its left-wing biases. But the school still possesses constitutional rights, and I’m grateful that it is defying Donald Trump:
Harvard’s defense of the Constitution doesn’t absolve it of its own sins, but the defense of the Constitution often comes through imperfect vehicles precisely because shrewd authoritarians often choose unpopular targets.
It’s hard to rally mass movements to support undocumented immigrants, large law firms or elite academic institutions. “Hands off Harvard” isn’t exactly a slogan that will rally disaffected steelworkers to the Democratic side.
American free speech law has been defined when unpopular people or unpopular institutions stand up against the censorship of the age — whether it’s a pair of Jehovah’s Witness sisters who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance during the height of World War II or faculty members who refused to sign certifications that they were not members of the Communist Party during the middle of the Cold War.
While we can applaud Harvard’s decision to confront Trump, the university still needs reform, given its recent history. Harvard’s stand might not make it the constitutional hero that we want, but it is the constitutional hero we need.
On Tuesday, I participated in a columnist roundtable reflecting on the key moments of Trump’s first 100 days. To me, the Jan. 6 pardons set the tone:
America learned everything it needed to know about Donald Trump’s second presidency hours after it began. He pardoned or granted clemency to the men and women who violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. And he ostentatiously removed the security detail for John Bolton, his former national security adviser, who had criticized Trump after an acrimonious departure from the White House.
The combination of these two orders sent the clearest possible message. His friends and personal allies will enjoy protection, favors and perhaps even immunity from the law. His critics and foes, on the other hand, should live in fear.
Finally, last week I had the privilege of talking to two Catholic thinkers I admire, David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and Leah Libresco Sargeant, the author of the upcoming book “Dignity of Dependence.” We talked about Pope Francis’ legacy, and this comment, from Libresco Sargeant, perfectly described what I admired most about Francis:
I think his gift to the Christians of the world, not just the Catholics, is his profound witness against throwaway culture, which comes out, as David says, in his personal presence with people, people with disabilities, with prisoners, with babies, with the elderly.
I think what the church gives that not all Protestant denominations know how to give, is it manages to pair that personal attention with the intellectual and theological foundations to support it. So it’s not just a matter of liking the person or having a positive feeling toward the person.
We can ground our question of: Who is a person? Who is it licit to kill? Who is it licit to throw away? — both on that startling witness of his love, and then the theological chops to back it up. I think Pope Francis’ personal witness underlines the urgency of not treating people as trash. And that’s only going to become more urgent as a question. He draws attention, and the church has the materials to back up his witness.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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