Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump by Andrew S. Moore

Author:Andrew S. Moore [Moore, Andrew S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism, Religion, Religion; Politics & State, History, United States, 20th Century, 21st Century
ISBN: 9780807174340
Google: tYgEEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08M3DJTDP
Barnesnoble: B08M3DJTDP
Goodreads: 58085708
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2021-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Dwelling in the Shelter of the Most High

RONALD REAGAN AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

J. BROOKS FLIPPEN

Every day commentator Bryan Fischer opens his show on American Family Radio with a quotation from Ronald Reagan. Every year Regent University, founded by the evangelist Pat Robertson, hosts a Reagan Symposium to highlight the former president’s legacy. Today one does not have to look far to ascertain the modern Religious Right’s opinion of Ronald Reagan, best summed up by the founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell Sr., just before his death in 2007. Reagan, Falwell stated, was our “beloved president.” While there are of course dissidents who cite shortcomings in Reagan’s legacy, such as Mark Tooley of the conservative Institute of Religion and Democracy, who noted that Reagan “wasn’t consistently a saint,” the populism inherent in the Religious Right sees no such ambiguity.1 In fact, as scholars note, Reagan’s true legacy was much different. Reagan largely appeased his conservative theological followers to keep them under the umbrella of the so-called New Right. He offered them access and rhetoric they had never enjoyed before but generally ignored their policy demands. At the time, a number of evangelical leaders protested. Only later, given the context of late-twentieth-century liberalism, did this respect prove enough. Framed by the disappointments of Jimmy Carter and George Bush and, subsequently, the tumultuous challenges posed by Bill Clinton, the Reagan administration never looked so good to the Religious Right. The movement needed a hero, and despite his true record, Reagan fit the bill.

Let me dispense at the outset here with what I mean by Religious Right, which, of course, is a nebulous term. I will refer to the movement as a loose coalition of religiously minded activists opposed to cultural liberalism. It certainly incorporates many fundamentalists and evangelicals, but of course, both are themselves diverse, and many do not consider themselves part of the Religious Right. Not all members of the movement are born-again Christians, and in fact, there are even elements who are not Christian at all. All share, however, conservative theological beliefs and a sense that God needed to exert his law into the public sphere. In this sense, Christian Reconstruction theology was influential. Spread in large part by the efforts of Rousas John Rushdoony in the years after World War II, this movement took from Genesis a mandate for Christians to have dominion over all aspects of life, government included. “As implausible as a vision of a reconstructed United States might seem,” author Michael J. McVicar concludes,” such “dominionism” had “steadily crept into America’s popular and religious consciousness.” By Reagan’s election, Newsweek had even characterized Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation as “the think tank of the Religious Right.”2

Many theological principles influenced the growth of the Religious Right, not just dominionism, and as such, it remained fluid, often driven by individual charismatic leaders or the emergence of new controversial issues. While scholars have characterized the Religious Right in terms of race, class, partisanship, and denomination, among others, there is nevertheless enough overlap

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