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Seeing Red
EVANGELICAL AND FUNDAMENTALIST ANTICOMMUNISM AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
RANDALL J. STEPHENS
In his religious biography of Jimmy Carter, Randall Balmer writes about the politicization of conservative American Christians in the 1970s. “For much of the twentieth century,” he argues, “evangelicals harbored deep skepticism about engaging politics directly.” Their sharpened millennial beliefs, otherworldliness, and skepticism about the gritty business of political engagement, so goes the argument, kept them out of the public arena. Added to this is what Balmer and others have described as a kind of benign disinterest. Televangelist and fundamentalist political broker Jerry Falwell Sr. said as much. His 1965 sermon “Ministers and Marches” proclaimed that “our only purpose on earth is to know Christ and make Him known.”1 There are other versions of this narrative of evangelical hibernation. In her 752-page sprawling narrative on the long history of a religious movement titled The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, Frances FitzGerald writes that “after the Scopes trial fundamentalists had been relegated to the margins of society.” Certain demagogues among the devout, says Balmer, tried to gather believers together in the common cause of anticommunism. Some evangelicals responded, but, Balmer implies, most of them remained apolitical until the mid-1970s.2
Late in the century, anecdotes from evangelical political leaders themselves seemed to prove this narrative. John Ashcroft—a governor of Missouri and U.S. senator who would go on to serve as George W. Bush’s attorney general—recalled the insularity of his Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination. In the years after he graduated from Yale University, in 1964, and then received his juris doctor degree at the University of Chicago in 1967, he contemplated a career in politics. Yet the church he called home offered no real examples of how to do that. He recalled only one member of his denomination, J. Roswell Flower, who ran for office. Flower had merely served as a Springfield, Missouri, city councilman. Flower spent some of his time in that position trying to convince fellow Springfielders that the fluoridation of water was part of a larger Communist conspiracy to take control of the population. In 1958, a representative of the Jaycees Fluoridation Committee pushed back, claiming, “It is almost unbelievable that a man in Mr. Flower’s position of responsibility . . . could be so completely misled by half truths and outright false statements made by irresponsible opponents to fluoridation.” In the end, though, Flower’s faction won at the polls. With fears of Communist plots and water poisoning exercising the community, Springfield’s citizens voted down fluoridation by an overwhelming margin of 4,266 to 8,672, or 33 to 67 percent.3 As odd or paranoid as the theory might have seemed, it represented persistent and real fears of Communist subversion in small-town America. Interviewed in 1988, Ashcroft thought about the strange apolitical nature of his denomination, which Flower eventually led as its general secretary. The government, Ashcroft contemplated, was “a worldly thing—in the same way that we shunned formal education for a long time.”4
Evangelicals like Ashcroft in the 1970s were, indeed, paying more attention to national politics and becoming aware of their collective influence. In a 1977 College of William and Mary master’s thesis on evangelical political thought, Darrell Kopp observed the changes taking place. “Evangelicals,” claimed Kopp, “have probably given greater attention to political theory and political affairs in recent years than to any other single area of social concern.” Kopp thought that as the faithful had “begun seriously to consider society’s problems, so has society begun to take evangelicalism more seriously.” National magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report as well as influential newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe took stock of the “newly” politicized evangelicals and fundamentalists. U.S. senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, himself an evangelical, told a UPI reporter in 1976 that “many in the evangelical community were not involved in politics; they were essentially withdrawn from the world.” Referring to Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, Hatfield went on to claim that “for the first time since William Jennings Bryan,” the American evangelical community “has caught fire because of the fact that a candidate uses (evangelical) nomenclature publicly.”5
Conservative Christians seemed to be thinking about their place in the larger world in other ways too. Christian pop music stars now competed for the hearts and ears of fans with their secular rivals. Evangelicals on the left end of the spectrum called for nuclear disarmament, racial justice, and greater attention to the nation’s social ills. Evangelicals Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty provided a model for born-again feminism in their influential 1974 book All We’re Meant to Be.6 The larger trend, however, was to the right. Evangelical and fundamentalist conservatives felt that their country was slipping away from them at an alarming rate. They pitched traditional family values and decried what they called secular humanism, the move for gay rights, legalized abortion, and liberal school curriculum, and lamented the banning of prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Just months before Ronald Reagan won his landslide victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter, the New York Times’s Dudley Clendinen maintained that this “new political activism of conservative Christians arises in large part from the growth of television evangelism, whose audiences have become the political wells from which the coalition seeks to draw.”7
But that was only part of the story, Clendinen admitted. Political power brokers and strategists such as Paul M. Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and a host of others brought together a large grassroots movement. Such changes were stunning to anyone paying attention to local and national politics. Some leaders of the Republican fold bristled at the new coalition of the self-righteous and denounced Falwell and company. There were those who might have wished that fundamentalist activists would have just stayed in their pulpits. In 1981, Barry Goldwater upbraided the Lynchburg, Virginia, TV preacher. “I think that every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass,” said the Arizona senator and one-time presidential hopeful.8 Falwell’s call for moral purity and righteous politics, especially in his opposition to the appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, was too much for Goldwater to endure. With a sense of irony, the journalist Mike Royko noted in 1984 how much the religious-political revolution had changed the landscape. “There’s little doubt,” he quipped, “the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the ...
