Religious Right Thrives in a Red-Hot Vacuum: Replies
Ribuffo, Leo
Some of the disagreement between Peter Laarman and me derives from our different perspectives. I wrote about the latest Christian right from the perspective of a historian who—odd as it may seem...
...Not only are these revivals habit forming, but their persistence has established their legitimacy, at least among devout Protestants, and provided a powerful "usable past...
...Evangelical and fundamentalist publishing houses produce an enormous supply of books and magazines...
...Tracts propounding bizarre conspiracy theories are outnumbered by self-help guides, a genre disdained in cosmopolitan circles that nonetheless helps people through their daily lives...
...it's sociobabble...
...Laarman responds from the perspective of a theologically liberal clergyman and social gospel activist...
...Indeed, Laarman inadvertently illustrates my central argument in the Spring edition of Dissent, that the left seems unable to understand that religious issues in the public sphere are no less complicated than issues relating to economics, race, or foreign policy...
...Liberal and neo-orthodox Protestants were not necessarily oblivious to these matters, as the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., show, but their customary focus on social issues left many Protestants cold...
...Who is going to listen further to any organizer who begins by denouncing his or her "lurid religion...
...Yet a difference in sensibility also lies at the center of our disagreement...
...Probably the main reason we now face a revival of culturally conservative Protestantism is that the United States, a country whose founders included evangelical heirs to the first Great Awakening as well as Enlightenment deists, has undergone such revivals repeatedly since the 1790s...
...If Laarman were less exercised, he might do better explaining why during the past three decades millions of evangelicals and fundamentalists have moved from apathy to right-wing activism, and why millions more have shifted from routinely voting for liberal Democrats to routinely voting for conservative Republicans...
...Most important, Laarman's sociobabble obscures the obvious proximate sources of the latest Christian right in the cultural shouting match of the Sixties...
...392 • DISSENT...
...Unfortunately, as Laarman's argument shows, the current cultural shouting match is both the most likely and least advantageous place to find exhibitions of feistiness by the left...
...Some evangelicals and fundamentalists believe very strange things about contemporary politics (including conspiracy theories first sketched in the 1790s...
...More broadly, most evangelicals and fundamentalists have reliably supported conservative Republicans since 1984...
...Unlike Laarman, I am not viscerally appalled because many Americans choose to be Protestant fundamentalists or evangelicals...
...Even if conceived in social neurosis, as Laarman contends, the Christian right's version of community is far sturdier than any recently created on the left...
...As Laarman suggests, the left has nothing to lose and probably something to gain, in morale if not votes, by adopting a less apologetic stance...
...This isn't analysis...
...By and large, however, they do not fit Laarman's caricature...
...And they read too...
...So let us turn to some plodding if complicated empiricism...
...Insofar as fundamentalists and evangelicals moved right in response to specifically religious or cultural issues, they were reacting against—rather than longing for—a "feisty, spirited secular campaign to build the New Jerusalem...
...According to plausible estimates, the Christian right component of this religious constituency includes two hundred and fifty thousand avid activists, four million core adherents, and five million sympathizers...
...Laarman's fervor makes a mockery of what he calls an "organizer's perspective...
...Most supporters of the Christian right do not belong to megachurches and, judging from membership statistics, those who do so feel adequately served...
...Decades before the latest Christian right SUMMER • 1995 • 391 Arguments emerged in the late-1970s, these religious groups grew primarily because they addressed matters of ultimate concern—the meaning of life, the inevitability of suffering and death, and the possibility of eternal salvation...
...Much the same thing could have been said about American culture sixty years ago or thirty years ago...
...The conservative community of the air waves is no less authentic than that created by Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio speeches during the Great Depression...
...They have not been motivated solely by religionrelated issues but, along with otherAmericans who moved right, have also been affected by a feeling of white racial grievance, fear of crime, and the association of political liberalism with Carter-era stagflation at home and humiliation abroad...
...It was metahistorical malarkey then and it is metahistorical malarkey now...
...Overwhelmed by the "trashiness and weightlessness of popular culture" and lacking "face-to-face conversations" that would provide emotional succor and enlightened dialogue, vulnerable men and women turn to "totalizing" megachurches...
...According to Laarman, these changes are the product of an "unprecedented degree of cultural desolation...
...Jerry Falwell sees himself as the spiritual successor to Lyman Beecher, and he has a point...
...Thus I feel no need to reduce their beliefs to social-psychological symptoms, to ridicule them as members of the "Church of the Galloping Christ (or whatever)," or to join in the comfortable left ritual of being "particularly exercised" by their beliefs...
...For cultural conservatives, the problem with Madonna's movies and music isn't that they are less "weighty" than Doris Day's or Deanna Durbin's, but that they are sexier...
...Comparably popular books on Bible prophecy offer textual explications as ingenious as those cherished by contemporary literary critics (and probably no less rooted in reality...
...Rush Limbaugh's fans meet regularly to discuss his opinions, an activity rare if not unknown among viewers of the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour...
...In fact, it was said—by critics who postulated the mesmerizing power of radio in the 1930s and deplored anomie-afflicted "organization men" in the 1950s...
...By the early 1990s, white self-described evangelicals and fundamentalists made up onefourth of the electorate (between twenty and twenty-one million voters in the last presidential election...
...The general religious awakening that has continued off and on since World War II has disproportionately benefited theologically conservative faiths...
...The secularization of public ceremonies, loosening of restrictions on pornography, legalization of abortion, and legitimation of feminism and gay rights really bother them...
...I wrote about the latest Christian right from the perspective of a historian who—odd as it may seem these days—was trying for a little detachment...
...The left's dim prospects will grow even dimmer unless it recognizes—"false consciousness" and "hegemony" to the contrary—that people usually believe what they think they believe...
...Even President Clinton would look better if he took the contrarian position that for most Americans the welfare state's benefits far outweigh "bureaucratic" inconvenience...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
