The right rides high - dogmatism and religious fundamentalism in U.S. Republican Party - Cover Story

Progressive, The, Oct, 1994 by Chip Berlet

While Falwell's Moral Majority began hammering on the issue of abortion, the core founding partners of the New Right were joined in a broad coalition by the growing neoconservative movement of former liberals concerned over what they perceived as a growing communist threat and shrinking moral leadership. Reluctantly, the remnants of the Old Right hitched a ride on the only electoral wagon moving to the Right. The New Right coalition was built around shared support for anticommunist militarism, moral orthodoxy, and economic conservatism, the themes adopted by 1980 Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.

The first attempt to build a broad Religious Right movement failed in part because Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, with its Baptist roots and pragmatic fundamentalist Protestant aura, had only a limited constituency; it failed to mobilize either the more ethereal charismatic and Pentecostal wings of Christianity or the more moderate branches of denominational Protestantism. Apart from the abortion issue, its appeal to conservative Catholics was microscopic.

But as early as 1981 Falwell, Weyrich, and Robertson were working together to build a broader and more durable alliance of the Religious Right through such vehicles as the annual Family Forum national conferences, where members of the Reagan Administration could rub shoulders with leaders of dozens of Christian Right groups and share ideas with rank-and-file activists. This coalition-building continued through the Reagan years.

When the scandals of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker rocked televangelism and Pat Robertson failed in his 1988 Presidential bid, some predicted the demise of the Religious Right. But they overlooked the huge grass-roots constituency that remained connected through a Christian Right infrastructure of conferences, publications, radio and television programs, and audiotapes. Robertson lost no time in taking the key contacts from his 1988 Presidential campaign and training them as the core of the Christian Coalition, now the most influential grass-roots movement controlled by the Religious Right.

The genius of the long-term strategy implemented by Weyrich and Robertson was their method of expanding the base. First, they created a broader Protestant Christian Right that cut across all evangelical and fundamentalist boundaries and issued a challenge to more moderate Protestants. Second, they created a true Christian Right by reaching out to conservative and reactionary Catholics. Third, they created a Religious Right by recruiting and promoting their few reactionary allies in the Jewish and Muslim communities.

This base-broadening effort continues, with Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition writing in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review about the need for the Right to move from such controversial topics as abortion and homosexuality toward bread-and-butter issues--a tactical move that does not reflect any change in the basic belief structure. Sex education, abortion, objections to lesbian and gay rights, resistance to pluralism and diversity, demonization of feminism and working mothers--these will continue to be core values of the coalition being built by the Religious Right.