Chapter 5. How the Movement Was Built: A Short Political History of Conservative American Christianity

(This chapter belongs in Part II, How We Got Here. It follows Chapter 4 on the editing of the Bible itself, and it prepares the ground for Part III, where we set the whole Bible next to the movement.)

There is a story Conservative American Christianity likes to tell about itself. In that story, the movement is old, older than the country, a straight line running back through the Founders to the Reformers to the early church to the apostles to Christ. It did not begin. It has simply been. What changed, in the story, is the world around it. The country drifted. The culture rotted. And the movement, faithful and unmoved, simply held the line, until at last it had to stand up and be counted in the political arena, reluctantly, because the alternative was to watch a Christian nation slip away.

That story is comforting. It is also, in almost every particular, not true.

The movement I have been describing in this book is not old. It is, in its current form, roughly fifty years old. It was assembled, in living memory, by identifiable people, for identifiable reasons, using identifiable methods. Many of those people are still alive. Many of the documents in which they described what they were doing, and why, are still in print. You can order them online. You can read the interviews. You can watch the footage. The movement did not fall from heaven. It was built. And the honest way to understand what it is, and what it wants, is to look at how it was built, and by whom, and out of what.

That is what this chapter is for. It is not going to be a comprehensive history. Books much longer than this one have been written about every decade in what follows. What it is going to do is walk, slowly, through the hinges. The moments at which the movement chose what it would be. Because once you can see the choices, you can see the movement.

The country before the movement

Start, briefly, before there was a movement to speak of.

For most of American history, evangelical Protestantism, which is the broad tradition the movement now claims to speak for, was not a unified political bloc. There were Northern evangelicals and Southern evangelicals. There were pietists who wanted nothing to do with politics and social reformers who wanted nothing but. Evangelicals founded abolitionist societies. Evangelicals also founded slaveholder theology. The Second Great Awakening produced revivalists like Charles Finney, who preached that a converted person could not, in good conscience, own another human being, and it also produced Southern preachers who used the same tent-meeting fire to defend the plantation.

After the Civil War, white Southern Protestantism went one way and the country's other Protestant traditions went several others. The early twentieth century brought the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, in which conservative Protestants split from the mainline denominations over questions of biblical inerrancy, evolution, and the historicity of miracles. The Scopes trial of 1925, and the mockery that followed it, drove a great deal of American fundamentalism into a defensive posture. For most of the next four decades, the movement retreated. It built its own colleges, its own radio networks, its own publishing houses, its own summer camps, its own Bible institutes. It did not, on the whole, do national politics. Billy Graham, at his peak in the 1950s, was welcomed at the White House by presidents of both parties, precisely because he was seen as speaking for a broad, non-partisan Protestant middle rather than for a political faction.

That is the world the movement was born out of. A world in which conservative Protestantism was culturally significant but politically diffuse. To turn that diffuse tradition into an organized political force, someone had to organize it. And that is what happened.

The trigger that was not what you were told

If you ask a member of the movement today why the Religious Right formed in the 1970s, you will get, nine times out of ten, a single answer. Roe v. Wade. The 1973 Supreme Court ruling on abortion, the story goes, so shocked the conscience of Bible-believing Christians that they had no choice but to organize, mobilize, and enter politics to defend the unborn. Everything else, in the story, flows from that.

The story is not true. It is a retrofit. And the people who built the movement have, in their own words, admitted it.

For roughly five years after Roe, the response of American evangelicalism to the ruling was, to put it plainly, muted. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, had actually passed a resolution in 1971, two years before Roe, calling for the legalization of abortion in cases including rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, and threats to the emotional or physical health of the mother. The SBC reaffirmed that resolution in 1974 and 1976, after Roe. W. A. Criswell, the towering First Baptist pastor of Dallas, publicly welcomed the Roe decision when it came down. Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham, ran editorials in the early 1970s that were, at most, ambivalent. Abortion was, at the time, considered a "Catholic issue" by much of white evangelicalism, which had inherited an old Protestant suspicion of Rome and was in no hurry to line up next to the Catholic bishops on anything.

So if it was not Roe, what was it?

The honest answer, spelled out most clearly by the movement's own architect, is race. Specifically, the federal government's move to strip tax-exempt status from segregated Christian schools.

Paul Weyrich, a conservative political operative and the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, said this repeatedly, in public, on the record, for the rest of his life. He said it at a conference in 1990. He said it in interviews with historians. He said it, in one form or another, whenever he was asked how the Religious Right actually came together. What he described was a decade of trying, and failing, to get white evangelical leaders excited about any conventional political issue. School prayer did not do it. Pornography did not do it. The Equal Rights Amendment did not do it. Even abortion, when he tried it, did not do it. What finally did it was the IRS.

In 1971, in a case called Green v. Connally, a federal court ruled that private schools that practiced racial discrimination could not qualify as tax-exempt charitable organizations under the tax code. The IRS began enforcing that ruling against segregated Christian academies, many of which had been founded, quite openly, in the years after Brown v. Board of Education, precisely so that white Southern children would not have to attend integrated public schools. Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which at the time forbade interracial dating and had, until recently, refused to admit Black students at all, was one of the most prominent institutions to lose its tax exemption. The lawsuit that followed, Bob Jones University v. United States, wound through the courts throughout the late 1970s and was decided by the Supreme Court in 1983, against the school.

That fight, not Roe, is what pulled white evangelical leadership into organized national politics. Weyrich said so. The schools said so at the time. The trade publications of the Christian school movement in the late 1970s are full of it. What the leaders needed, for the movement to grow beyond the schools, was a broader banner. Race, in the wake of the civil rights movement, could no longer be defended in public in the old way. A new banner had to be found. Abortion, which by the late 1970s was beginning to be reframed by a small number of evangelical intellectuals, notably Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, as the great moral crisis of the age, turned out to be the banner. By 1979, when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, abortion had been retrofitted into the movement's origin story. By 1980, it was the origin story. By the time the children of that generation reached adulthood, the earlier history had been quietly forgotten.

This is not a small footnote. It is the movement's founding compromise. A political coalition that had come together to defend the tax status of segregated schools rebranded itself, within a decade, as the guardian of the unborn. The rebrand was successful. It was also, historically speaking, a lie about what the movement was and where it came from. Anything the movement now says about itself has to be weighed against the fact that its own founding story is a piece of public relations.

The apparatus

Once the movement had a banner, it needed machinery. It got it, quickly, from a small number of political operatives who were extraordinarily good at building institutions.

Weyrich, again, was central. So was Richard Viguerie, a direct-mail pioneer who had figured out, in the 1960s, how to raise enormous sums of money from small donors by mailing them carefully written appeals designed to make them angry. So was Howard Phillips. So was Ed McAteer. Together, and separately, they helped build or fund the Heritage Foundation (1973), the Council for National Policy (1981), the Moral Majority (1979), Christian Voice (1978), the Religious Roundtable (1979), and, later, the Family Research Council (1983) and the Christian Coalition (1989). Every one of those organizations was, in different combinations, a partnership between conservative political operatives who needed a mass base and conservative religious leaders who needed a political vehicle. Neither side pretended, in private, that the arrangement was anything other than what it was.

Alongside the institutions came the media. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1961 and launched The 700 Club in 1966. Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye followed with PTL in 1974. Focus on the Family, founded by James Dobson in 1977, was carried by more than a thousand radio stations at its peak. Salem Communications, founded in 1986, eventually became the largest Christian radio network in the country. By the 1990s, a Christian in most parts of the United States could, if he chose, listen only to Christian radio, watch only Christian television, read only Christian magazines, send his children only to Christian schools, and buy his books only from Christian bookstores. He would, in that closed loop, hear the movement's version of every political question in the country, every day, from morning drive time until he went to sleep. Very few of the people speaking into his ear were trained biblical scholars. Almost all of them were, in one way or another, on the payroll of the apparatus.

That closed loop matters, because it explains something otherwise puzzling about the movement. If you ask an ordinary member of it where a particular political conviction came from, he will very often say he got it from the Bible. And he will believe that when he says it. He is not lying. He is describing, honestly, what it feels like from inside the loop. But if you trace the specific framing of the conviction backward, you will often find, three or four steps up the chain, a talking point that started at a think tank in Washington, was tested in a direct-mail letter, was picked up by a talk-radio host, was repeated by a pastor who listens to that host on his morning commute, and finally reached the pew as a matter of Christian conviction. The Bible is not the source. The Bible is the varnish.

The alignment

Through the 1980s, the movement married the Republican Party. That is the plainest way to say it.

There had been Christian Democrats and Christian Republicans, both, for most of American history. The Democratic Party had held the Solid South for a century, and much of that South was culturally evangelical. Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher who spoke openly about being born again, won the presidency in 1976 with heavy white evangelical support. Four years later, that same constituency abandoned him and voted, in overwhelming numbers, for a divorced Hollywood actor who did not attend church, Ronald Reagan. What had changed was not Carter's theology, which was, if anything, more conventionally evangelical than Reagan's. What had changed was the movement.

Reagan, courted skillfully by the new Religious Right, gave the movement what it wanted in language, and much of what it wanted in policy. He addressed the Religious Roundtable in Dallas in 1980 and said, famously, "I know you can't endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you." From that moment on, with rare exceptions, the leadership of Conservative American Christianity has been formally, institutionally, and financially braided into the Republican Party. Its voter guides. Its endorsements. Its get-out-the-vote operations. Its judicial nominations. Its policy priorities. All of it, over time, has come to run through the machinery of one American political party.

This is not a criticism of any particular Republican policy. It is a description of a structural reality. A church tradition that becomes indistinguishable from a political party has stopped being a church tradition in any meaningful sense. It has become a chaplaincy. And a chaplaincy, whatever its stated theology, will over time preach whatever the flag it serves needs preached. There is no example in Christian history of that arrangement ending well. The German church of the 1930s is the case every seminary student is required to study, and it is required to be studied because the pattern is that consistent. A church that fuses itself to a national party will, sooner or later, be asked to bless something no honest reader of the Gospels can bless. And most of the time, it will.

The escalation

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the movement escalated. The Clinton impeachment. The Terri Schiavo case. The judicial wars over Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The Ten Commandments monuments. The battles over same-sex marriage. The Tea Party. Each of these was framed, from the movement's pulpits and radio stations, as a defining moment. Each of them raised the emotional stakes. Each of them narrowed the space in which a member of the movement could hold a moderate view without being pushed out.

Something else happened in those decades, quieter but more consequential. The movement's theology of leadership shifted. In the 1980s, when the movement was still new and self-conscious, its leaders insisted, at least in public, on personal character as a qualification for office. In 1998, during the Clinton impeachment, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating that "moral character matters to God" and that "tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture." That resolution was written in the context of a Democratic president's affair with an intern. It was clear. It was scriptural. It was, everyone assumed at the time, a permanent principle.

Twenty years later, the same denomination, and the broader movement it belonged to, would embrace, defend, and turn out for a candidate whose personal life made the Clinton years look, by comparison, restrained. The theological adjustment required to make that embrace possible was, in retrospect, the moment the movement gave up any pretense that its political posture was constrained by its own scripture. If character does not matter when it is our candidate, character does not matter. What matters is the outcome. What matters is the win. That, in the end, is the value the movement now shares with the party it has bound itself to. It is a value the Bible does not share. But by the time the shift was complete, the loop was closed tightly enough that very few inside it noticed.

What was lost along the way

I want to name, before this chapter ends, what was lost.

Something was lost, first, from Christian witness. A tradition that in 1900 could produce a Walter Rauschenbusch, in 1950 a Billy Graham who refused to preach to segregated audiences, in 1963 a Martin Luther King, Jr., writing from the Birmingham jail to white pastors who had told him to slow down, has, over the last fifty years, produced, on the national stage, mostly a chaplaincy to power. There are exceptions. There have always been exceptions. But the exceptions have, on the whole, been shouted down or pushed out. The men and women in the movement's pews who suspect, quietly, that something has gone wrong tend to keep it to themselves, because they know what happens to the ones who say it out loud. That silence is a loss. It is the loss of a public voice a country badly needs and no longer has.

Something was lost, second, from the movement's own children. A generation raised inside the loop has been leaving, in numbers the movement's leaders now openly worry about. The polling on this is not ambiguous. Young adults raised in white evangelical households are disaffiliating at rates without precedent in American religious history. When those young adults are asked why, the answers cluster. Hypocrisy. Politics. The treatment of LGBTQ people. The embrace of a leader whose life contradicted the values they had been taught since kindergarten. They did not, most of them, lose their faith. They lost their faith in the movement's version of it. That, too, is a loss, and one the movement has not yet begun to reckon with honestly.

Something was lost, third, from the neighbors the church was supposed to serve. Every hour the movement has spent building its apparatus, chasing its wins, defending its access to power, has been an hour it did not spend at the bedside, at the shelter, at the border, at the jail, at the funeral of someone the empire chewed up. That is not a small trade. The Gospels do not treat it as a small trade. Jesus, in Matthew 25, does not ask his followers what political victories they secured. He asks what they did with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. A movement that trades the second list for the first will, eventually, have to answer for the trade. It will not be able to answer by pointing to its voter turnout.

What this chapter is asking you to hold

I have tried, in these pages, not to argue. I have tried to describe. To lay out, in order, how the thing was built, out of what materials, by which hands, for what stated purposes. The record is public. Very little of what I have written here is disputed by serious historians of American religion. What is disputed, still, and fiercely, is the significance of the record.

The reader has to decide that part.

If a movement was assembled, in living memory, by political operatives who needed a base, funded by donors who needed a return, staffed by broadcasters who needed an audience, and rebranded, after the fact, with a founding story that was not true, then the movement's claim to speak for the eternal Word of God has to be tested, carefully, against the eternal Word of God. That is what the next part of this book is going to do. It is going to open the Book, the whole Book, from Genesis to Revelation, and ask a simple question, one part of the Bible at a time. Does this movement, whose history you have just read, look like the people this Book describes as belonging to its God?

You already know how I would answer that question. You have known since the first chapter. But you also know, by now, that the answer that matters is yours. The one you will give in your own kitchen, in your own quiet, when the radio is off and the sermon is over and there is no one in the room to nod along or push back.

Turn the page. The Book itself is waiting.