The Religion of American Greatness by Paul D. Miller

Author:Paul D. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: United states of america;conservative;liberal;political ideology;American nationalism;Donald trump;republican;democrat;constitution;democracy;political science;patriot;US history;American religious history;make America great again;identity politics
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2022-03-31T08:38:27+00:00

THE CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN RIGHT

The conservative Christian political coalition of the 1940s and 1950s collapsed because of two events: the election of John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, in 1960; and the civil rights movement, which split White Protestants between segregationists and moderate civil rights advocates. In 1960 conservative Protestants threw their weight behind Vice President Richard Nixon and waged an anti-Catholic campaign, warning the nation against the dangers of entrusting power to someone who, they believed, owed his ultimate loyalty to the Vatican rather than to the United States (much as they had done in 1928 against Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith). They lost, and Kennedy’s presidency, much like the Scopes trial, demonstrated their waning influence and, as the nation moved on from overt anti-Catholicism, deprived them of a common cause to rally around.

More consequentially, the civil rights movement split the nascent Christian Right. Some northerners and elite spokesmen, like Billy Graham, endorsed integration, while southern fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell Sr., Bob Jones Jr., John Rice, and Billy Hargis remained stalwart segregationists during the 1960s, joined at the time by evangelicals like W. A. Criswell. According to Daniel Williams, “While evangelicals such as [Billy] Graham took a moderate position on issues of race, giving cautious support to civil rights legislation, southern fundamentalists lambasted the civil rights movement as a communist plot.” Southern fundamentalists “saw the movement as an attack on the nation’s well-being and a threat to the right of private institutions, including churches, to exclude anyone they wished.”18 Some of the divide was not regional but between elites in large national institutions and local leaders. The Southern Baptist Convention praised the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that struck down segregated public schools and endorsed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but rank-and-file Southern Baptist churchgoers almost certainly supported the South’s campaign of “massive resistance” to integration—an important example of how elites diverged from the population they purported to lead, and how the articulated ideology of republicanism diverged from the social practice of nationalism. White southern churches had, after all, been instrumental in sustaining segregation for decades. As one historian summarized, “Grassroots conservatives’ opposition to the liberal state’s expansion of individual rights (although not property rights), their concern with growing federal government power, and their defense of custom and tradition (here understood as the traditions of the White majority) combined to create a strong opposition to federal support for civil rights.”19 Because conservative White Protestants were divided on civil rights, their movement fell into disarray and they had no united voice on public issues through much of the 1960s.

Conservative Christians began to regroup in 1968. Over the next decade, the movement underwent a profound transformation that birthed the contemporary Christian Right and modern conservatism. The movement shed its anti-Catholicism and put disagreements over civil rights behind it, while still maintaining a strong emphasis on anticommunism. “The end of the civil rights movement facilitated the formation of a new Christian political coalition, because it enabled

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