Darryl G. Hart
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Last Dance? The Future of the Religious Right and American Conservatism
Speech to The Philadelphia Society
April 28, 2007

The future of religion and conservatism in the United States depends largely on evangelical Protestants.  This may seem an exaggeration but recent history suggests this assertion needs to be received only with a half-grain of salt -- a reduced-sodium axiom as it were.  First, prior to 1976, “the year of the evangelical” according to Newsweek magazine, scholars and pundits did not pay much attention to religion and politics.  The older and traditionalist conservatives of the 1950s were certainly religious and concerned about first-order considerations in the articulation of their arguments.  But they did not wear their faith on their sleeves the way evangelicals do, which means that evangelical Protestantism has recast the relationship between religion and politics in ways that the older arguments between traditionalists and libertarians about virtue did not anticipate.  Second, the Republican strategy of tapping the values-voters linked conservatives and evangelicals in a way that ironically made the former dependent on the latter for electoral success.  If conservatism is going to prosper, at least numerically, the future of the Religious Right, the subject of my remarks today, will likely be decisive.

I plan to confine my remarks to two points.  The first is that the early returns on the future of born-again politics are not encouraging from a conservative perspective, anyway.  The leaders about to succeed the generation of Falwell, Roberston and Dobson are Ron Sider, Rick Warren and Jim Wallis.  If you do not recognize the latter three characters you may not understand that the emerging spokesmen for evangelicals are men more easily placed on the Left that the Right.  My second point is that the future of the Religious Right is not effectively disconnected from evangelicalism’s pre-Cold War past.  In fact, the Religious Right’s embrace of conservatism could turn out to be an anomaly.  In other words, have conservatives known more about evangelicalism prior to enlisting its believers for the movement, they might have decided to pass on born-again Protestants and go it alone.

Left Turn

As unthinkable as it was fifty years ago that a prospective nominee from one of the major political parties would consider Bob Jones University a significant campaign stop, almost as unlikely a half-century ago was the idea that born-again Protestants would consider the Democrats, the party of big-government, ethnic diversity, and social engineering, a political option.  Of course, evangelical Protestants have never been an easy fit within the post-World War II conservative movement.  Even so, evangelical leaders during the 1950s and 1960s shared enough of the concerns of the emerging conservative wing of American politics that they constituted a natural piece of the quilt Ronald Reagan patched together to secure the electoral victory of 1980.

Yet, the addition of family-values activism to the premises of Cold War conservatism that occurred in 1980 did not strengthen the hand of American conservatism.  On the one hand, the effort to harness the federal government, especially in presidential contests, to do battle in the emerging culture wars was an invitation to the sort of political centralization that post-World War II conservatives had always opposed.  In fact, the desire to force the government in Washington, D.C. to adopt a religiously inspired conservative agenda that would restore the nation’s moral integrity was at odds with a conservatism that had historically feared big government. 

On the other hand, the Religious Right inserted Christianity into American politics in a way that forced evangelicals to flip flop on the separation of church and state.  Prior to the late 1970s, the eventual leaders of the Religious Right, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had been forceful critics of the mainline churches for politicizing the faith.  They insisted that the church’s mission was not political but spiritual.  But once faith-based electioneering and policy-making became more attractive, those older expressions of the church’s inherently religious character turned mum.  In which case, the Religious Right has facilitated the rise of the Evangelical Left. 

The emergence of evangelical dissent from conservatism did not owe simply to the missteps of the Religious Right’s leadership.  As early as 1973 a group of young evangelical academics convened in Chicago to propose an alternative to the conservatism of their evangelical parents and professors who seemed woefully stolid as members of the Silent Majority.  The fifty academics and students who gathered in the Windy City produced a statement that indicated their frustration with the status quo. The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern was an explicit call for social righteousness, a phrase that hearkened back to the Social Gospel sentiments of liberal Protestantism between the Civil War and World War I.  The statement’s policy prescriptions were thin, but the heart of the statement was its affirmation of the social justice that God requires of righteous nations:

Although the Lord calls us to defend the social and economic rights of the poor and oppressed, we have mostly remained silent.  We deplore the historic involvement of the church in America with racism and the conspicuous responsibility of the evangelical community for perpetuating the personal attitudes and institutional structures that have divided the body of Christ along color lines.  Further, we have failed to condemn the exploitation of racism at home and abroad by our economic system.

One of the Chicago Declaration’s signers was Ron Sider, then a religion professor at Messiah College, an evangelical Anabaptist school in Pennsylvania, who achieved a measure of fame with his book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977).  As the title suggested, Sider was pointing out what the Chicago Declaration had noted, namely that evangelicals were invariably middle-class and indifferent to pressing social needs.  Like most reform-minded evangelicals, he tried for a middle course by arguing that individuals needed to change behaviors that contributed to poverty and that social structures were also in need of reform.  But the larger message of the book was that fighting such social ills as hunger and poverty was a duty the Bible demanded of the church. 

At roughly the same time that Sider was trying to steer evangelicals in a more progressive tack, Jim Wallis, having just been graduated from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, was challenging the evangelical status quo with Sojourners magazine (originally The Post-American) and the formation of a Christian community in inner-city Washington, D.C.  Wallis’ intent was to reconcile blacks and whites, poor and middle-class, cities and suburbs.  For him it was insufficient to provide simply for the poor and hungry.  Christians also needed to identify with people in need because God himself exalted the humble over the proud.  Wallis also created a stir with his 1976 book, Agenda for a Biblical People that was as far from Billy Graham as it was from Jimmy Carter.  Unlike Sider’s moderation, Wallis intentionally adopted a radical pose. 

Wallis has remained something of an acquired taste among born-again Protestants but Sider has moved readily into the evangelical mainstream. One important instance of Sider’s longevity was the recent policy statement adopted by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), entitled, For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility.  This white paper drew upon the social-justice ideals evident in the earlier Chicago Declaration and one important reason for the similarities was the role that Sider played in both documents. 

Prior to this statement, the NAE was predictably right of center.  But with For the Health of the Nation the NAE occupied territory to the left of its founders.  It combined conservative favorites such as religious liberty, families, the sanctity of human life, and human rights, and humanitarian initiatives generally associated with liberal politics -- economic justice, the environment, and a form of opposition to violence that bordered on pacifism.  By no means radical in its goals, the NAE’s embrace of liberal concerns was decisively out of step with the laissez-faire, anti-communist strain of Republicanism that appealed to evangelicals either as part of the Silent Majority or the Religious Right.  Sider’s influence looked particularly strong in the statement’s stress on justice.  “Because we have been called to do justice to our neighbors,” For the Health of the Nation affirms, “we foster a free press, participate in open debate, vote, and hold public office.”  “When Christians do justice, it speaks loudly about God” and demonstrates to non-believers “how the Christian vision can contribute to the common good and help alleviate the ills of society.”  Achieving justice was especially important for the NAE’s consideration of poverty.  According to the statement, economic justice required a restoration of wholeness in community and called Christians to become involved in politics in order to “shape wise laws pertaining to the creation of wealth, wages, education, taxation, immigration, health care, and social welfare that will protect those trapped in poverty and empower the poor to improve their circumstances.”

The NAE’s openness to liberal policy included family values and so attempted to bridge the divide between religious conservatives and secular liberals.  Even so, the NAE’s declaration was not very different from the Social Gospel reforms proposed a century earlier when the Federal Council of Churches also tried to harmonize evangelism and social reform.  Arguably the closest resemblance between evangelical activism and the old liberal Protestant Social Gospel was a re-definition of the church’s social responsibility.  Unlike the post-World War II evangelical conviction that placed the eternal destiny of people before their physical conditions, the NAE had come around to an older liberal Protestant conception of the kingdom of God that called upon the church to improve this world as a harbinger of the world to come.  The NAE declaration concluded, “We know that we must wait for God to bring about the fullness of the kingdom at Christ’s return. But in this interim, the Lord calls the church to speak prophetically to society and work for the renewal and reform of its structures.”

Apparently, the NAE is unprepared to move any farther left.  In 2005, when the Evangelical Climate Initiative released its statement, Climate Change: A Call to Evangelical Action, the NAE declined to add its formal support. But this has not deterred the head of the NAE’s lobbying efforts in Washington, Richard Cizik, from seeking evangelical support for “creation care.”  According to Cizik, “There are people who disagree with what I’m doing . . . within the evangelical community of America.”  But he does not understand why it is controversial to stand up and say, “Climate change is real, the science is solid, we have to care about this issue because of the impact on the poor.”  Cizik’s position has prompted a number of evangelical leaders, such as Land and Dobson, to call for his resignation. 

Perhaps the best indication of the leftward political drift of evangelicalism is the man in the Hawaiian shirt, purpose-driven pastor, Rick Warren.  Fast on the heels of his enormously popular book, Warren has shifted his attention from the cultivation of committed Christians to solving the world’s problems.  His recently launched P.E.A.C.E. initiative may not have the official status of the NAE’s declaration but given the Southern California pastor’s popularity it may be more indicative of contemporary evangelicalism’s political soul.  Rather than using the profits from Purpose Driven Life (2002) to add to his Tommy Bahama collection, Warren formed an organization to mobilize one billion Christians around the world into an “outreach effort to attack the five global, evil giants of our day. . . . spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, poverty, disease, and illiteracy.”  According to Warren, no government “can effectively eradicate” these afflictions.  That leaves the church to do it.  His implicit distrust of the state suggests that contemporary evangelicals’ sentimental left-of-center- humanitarianism could find an outlet other than the sort of big government that Democrats typically favor.  But by assigning to the church tasks typically reserved for the modern state Warren’s initiative will likely prompt American evangelicals to demand that the United States follow and support the church’s lead in fixing the world’s problems.  Whatever the effects of Warren’s efforts, the embrace of social justice, the environment and AIDS as forms of political engagement suggest that evangelicals are taking more cues from Jim Wallis than Jerry Falwell.   

The Uneasy Conservatism of Modern Evangelicalism

The reasons for this recent and generational shift among evangelicals are varied and complex.  Certainly, much of the current discomfort with the Religious Right stems from opposition to the Iraq War.  Randall Balmer, a baby-boom evangelical who recently wrote, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, indicates how George W. Bush has turned evangelicals hostile to the GOP.  He wrote:

The torture of human beings, God's creatures--some guilty of crimes, others not--has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation's capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.

Related to the rejection of Bush is the flakiness that afflicts the generation which was spared the hardships and sacrifices demanded of a generation that endured the Great Depression and that fought totalitarianism.  Having grown up with little pride in America, its institutions, and political traditions, and finding it difficult to accept the realities that come with growing up, evangelical baby boomers have no compass for discerning a way to stay on a politically sensible path while replacing their father’s Oldsmobile with their own Land Rover. 

Another important consideration for understanding boomer evangelicals’ distaste for conservatism is the defeat of Communism.  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union not only stood for an ideology at odds with America’s unique blend of liberal democracy and Christianity.  It also convinced born-again Protestants of the necessity and virtues of free institutions, market capitalism, and a strong national defense.  Just as anti-Communism held together the post-World War II patchwork of libertarians and traditionalists, it also explained born-again Protestants’ relatively easy absorption into the conservative movement.  But with the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the barrier to social-justice sentiments like those of the Chicago Declaration also came down.

But the most significant factor in the recent rise of an Evangelical Left may be evangelical Protestantism itself.  Wilfred McClay identified a tension between evangelicalism and conservatism several years ago when trying to account specifically for the thinness of George W. Bush’s conservatism.  According to McClay, Bush’s faith “has broadened and softened [the president’s] younger tendencies toward harder-edged oil-and-gas business conservatism, fired his moral concerns, given him a sense of political mission, and given him the energy, force, and staying power to pursue it.”  McClay goes so far as to admit that Bush’s “commitment to his evangelical faith . . . has made him more liberal, . . . than many of his party brethren.”  This liberalism is not that of the post-New Deal Democratic party.  It is instead one that promotes the individual and is suspicious of hierarchy and tradition.

McClay’s comment suggests an important aspect of evangelical devotion seldom noticed by its political enablers.  That is, the temptation that Eric Voegelin described well when he spoke of immanentizing the eschaton.  Like mainline Protestants before them, evangelicals believe in some way that they can establish heaven on earth.  They would never put it so crudely if a pollster asked the question in just those words.  But their actions and social involvements betray a sense that what will be true of the world to come should also characterize the world here and now.  Such millennial impulses, I believe, help to account for the recent evangelical statements about violence, poverty, hunger, war and the environment.  This is not to say that non-evangelicals favor violence, poverty, hunger, war and abuse of the environment.  But evangelicals live with a certain measure of surprise and indignation whenever they encounter human suffering.  Bill McClay put this feature of evangelicalism well when he said:

There is not much of . . . original sin, or any other form of Calvinist severity, in the current outlook of the Bush administration. That too is a reflection of the optimistic character of American evangelicalism, and therefore of evangelical conservatism. . . .

But conservatism will be like the salt that has lost its savor, if it abandons its most fundamental mission -- which is to remind us of what Thomas Sowell called “the constrained vision” of human existence, which sees life as a struggle, with invariably mixed outcomes, full of unintended consequences and tragic dilemmas involving hopelessly fallible people, a world in which the legacy of the past is usually more reliable than the projections of the future.

Several other points could be made about the inherently unstable compound that evangelicalism adds to American conservatism.  But putting together the emergence of an Evangelical Left with born-again Protestantism’s social reform impulse leads plausibly to the conclusion that the marriage between the Religious Right and the American Right will soon be ending in divorce.   

Evangelicalism and the Future of American Conservatism

Let me conclude by drawing attention to David Brooks’ reaction to Rick Warren at a conference sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts and which featured the Southern California pastor as one of the keynote speakers.  Brooks was impressed by Warren’s humanitarianism and wrote a column in which he asserted the following:

. . . when I look at the evangelical community, I see a community in the midst of a transformation -- branching out beyond the traditional issues of abortion and gay marriage, and getting more involved in programs to help the needy.  I see Rick Warren, who through his new Peace initiative is sending thousands of people to Rwanda and other African nations to fight poverty and disease.  I see Chuck Colson deeply involved in Sudan.  I see Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals drawing up a service agenda that goes way beyond the moral turf of Christian conservatives. 

Brooks added:

Millions of evangelicals are embarrassed by the people held up by the news media as their spokesmen.  Millions of evangelicals feel less represented by the culture war-centered parachurch organizations, and better represented by congregational pastors, who have a broader range of interests and more passion for mobilizing volunteers to perform service. Millions of evangelicals want leaders who live by faith by serving the poor. 

What Brooks sees in Warren is likely the future of the Religious Right.  It involves millions of compassionate evangelicals, without much consideration for limited government, legitimate authority, national sovereignty, the conditions that generate financial or social capital, the importance of strong mediating institutions, or the reality of unintended consequences, supporting policies and voting for candidates who will use the resources of the U.S. government to try to end human suffering not only in America but around the world.  That may be an inspiring vision of the future, but it is unclear whether it has much to do with American Right.