The latest version of the Christian right
Ribuffo, Leo P.
According to standard criteria, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the industrialized world—perhaps the most religious country. More than 40 percent of Americans claim...
...Although the left has ostentatiously reconsidered many subjects in the last few years, religion has not been one of them...
...More important, the left should try to cool the rhetoric about religion-related issues that spans the political spectrum...
...Much as Americans fought over temperance and Prohibition for a hundred years, they may battle over abortion well into the next century...
...Scholarly study of religion is booming, and painless popularizations for the secular are available in paperback (notably Garry Wills's Under God and Paul Boyers's When Time Shall Be No More...
...If school prayer must remain a priority, then the left at least should play down two arguments self-evident only to itself: that a moment of silence violates the First Amendment (dubious, since the violation wasn't discovered for 170 years) and that it stigmatizes children who don't participate (also a reason to abolish football teams, cheerleaders, proms, and—as the Christian right emphasizes—sex education...
...Our metaphors can make a difference...
...Shouting matches are annoying and sometimes end in violence, but they are more likely than wars to settle into tolerable truces...
...But the news isn't all bad...
...Initial forays into this unfamiliar territory may be discouraging...
...and inferred from President Reagan's ruminations on Bible prophecy that he might start a nuclear war in order to advance the date of Armageddon...
...The election of Bill Clinton, a self-consciously hip cultural liberal, brought fresh recruits and renewed notoriety...
...And contrary to another venerable dream, cultural concerns are not easily trumped in the voting booth by economic concerns...
...The latest militant Christian right represents a minority among culturally conservative Protestants, many of whom are appalled or embarrassed by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and their fellows...
...These claims may reflect good intentions rather than actual behavior, but—as Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan showed—personal piety can flourish in the absence of regular church attendance...
...More than 40 percent of Americans claim to attend religious services each week, compared to 14 percent of the British and 12 percent of the French...
...Over the long term, culturally conservative Protestants may move in a more tolerant and cosmopolitan direction, much as Catholics (a group analogously stereotyped by the left) have done since the fifties...
...While frightened secularists warn against incipient theocracy, Pat Buchanan proclaims a "cultural war" and the normally astute sociologist James Davidson Hunter sees one in the making...
...During the Great Depression, a minority of fundamentalists formed the core constituency of an anti-Semitic, old Christian right that denounced the New Deal as a wing of the international Jewish conspiracy...
...In other words, probably more Americans use Bible prophecy than can identify Keynesian economics...
...Young evangelicals are less likely than their parents' generation to condemn premarital sex and homosexuality...
...At least eight million Americans accept a system of Biblical interpretation called premillennial dispensationalism — not only to predict the time of Jesus' return, but also to discover the divine meaning behind wars, 174 • DISSENT Right Turn economic changes, and technological innovations...
...The latest round is less volatile than those in the twenties, thirties, or sixties and, with some mutual consideration and good luck, may stay that way...
...Unfortunately, leaders of the cultural and political left prefer to respond with reflexive anticlericalism and willful ignorance...
...No religious issue appeals to more Americans or does more to convince pro forma Christians that secularists are out to undermine their basic beliefs...
...Cultural conflict in the United States has always carried a strong religious tinge...
...Evangelicals and fundamentalists have been solidly ensconced in the Republican coalition since the 1984 election and show no sign of being dislodged anytime soon...
...Indeed, 90 percent of Americans pray, 80 percent expect to face God's judgment, and 60 percent (including Hillary Rodham Clinton) anticipate Jesus' return...
...In fact, we are in the midst of what is only the latest phase in a perennial shouting match to define a normative American way of life...
...A dozen years ago, during the first phase of the latest Christian right, stunned secularists grossly exaggerated the influence of television preachers...
...assumed that fundamentalists, evangelicals, and Pentecostals obeyed their clergy like so many robots...
...Most evangelicals and fundamentalists continue to anticipate the rise of the Antichrist but, unlike their counterparts in the thirties, rarely expect this agent of Satan to ally with the pope or an international Jewish conspiracy...
...Post-election mailings from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and People for the American Way exude the usual overkill, and the Nation's periodic articles on conservative religious communities read like reports from a rocket probe to Saturn...
...But they should think about it...
...Furthermore, the energy invested in this largely symbolic issue could be better spent deflecting conservative assaults on school curricula and library acquisitions, defending gay rights, opposing reimposition of the "gag rule," and providing protection for abortion clinics...
...A deeper understanding of religious issues and constituencies could yield shrewder strategic responses...
...Even the intricacies of premillennial dispensationalism are accessible to anyone with a cable television hookup...
...Probably most readers of Dissent reflexively disagree with my view that local option for a moment of silence in public SPRING • 1995 • 175 Right Turn schools is a tolerable social compromise rather than a serious threat to freedom...
...Perhaps most important, the wider community of culturally conservative Protestants is neither monolithic nor static...
...q 176 • DISSENT...
...Cultural issues with a religious tinge show no sign of disappearing through the alchemy of secularization...
...So the first thing the left needs to do is to appreciate that religious issues in the public sphere are no less complicated than economic, racial, or ethnic issues, and then to learn something about them...
...During the twenties, most Protestants supported Prohibition, and the fundamentalists among them campaigned also to bar Darwinism from public school curricula...
...Grass-roots efforts continued even after the movement dropped beneath cosmopolitan notice in the late 1980s...
...Alliances between Protestant and Catholic militants, still separated by class and ethnicity, remain fragile...
...A selfconsciously new Christian right organized in reaction to the cultural liberalization of the sixties and became a junior partner in the Reagan coalition...
...Roughly 9 percent of Americans now identify with the Christian right...
...A smarter and more effective argument, dating back to the dissident Puritan Roger Williams, is that forced conflation of church and state corrupts the former more than the latter...
...None of this is esoteric information...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
