What was the major political and religious platform of the new right in 1980?

An analysis of the capture of the Republican party and the national agenda from the late 1970s into the 1990s by a coalition of political and religious conservatives.

PIP: Paradoxically, as Americans became increasingly pro-choice, 2 anti-abortion Presidents were elected to serve for 12 years and pro-life forces captured the domestic agenda by overhauling the traditionally libertarian Republican party. This occurred because Republican analysts saw that the Democratic New Deal coalition was cracking, the traditionally conservative south and west began to control more seats in the House of Representatives, and Americans were becoming more affluent and, thus, more interested in taxes and inflation. Efforts were made to bring social conservatives, especially pro-lifers, into the Republican party with scare tactics used in the wording of direct mailings. In the late 1970s, fundamentalist Christians became outraged by Supreme Court decisions banning school prayer and legalizing abortion and by Jimmy Carter's decision to withdraw tax-exempt status from segregated church schools. This group was mobilized by radio and television preachers, especially televangelist Jerry Falwell who also used scare tactics to promote his Moral Majority. The new right also tried to reach the nation's 50 million Roman Catholics through the right-to-life movement. The Catholic bishops worked closely with the new right at first, but most Catholic lay people did not share their church's opposition to abortion in all cases. When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the new right was quick to claim the victory, even though polls showed that most Reagan voters opposed banning abortion. For the next 12 years, Republican policies were crafted to please these new Republicans, with funding denied important international family planning agencies. Then in the mid-1980s, the forces of the new right began to wobble. Fundamentalist and Catholic Church leaders were rocked with sexual scandals, the pro-lifers began to fight among themselves, and the Moral Majority stopped raking in funds. When the Supreme Court's Webster decision gave states the right to restrict abortion, a pro-choice backlash swept the nation. Congress followed suit. Pro-lifers have resisted political marginalization, and their new strategy is exemplified by Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition which wants to organize members into a political force from the ground up. The religious right also maintains its firm hold on the Republican party, although pro-choice Republicans are urging the party to distance itself from the anti-abortion forces. With most Americans willing to accept some restrictions on abortion, however, and anti-choice activism continuing, abortion foes have made significant political gains in some states just as the Supreme Court has allowed states to regulate abortion. This will affect the women who most depend upon abortion, the young and the poor.

In the post-Scopes era of the 1930s, growing numbers of conservative Protestants struggled to reconcile their separatist religious sensibilities with their increasing sense of the need to engage in direct political and social activism. Many, like Bob Jones, focused on building the secessionist institutions that formed in the wake of the Fundamentalists-Modernist controversy. Another small but vocal contingent took aim at the Great Depression–era economic policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They developed politicized religious rhetoric that would give shape to the anti-communist bombast of the Cold War and the pro-family politics of the last two decades of the century. Some prominent fundamentalists, such as Baptist preacher J. Frank Norris, criticized the New Deal to condemn the centralization of political power in Washington, a trend some interpreted in apocalyptic terms, seeing parallels to ancient biblical prophecy regarding the rise and fall of powerful regimes. Other more controversial pro-Nazi anti-Semites such as Episcopalian writer Elizabeth Dilling, Catholic radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin, and Christian Nationalist Crusade agitator Gerald L. K. Smith pushed the limits of populist religious rage in their attempts to dismiss FDR’s New Deal as a Jewish Bolshevik plot.

In contrast to neo-evangelicalism, an equally politically active model of old-line fundamentalism advocated by the likes of Presbyterian secessionist Carl McIntire, ex–Disciples of Christ pastor Billy James Hargis, and numerous regional ministers argued for the continuation of fundamentalist institutional separatism. Often couched in the rhetoric of aggressive anti-communism, these ministries lashed out against the political priorities of the day to condemn racial desegregation and advocate foreign military intervention against “Reds” abroad. They also rejected secular trends in culture and supported a more public role for Christianity in civil institutions. The student movement of the 1960s, the counterculture, the Civil Right movement, and anti–Vietnam War activism drew the ire of anti-communist fundamentalists.

McIntire, Hargis, and others also took aim at their fellow Protestants. They focused on attacking the ecumenical body of the National Council of Churches, which they condemned as an unbiblical, Babel-like “super church.” They also lashed out against neo-evangelicalism as a compromise with, not condemnation of, degenerate modern culture. Speaking mostly to regional audiences in the South, West, and Northeast, religiously and politically incendiary broadcasts such as McIntire’s Twentieth-Century Reformation Hour and Hargis’s Christian Crusade pushed the limits of regulating access to public radio airwaves. Both ministries anticipated legal disputes that would later animate the Religious Right of the 1970s as they faced frequent regulatory challenges regarding their political messages and wrangled with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over their tax-exempt status.

By the 1960s a large number of evangelical leaders had begun to question the isolationism of a previous generation of fundamentalist leaders. Neo-evangelicalism and anti-Communist fundamentalism reflected more than a half-century’s worth of controversy regarding engagement with and withdrawal from the broader culture. A small number of younger evangelicals rejected the status quo conservatism of neo-evangelicalism and anti-Communist fundamentalists and turned to anti–Vietnam War, anti-segregation, and anti-poverty activism. A larger coalition of evangelicals and fundamentalists turned toward aggressive political organizing and built new relationships with the Republican Party. In the GOP, they found politicians willing to embrace conservative social and economic issues in a way that resonated with white evangelical Christians living in the American South, the West, and beyond.

What was the New Right in the 1980s?

What was the conservative movement in the 1980s?

What led to the rise of the Moral Majority in American society during the 1980s?

What is the religious right movement?