Onward, Christian Soldiers

The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States

Deal W. Hudson

• Publisher: Threshold Editions
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416565895
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.
We are not divided, all one body we.
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity. -- From the nineteenth-century hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" What keeps America a country of religious practice and traditional values? How has the U.S. avoided suc-cumbing to total secularism? The answer to these provocative questions is found in the religious commun-ities of America today: In the past thirty years, the religiously active voter has migrated to the Republican Party, and the story behind this shift, evidenced in the emergence of Evangelical dominance over mainstream Protestantism and the defeat of liberal Catholicism, is at the heart of this fascinating cultural history. In Onward, Christian Soldiers, the Washington insider who was at the vanguard of the sea change in religious and political history that propelled George W. Bush into the White House offers an intimate perspective on those remarkable years -- and their influence over the ones to come. Deal W. Hudson analyzes how, steadily over-coming age-old misjudgments and misunderstandings that separated them, conservative Catholics and Evangelical Christians drew together because of what they viewed as profound assaults on shared core beliefs. They became allies to battle the forces of secularization, relativism, and atheism. And together they forged a grassroots movement across America that astonished political activists and surprised commentators as well as members of traditional religious organizations. How, exactly, was this coalition achieved and who were its movers and shakers? What enabled them to deepen, enrich, and activate the resurgence of traditional values in society to make America radically different from the secularized Europe that was so widely believed to be on the verge of becoming the model for the United States? Deal W. Hudson details this phenomenon by examining the leading figures and institutions on both sides of the debate, exposing the dramatic encounters between those espousing fundamental Judeo-Christian beliefs and those heralding the "death of God" and the new age of secular humanism. Dealing with today's hot-button issues, Onward, Christian Soldiers provides an unprecedented look at the confrontation of the religious right with secularists in America, a confrontation that is not only timely but also timeless in its impact.

1

1979

IN 1976, NEWSWEEKFAMOUSLY ANNOUNCED THE “YEAR OF THE Evangelical.”¹ Most people were not familiar with Evangelical piety at the time. To them, the headline seemed exactly right. For the first time, a self-professed Evangelical Christian—Jimmy Carter—was about to make his home in the White House. His candidacy was attracting the support of religious voters nationally. Most notable was the effect Carter was having on Evangelical pastors and communities across the South, where Republicans already had made serious inroads since the civil rights and busing controversies of the ’60s. It appeared that religiously motivated voters, turned off by the ’72 George McGovern candidacy, were returning to the Democratic Party.

The Newsweek headline introduced the country to the growth of the Evangelical movement. The mention of an Evangelical evoked an image of a Bible-toting hick who talked about “being saved” in a Southern accent. Carter didn’t fit this stereotype, and he was a liberal. His politics were formed out of the crucible of the civil rights movement. “Carter is not a strict Evangelical,” Time had written several months earlier.² Little explanation was given for this observation, which would turn out to be decisive for Carter’s presidency. The article briefly mentions Carter’s fondness for the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a figure unknown to the general public but whose influence on Protestant clergy in America was immense. A professor at Union Theological Seminary from 1928 to 1960, Niebuhr had a career that encompassed successive periods in American religion, from the Social Gospel of the ’20s to the mainstream Protestant liberalism of the postwar period.

Carter was particularly taken with one sentence from Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” This reveals the fundamental difference of outlook between Carter and the Evangelicals he was supposed to represent. The federally enforced notion of justice was precisely what was fueling the coming revolution of the religious conservatives against Washington. Carter was an Evangelical whose White House activism aroused a slumbering giant known as the Religious Right.

Niebuhr’s call for political elites to correct injustice, protect civil rights, and challenge structures of inequality was the dominant voice of religion in politics at the time. This kind of religious activism was not new in American politics; it was the bread and butter of the National Council of Churches and mainstream Protestantism. The fact that a Southerner, Carter, had become its principal spokesman was not new, either. The country was only a decade beyond the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What was new was that Carter—Southern and white—had unified other Southern Evangelicals behind his Democratic candidacy. The liberal base of the Democratic Party, uncomfortable with his public piety, made common cause with Evangelicals, still at odds with the party over civil rights issues. Evangelicals were about to learn a political lesson. They had signed on to support one of their own, or at least they thought so.

BREAKING WITH CARTER

Eight days before the election, Pat Robertson put his arms around a Sunday-school teacher from Plains, Georgia, on his nationally broadcast television program, The 700 Club, and called him “my Christian brother.” After Evangelical voters were decisive in putting the Georgia governor into office, their brother soon disappointed and alienated them. Carter turned out not to be so Evangelical after all, at least by the standards of Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, such as Robertson, who had helped to make him president.

Carter’s religious convictions were those of a mainstream Protestant, but he walked and talked like an Evangelical. He quoted the Bible more freely than any presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan, but his religiously infused political passion for justice was formed by the civil rights movement, not by the culture wars that were stirring in the grassroots of religious conservatives. Carter cared little for social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and the militant feminism that had inflamed pockets of resistance around the country and were making activists out of conservative Christians.

In the late ’70s, most of these Christians were Democrats from Democratic states, but President Carter was tone-deaf to the sense of cultural crisis in conservative religious communities across the country. His success as a candidate in winning the support of religious voters was short-lived. Through its actions, Carter’s administration drove the conservative Christians back toward the Republican Party. It had shed its pro-abortion inclination just in time to receive them with open arms under the leadership of Ronald Reagan.

Carter’s missteps were many, but they were unavoidable given his political vision. His zeal for imposing “justice” on segregated communities led to a showdown between the IRS and Christian schools in the South. He allowed the Internal Revenue Service to threaten these private schools, newly created since the busing days of the ’60s, with the loss of their nonprofit status on the grounds of being segregated. Longtime activists and organizers credit this one initiative, more than any other, with the beginning of the Religious Right.

Nothing revealed Carter’s distance from the Evangelicals who supported him more than his infamous 1979 White House Conference on Families. From the moment he allowed the conference to be renamed “On Families” from “On the Family” a train wreck was inevitable for the Carter administration. The name of the conference, which was created to rebuild religious support for Carter’s reelection campaign, was changed under pressure from Democratic Party ideologues. As it turned out, Carter’s sense of the justice that needed to be imposed on the “sinful world” comported better with the feminists in the Democratic Party left over from the McGovern campaign than with the Southern Baptists, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and conservative Catholics who had rallied to his candidacy.

Religious conservatives had a much different notion of the sins that needed to be addressed by their political representatives. Protecting the traditional family, not questioning it, was a first principle of their political vision. They felt they had no choice but to protect themselves against the Evangelical in the White House the way they had defended themselves against the Equal Rights Amendment. The struggle against the ERA, which began in 1972, already had created a loose network of Evangelicals, Mormons, conservative Catholics, and Jews who saw the amendment as a threat against the family and traditional gender roles and a pretext for abortion rights. Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic activist, had rallied a coalition of religious conservatives to kill the ERA by 1979. Carter’s “Conference on Families” succeeded in reenergizing the same troops for another battle. Schlafly, along with other religiously motivated activists, led the fight to subvert the left-wing agenda of the White House conference held in all fifty states during 1979.

Religious conservatives had demonstrated their grassroots muscle in the states where the ERA was defeated. Schlafly and others were ready to defend their values and way of life as not being the source of any social flaws. They were ready to bring their regional grassroots leaders to Washington. Two years earlier, as part of her anti-ERA effort, Schlafly had organized a successful counterdemonstration to another federally funded effort to challenge the traditional family, the Conference on Women in Houston. But Carter’s White House Conference on Families, coupled with the IRS attack on Christian schools, made the White House and Congress the source of opposition for the newly created network of religious conservatives.

Evangelicals scratched their heads in disbelief as the Sunday-school teacher from southern Georgia provided a public platform for McGovernites to attack the man-woman-child norm of the family. With the White House itself calling into question the meaning of “the family” on the heels of Roe v. Wade (1973), the IRS investigation of Christian schools, and the feminist threat of ERA still hanging in the air, a cultural all-out attack on the core beliefs of religious conservatives was under way. Taken together, these initiatives were seen as nothing less than a declaration of war on their way of life and possibly something even more sinister: an assault on the content of faith itself. Sensitive to the threat of atheism from their anti-Communist days, the network continued to mobilize.

“The Religious Right was a reactionary movement with two strands: anti-Communism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s,” says Tim Goeglein, a senior advisor to President George W. Bush. Goeglein knows a great deal about the politics of religious conservatives. Over the years, he has participated in thousands of conference calls and events involving the movers and shakers in the religious conservative movement. As associate director of coalitions for President Bush, Goeglein worked 24/7 with Catholic and Evangelical leaders to relay their concerns to the Bush administration. Before that, Goeglein, a Missouri Synod Lutheran, worked on the Senate staff for Senator Dan Coates (R-Idaho), who was a leading religious conservative.

His knowledge of the broader cultural horizons of the debate makes Goeglein a particularly interesting and succinct commentator. “Everything that has come out of the movement can be seen as a product of those reactions to the Communist threat and the sexual revolution. This,” he explained, “was the reason the movement loved Reagan and hated Clinton.” Reagan had firmly established his credentials as an anti-Communist during his years in Hollywood and later as governor of California. But it was as a social conservative that Reagan presented himself in the 1980 presidential campaign.

Conversely, “The reason the Religious Right’s hatred for Bill Clinton was so venomous,” Goeglein explained, “is that Bill Clinton was a proxy for ’60s behavior; he embodied the same issues that created the movement in the first place. The Clinton presidency was eight years of feeling confirmed about its views of the sexual revolution. We would wake up each morning wondering what we missed in the White House soap opera of the previous twenty-four hours. The Clinton years,” he added, “are a big part of the explanation why Governor George W. Bush could get such enthusiastic cooperation from religious conservatives during the 2000 presidential campaign.”

I asked Goeglein if this animus toward Bill Clinton would carry over to Senator Hillary Clinton. “If Hillary is elected president, the Religious Right will reemerge so powerfully it will make its first iteration look like a cakewalk,” he said. “It’s important to remember that the most powerful leader of the Religious Right came to prominence because he was the anti–Dr. Spock, that is, Dr. James Dobson, founder and president of Focus on the Family.” By the time Dobson wrote his groundbreaking book Dare to Discipline (1982), the ideas of Dr. Benjamin Spock and his imitators had become the establishment view. Dobson’s name and message became supercharged after an appearance on The Phil Donahue Show where he tangled with the liberal Catholic host about the raising of children. Dobson’s steady rise to movement leadership underlines the centrality of family issues as the hub of Religious Right concerns. “Dobson’s Focus on the Family,” as Goeglein put it, “has become the bricks and mortar of the Religious Right since the days of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.”³

ORGANIZING THE MOVEMENT

The Carter fiasco made Evangelicals realize they had no leverage against the president they helped to elect. Without outside groups such as the labor unions, they had no mechanism to apply pressure and deliver votes. The Carter campaign and election had brought Evangelicals onto the national stage; their preeminence as a religious force had finally been recognized. Also publicly recognized was an unexpected cost to mainstream Protestants: a significant loss of membership.

The disaffection with Carter made the year 1979, not 1976, the historical turning point for religious conservatives, both Catholic and Evangelical. They were not going to make that mistake again. Just as Clinton made Bush possible, so Carter paved the road to the White House for Reagan.

But at that moment in time, Evangelicals did not have an organization like the National Council of Churches to work their message through the media. What ongoing lobbying presence Evangelicals had in Washington, was either ineffective or out of step, just as Carter was, as a result of their growing discontent over social issues. It was during this time that two powerful Christian organizations emerged that would represent the needs and wishes of conservative Christians in the years to come.

Gary Jarmin’s name is not as well known as those of other Religious Right leaders. He is president of Christian Voice, an organization he helped to create in 1979. Jarmin was present at the beginning and was a significant and innovative player throughout the growth of the Religious Right through the Reagan years. His organization continues to thrive, having registered nearly 350,000 voters in the 2004 campaign. Jarmin comes across as an affable veteran of D.C. politics and looks more like a career lobbyist than the Evangelical ministers he’s organized over thirty years. Sitting in his office in Alexandria, Virginia, he spoke to me of the frustrations that led to the founding of Christian Voice.

Christian Voice was founded the year before the Moral Majority. The two fledgling organizations shared space in the same building on Capitol Hill in Washington in the early 1980s. A Baptist from California, Jarmin came to D.C. in 1971, eventually becoming legislative director of the American Conservative Union, founded in 1964. “I remember constantly encountering many of these prominent liberal clergymen, from mostly mainline denominations,” said Jarmin. “All of these people would gather on Capitol Hill and were taking a very liberal or hard left line. It was frustrating. You would hear these guys running around lobbying members of Congress, testifying at committee hearings, presuming to represent all of Christendom. You’d have the National Council of Churches pretending to represent all of their denominations. You’d have the Baptist Committee guy talking as though he represented all Baptists in the U.S., and of course, you knew darn well that what was really represented there was a minority slice of opinion in those churches. In fact, I felt that I represented the political views and attitudes of most mainstream Protestants, Evangelicals, or Baptists. I found this very frustrating.”

Jarmin continued to complain aloud about “all the liberals running around Capitol Hill pretending to represent all of Christendom” and was eventually introduced to someone who was doing something about the same problem in California. In 1974, Robert Grant started a group called American Christian Cause, and, like Anita Bryant in Florida, he fired one of the first flares of Religious Right activism, fighting the pornography and the homosexual lobby on the West Coast. Jarmin saw in Grant’s activism the opportunity to start an “effective lobby for pro-family Christian values around the country.” When the two finally met in 1977, they agreed that the conservative Christian community had no voice in Congress and decided to create one. “That’s how the name came about. We were really the first Moral Majority.” According to Jarmin, the first two major news stories about the Religious Right, in Newsweek and on 60 Minutes, were both about Christian Voice.

“We made a decision at the beginning not to get a big name, like a Falwell, Bakker, or Swaggart. We wanted to make sure we were as broad-based and as eclectic as possible in terms of representing the Christian community. Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, mainstream Protestants, and Catholics—everyone would feel welcome and support what we did. If we picked one well-known leader of a particular domination or faction within a denomination, that would really limit our appeal to only those people,” Jarmin told me.

Grant and Jarmin had correctly realized the need for someone to represent conservative Christians in Washington. Their timing in founding Christian Voice was impeccable. They sensed that it was only a matter of time until the culture “inside the Beltway” would step over the line and so outrage Evangelicals that they would be shaken loose from their disdain of politics. At the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword
• Personal Introduction
• 1. 1979
• 2. WAS PAT BUCHANAN RIGHT?
• 3. NOT SEX, THE FAMILY
• 4. THEOCRACY, THE MYTH
• 5. THE LAND OF CIVIL RELIGION
• 6. IS THERE A CATHOLIC RELIGIOUS RIGHT?
• 7. RELIGIOUS LEFT, RIGHT, AND CENTER
• 8. “HELLO, THIS IS KARL ROVE”
• 9. WHEN PHILOSOPHY GOES BAD
• 10. PERSECUTION, ACCOMMODATION, AND TRIUMPH
• 11. SEPARATED BRETHREN NO MORE
• 12. ALTAR BOYS AND CATHOLIC GRANDMOTHERS
• 13. WILL THE DEMOCRATS GET RELIGION? WILL THE REPUBLICANS KEEP IT?
• Bibliography