The Republican courtship of the religious right
Hausknecht, Murray
Notebook Murray Hausknecht ANOTHER CHOICE OF COMRADES fter losing a national election a party reassesses where it stands and what it must do to recoup its fortunes. It is now the Republicans'...
...Thus, the "old-time religion" that promised hellfire to those guilty of extramarital sex, abortion, divorce, drinking, dancing, cardplaying, and frequenting pool halls and movie theaters...
...Evangelicals are responsible for saving other people as well as themselves from damnation...
...The continuing strength of religious belief in the United States—a society synonymous with modernity— suggests that its persistence is, in fact, a consequence of modernity itself...
...what was once part of the natural order of things is now shrouded in ambiguity...
...Although they tend to be moderately educated and clustered in the lower middle- and working-class occupations, they are found at all socio-economic levels, and those who are active within the Republican party are clearly middle class...
...Or, to put it another way, evangelicals today tend to be more "civilly intolerant with those of other faiths...
...In contemporary evangelical thought, however, there is "a softening and a polishing of the more hard-line and barbed elements...
...There are other discernible accommodations...
...To use a rough analogy, the latter's situation will be similar to that of liberals in the eyes of the Communist party during the thirties and forties...
...A premise of evangelical doctrine is the inferiority and eternal damnation of people who do not accept orthodox beliefs...
...Each, in his own fashion, expresses an ideology that makes fundamentalists his most responsive audience and reassures them that their certainties also foretell another coming event, the "Conservative Century...
...But the more fundamentalists are attracted to the party, the more their incivility and unwillingness to accommodate the demands of cultural pluralism will hinder the recruitment of the coming generations of evangelicals...
...But although they may represent an extreme of orthodoxy, they also share with a much larger body of religious conservatives a common resistance to the claims of modernity...
...Modernity here means rationality and its concomitant questioning orientation...
...before the Second Coming the born-again Christian will be swept up to heaven in the "rapture" foretold in Revelations...
...It is of course possible to concede, as Kristol does, that attracting large numbers of fundamentalists is "a problem," but to argue that once alerted to the risk, the Republican establishment could domesticate them...
...Where the younger generation is willing to temper the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, fundamentalists "are more sure that every word of scripture . . . is to be taken at face value...
...The overwhelming majority are Baptists, but the movement also encompasses Pentecostals and members of charismatic sects...
...rather, "at the level of social demeanor and social discourse" there has been a shift to greater civility...
...it is a familiar beacon among the prevailing ambiguities...
...A central one is a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible as the Word of God and as an accurate historical record of God's work...
...They are already active in local party politics, and in some states have become a major political influence...
...Barnes also reported Clinton's strong appeal "to moderate Southern Baptists," who, it might be added, were the losers in the struggle with fundamentalists for control of the denomination in the mid-eighties...
...Moreover, they believed "that it overall harms the cause of religion in America...
...But not everyone agrees...
...The loudest and most strident voices appealing to religious conservatives are those of Buchanan and Pat Robertson, who famously denounced supporters of an equal rights amendment to the Iowa constitution as part of an "anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians...
...Nevertheless, within this variety there is a distinguishing set of core doctrines...
...In organizational politics these certainties give them an advantage over people like Kristol: because fundamentalists do not recognize the limits imposed by civility they can easily and in good conscience violate them...
...Evangelicals have undergone an experience of spiritual transformation...
...In South Carolina, they captured the chairmanship of the party, its executive committee, and many county organizations...
...On the other hand, the younger and better educated "coming generation" of evangelicals would be intensely embarrassed by such statements...
...Fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives, they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight...
...they were as much the enemy as reactionaries and fascists...
...On another dimension of belief, involving the issue of cultural pluralism, accommodation is less clear...
...Nancy Ammerman in Baptist Battles (1990) reports a similar decline in the mid-eighties among her sample of pastors and lay leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention—at the precise moment when fundamentalists were seizing control of that largest and most influential of Baptist denominations...
...But whatever the final outcome of the struggle, if fundamentalists win even local victories, the first order of internal business will be a purge of Kristol and others like him...
...The discourse of traditional orthodoxy was, and remains, to use Hunter's word, "offensive...
...More simply, would the G.O.P...
...For these young evangelicals "care for young children is not the exclusive or necessarily principal responsibility WINTER • 1994 • 133 Notebook of the mother...
...The belief that all others are damned has not changed...
...Fundamentalists are "willing to stand and to fight" for the militant certainties that define their identities, the springs of their behavior in this world, and their hopes for salvation in the next...
...So, too, Kristol, who knows that "the limits of politics in a constitutional democracy" require a necessary readiness for compromise, will be defined as an enemy of "the Word of God...
...Once it meant that the Bible represents God's word and must be taken as an accurate historical and scientific record, but among Hunter's college and seminary students "the urgency to uphold or defend a totally unerring Bible appears to have weakened dramatically...
...These people," meanwhile, have not waited for an invitation...
...One early conclusion is the necessity to return to a vision of the party as "a big tent...
...The Kristol who joins the attack on John Dewey as an exponent of "rampant spiritual individualism," who discerns and welcomes "the collapse of 'secular humanism,' " and who believes "[i]t's the traditional spiritual values that we as individuals need" — this quieter, more intellectual voice can be as persuasive, if not more so, than a Buchanan or Robertson...
...A second basic tenet is that personal salvation depends on belief in WINTER • 1994 • 131 Notebook Jesus Christ as Savior—men and women without this faith are condemned to eternal damnation...
...A victor in one of the latter contests credited her success, in the words of the Times reporter, "to a lack of conviction on the part of the old order...
...Nor are they happy with fundamentalist militancy and intransigence...
...Cultural pluralism follows from this, and so any given set of beliefs and practices faces challenges, implicit or explicit, posed by the very fact of the others' existence...
...Where many evangelicals, like Billy Graham, for instance, are willing to cooperate even with mainline churches, fundamentalists "refuse to cooperate even in the best of causes . . . . Compromise and accommodation are among the most dreaded words in the Fundamentalist vocabulary...
...At a time when the Moral Majority was still alive and well, a majority of Hunter's respondents "were either neutral toward or disapproved" of its goals and its methods for achieving those goals...
...Of the 60 percent of Americans on the rolls of churches and synagogues and the 40 percent who say they attend services at least once a week, it is evangelical Protestants who are most likely to fill the ranks of "religious conservatives...
...Finally, a modern society is institutionally differentiated: there is no established religion, and religious beliefs tend to be regarded as belonging to the private sphere...
...To be sure, "[r]eligious people always create problems since their ardor tends to outrun the limits of politics in a constitutional democracy...
...they are "born-again Christians," committed to publicly testifying to their beliefs and actively proselytizing others...
...At the level of personal experience, then, the world of modernity is a problematic world in which it is difficult to maintain a commitment to the certainties of inherited traditions...
...Is it merely an expression of political high spirits in the first flush of victory, a naive exuberance that can be harnessed and "shaped" by the Republican establishment...
...Finally, evangelicals are typically premillennialists...
...Her own passionate intensity shows through in her insistence that candidates must be "dogmatic, I mean that when it is the word of God you are talking about, you don't compromise...
...it entails the assumption that there are alternative ways of thinking and acting, which must be rationally defended...
...The most intransigent and combative evangelicals in this struggle are the fundamentalists...
...there is a decided shift toward greater acceptance of tolerance and pluralism...
...In comparison with those in public universities, Hunter's students are still "stoutly conservative" on, for example, a subordinate role for women in the private sphere, but the majority is not committed to "strict formulations" of this subordination...
...However, this is a far-from-certain outcome of what would be a long internecine battle...
...Those most likely to respond positively to this vision of the world are fundamentalists...
...Evangelicals are overwhelmingly political conservatives, but this is less a result of class location than religious beliefs...
...The doctrine of inerrancy, for example, arose in resistance to historically based biblical criticism...
...But no religious faith can remain totally immune to the fact of modernity, and among Protestant conservatives—with the exception of their belief in the sinfulness of premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion, and divorce—adherence to the old-time religion has declined significantly...
...must work at accommodating these people," for "by embracing them and shaping their thinking" it will avoid the possibility of a third party and a "restructuring of American politics...
...survive its embrace of those people...
...In this secular millennium, the "traditional family" with its emphasis on patriarchal authority in husband-wife and parent-child relationships will be restored to its rightful dominance in the culture...
...If the drift Hunter discerns among the young continues, then it is probable that issues like abortion and homosexuality, still highly salient for them, will be less so for their children...
...Liberals, with their talk of respect for the rights of others, were too prone to accommodation with "the forces of reaction...
...Patrick Buchanan continues to elaborate the themes of his convention speech, and in "The Coming Conservative Century," an essay in the Wall Street Journal last February, Irving Kristol advises Republicans to disregard conventional wisdom and actively welcome "religious conservatives...
...More specifically, and with the debacle of the 1992 convention in mind, the prevailing wisdom is that the party must avoid identification with the religious right...
...But this hope ignores a significant drift away from fundamentalist extremism among religious conservatives...
...But since this "civil" intolerance is more a matter of style than substance, it does not prevent "offensiveness" from breaking through—as in the 1980 sermon of a wellknown pastor that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew...
...If we indulge an end-of-century impulse to peer into the next one, then perhaps it is not too farfetched to see Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton as today's distant outriders of the evangelical middle class of the next century...
...All evangelicals still subscribe to the principle 132 • DISSENT Notebook of an inerrant Bible, but the meaning of inerrancy has changed...
...Religion, almost by definition, provides a believer with a meaningful and comprehensible universe...
...It is now the Republicans' turn...
...Evangelicalism is a movement within Protestantism cutting across denominational lines and comprising a wide range of beliefs and practices...
...In other words, the response to Kristol's invitation to join the Republican party is more likely to find takers among religious extremists than religious conservatives—the party's "natural" constituency today and for some time to come...
...Nonetheless, the G.O.P...
...The challenge modernity poses to religion has not produced, as was once expected, increasing secularization...
...In American Evangelicalism (1983) James Davison Hunter writes that embedded in this vision of damnation is an "individuated conception" of a social world in which "the sinful heart and mind of the individual [is] the root cause of and explanation of all human ills...
...This example of the "ardor" Kristol rightly fears raises some inevitable questions...
...Only a minority would fit Ammerman's definition of fundamentalism...
...Or is it essential to the political character of those whom Kristol would embrace as his comrades in "the coming conservative century...
...At that point Irving Kristol will have to make still another choice of comrades...
...In Virginia, according to a New York Times story last June, they were a "dominant force" in the selection of an ultra-conservative slate for statewide offices...
...This suggests that fundamentalists are at one extreme of traditional Protestant orthodoxy, and their characteristic militancy has now propelled them into an activist role in Republican intra-party contests...
...The offensiveness and "ardor" demonstrated here are certainly distasteful to Kristol, but the themes are close to his own...
...George M. Marsden writes (Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 1991) that they are "a subtype of evangelicals, and militancy is crucial to their outlook...
...Just before Clinton's election, Fred Barnes in the New Republic quoted a contributor to Christianity Today: "Many evangelical women . . . have more in common with Hillary Clinton than with other candidates' wives...
...Fundamentalists "are convinced," she writes in her ethnological study of a northern Baptist congregation (Bible Believers, 1987), "that their differences from others make them superior not only because they have something better but because theirs is the only truth, the only right way to live...
...Hunter reports in Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (1987) that among students attending evangelical colleges and seminaries the "traditional meaning of worldliness has indeed lost its relevance for the coming generation of Evangelicals...
...In Ammerman's sample the "number of people willing to accept a nonliteral reading of scripture had grown to clearly outnumber the literalists...
...Evangelical beliefs emerged out of the confrontation of traditional American Protestantism with the forces of modernity, especially from the late nineteenth century on...
...According to Hunter, evangelicals "are, in the main, intransigent" in their commitment to these beliefs...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
