The Big Sort (16 page)

The most severe difference between the two groups—people who initially had divided only over which textbooks they thought should be used in the Kanawha County schools in the fall of 1974—came to light in how they judged the importance of a "saved, eternal life." The group that had favored the introduction of the new textbooks placed "salvation" last in their hierarchy of values. Those who opposed the new books ranked a saved, eternal life first.

Political scientists Geoffrey Layman and Edward Carmines gathered survey results from the 1980 through 1992 presidential elections. They compared the effects of race, age, education, religion, and a desire for personal freedom on voting behavior.
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They found that measures of traditional faith appeared to have the strongest impact on presidential votes. Voters cared about issues affecting self-expression—they wanted freedom of speech protected, for example—but traditional religious values mattered the most.
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The political division in this country wasn't between regions or classes, Layman and Carmines found. It was between people with liberal notions of religion and those with traditional beliefs.

This was the new politics that appeared in 1974 in Kanawha County. The divide there was about religion and values—and it was expressed geographically. The textbook opponents came largely from the small towns in rural Kanawha County; those who supported the textbooks and the board lived mainly in Charleston, the state capital. There were class differences, too. Opponents were working people who earned less and had less formal education than those living in the city. The mainline religious denominations and the establishment organizations in Charleston—civic clubs and the daily newspaper—supported the school board's choice of books. Opponents worshiped at the Open Door Apostolic Church, the Spradling Gospel Tabernacle, and Reverend Horan's Two-Mile Mountain Mission. This wasn't simply a conflict between clubs or institutions, however. Kanawha County residents were divided over their way of life.

Social scientists have been predicting for the past three centuries that religion would soon run its course and disappear. Sociologist Rodney Stark found the first forecast of religion's demise in 1710, when Thomas Woolston calmly calculated that Christianity would no longer be with us in 1900. Voltaire (1694–1778) figured that religion would last only another fifty years. In 1822, Thomas Jefferson surmised, "There is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."
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Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx all predicted that ascendant industrialism would eventually render religion meaningless. Society would simply "outgrow" the need for organized faith, and humans would be rid of ritual, superstition, and sacred traditions. More bluntly, sociologist Peter Berger announced in 1968 that "by the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture." Indeed, Berger wrote, "the predicament of the believer is increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university."
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The promise that religion would fall victim to modernization "has been regarded as
the
master model of sociological inquiry," one of the "key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations," wrote political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart.
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Which means, of course, that a central tenet of the social sciences over the past three hundred years has been proved spectacularly wrong. (Berger had the good sense to recant in 1997.) But a modernizing, industrial society did have an impact on faith in America. The economic panics of the late nineteenth century, the influx of immigrants, and the contradictions between scientific discoveries (say, evolution) and religious faith led to a split in the Protestant church. The division that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century was not so much between denominations; it was more about how people viewed the world. On one side was what Martin Marty has called "Private Protestantism."
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Private Protestants promoted individual salvation and promised that personal morality would be rewarded in the next life. On the other side of that great divide was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society. The latter laid the foundation for Democratic liberalism. The former provided the moral footing and rationale for Republican conservatism.

Private Protestantism considered the consumption of alcohol a personal failing; Public Protestantism looked at drunkenness as a social ill. Private Protestants supported "blue laws" (closing places of business on Sundays); Public Protestants promoted the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Dwight Moody, a Private Protestant revivalist, witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either "these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known." Public Protestants, Marty wrote, saw the Chicago labor strife and reasoned, "either the people were to be evangelized and their needs were to be met and their rights faced, or the Kingdom of God would not come." At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, both a session on the Social Gospel (the name given to Public Protestantism) and a revival conducted by Reverend Moody were held. While the Social Gospel ministers confronted industrial life and sought human perfection through political reform, Moody defined his task differently: "I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'"
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Josiah Strong, a turn-of-the-century Congregationalist minister, described "two types of Christianity" alive in the country. The division was "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong wrote in 1913. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social." The one staged revivals; the other sought to reform the world.
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Walter Rauschenbusch was the most well-known proponent of the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch pastored a church in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and from that vantage point in the new urban slum, he watched the modern industrial order rub raw against humanity. He was an optimist, believing in the "immense latent perfectibility of human nature."
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Perfection, however, required social intervention. Rauschenbusch wrote in 1908 that a "sense of equality is the basis for Christian morality." And to reach that equality, the Social Gospel theologian promoted legislation: a minimum wage, shorter workdays, better food, and cleaner air. The Social Gospel was a moral crusade against the cruelty of the industrial city. Western civilization was at a "decisive point in its development," Rauschenbusch wrote. "Either society confronted social injustice or society would fall: It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge."
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The country—or at least a majority of its citizens—followed Rauschenbusch. In 1908, the Methodist Church adopted its Social Creed, a list of social reforms, including "equal rights and complete justice for all men," the end of sweatshops, the prohibition of child labor, the protection of workers from dangerous machinery, and the "abatement of poverty." The title of Charles M. Sheldon's 1896 novel,
In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?,
would become the inspiration for
W.W.J.D.
bumper stickers and woven bracelets sported by Evangelicals in the 1990s. But the original book was a call for Christian socialism. Ecumenicism was the organizational form of the Social Gospel. Thirty-three denominations were represented when the Federal Council of Churches was formed in 1908. The combined representation of Protestant faiths quickly adopted the Methodist Social Creed.
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There was a period of intradenominational conflict, but the Social Gospel crowd won most of these organizational disputes. (For instance, modernist Baptists took over the denomination's theological schools and missionary boards, steering them in the direction of the Social Gospel.) The so-called Fundamentalists "lost in their efforts to gain control of any of the denominations" in the early twentieth century, Marty wrote. So the traditionalists responded by setting up institutions parallel to those dominated by practitioners of the Social Gospel.
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Left out by the mainline denominations, Private Protestant pastors established councils of Fundamentalist preachers, printing houses, and seminaries.
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The traditionalists published their own manifesto, twelve booklets printed between 1910 and 1915 titled
The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.
These scholarly works fenced off the theological boundaries of Private Protestantism: the Virgin Birth of Christ, the inerrancy of the Bible, Christ's death on behalf of sinners, his Resurrection, and the Second Coming. Three million copies of these booklets were distributed; this was the birth of Fundamentalism.
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But after the humiliation of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, where a public school teacher was found guilty of violating the state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, the contest was over. The Fundamentalist movement was brought to an "abrupt halt" by the ridicule resulting from the trial, according to the Reverend Jerry Falwell.
Christian Century
magazine predicted in 1926 that Fundamentalism would be a "disappearing quantity in American religious life." There was a "noticeable drop in attendance" at the 1926 meeting of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association. What followed was the "Great Exodus," Falwell's description of the mass movement of Fundamentalists out of mainline denominations and public life.
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Evangelicals didn't disappear, of course; they separated. Conservatives organized the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. They experimented with radio and television. (Between 1967 and 1972, membership in the National Religious Broadcasters increased fourfold.
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) Occasionally, religious conservatives poked their heads out and showed some political force, supporting, for example, the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. But the purpose of the church was saving souls, not saving society.
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For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the people who would become the Republican religious right were pre-political. They were either unaligned or stuck in political formations established by the Civil War or the New Deal. In 1960, 60 percent of Evangelical Protestants identified themselves as Democrats.
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In the mid-twentieth century, the strands of what we would recognize as modern conservatism were mostly unconnected. There were libertarians, business conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and conservative intellectuals. But they didn't have a party, and they didn't have each other. After World War II, there occurred what historian Sara Diamond has called a "conservative transformation." The various threads of conservative thought and faith began to intertwine, and social, religious, and ideological movements slowly braided together.
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The groups found they had things in common. Libertarians saw as primary the conflict between the individual and the state. They distrusted a government that substituted programs for personal responsibility and freedom. Christian traditionalists also thought that the country lacked discipline and distrusted a government that substituted programs for salvation. (James Dobson sold more than 2 million copies of his 1971 book
Dare to Discipline,
which encouraged parents to spank children who were disrespectful. The conservative movement simply hoped to extend family discipline to the nation.)
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New York neoconservatives, libertarians, and southern fundamentalists distrusted "social engineering" by the state, whether it was Stalin's Five-Year Plan, Johnson's Great Society, or textbooks recommended by English teachers in West Virginia. Finally, libertarians and fundamentalists found ready allies in the business wing of the Republican Party, those pressing for smaller, cheaper, and less intrusive government.

Historian Lisa McGirr has described the shift in conservative politics in the 1960s from stiff anticommunism to a tossed salad of libertarianism, racial homogeneity, social conservatism, and fundamentalist Christianity. She found the formation of the "New Right" a continent away from Kanawha County, in Orange County, California. The people in Orange County in the 1960s "embraced a set of beliefs whose cornerstone element was opposition to the liberal leviathan that was, in their eyes, the postwar federal government ... Many Orange County conservatives, then, drank a heady and muddled cocktail of traditional and libertarian ideas, linking a Christian view of the world with libertarian rhetoric and libertarian economics." The new conservative movement didn't grow just in the rural South or in coal country. Fundamentalist churches and right-wing politics also thrived among a "modern, young, and affluent population" in California.
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During the late 1960s and early 1970s, this impromptu conservative movement in Orange County steered toward the public schools.
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Anaheim fought over sex education from 1968 to 1970. In 1969, Orange County parents protested and eventually shut down a sex education program in the public schools. Parents warned that "secular humanists" were worming their way into the classrooms.
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The John Birch Society in Orange County reprinted and distributed copies of the nineteenth-century McGuffey Readers. By the time the textbook fight began in West Virginia, Orange County conservatives' "concerns about 'morality' and permissiveness would become the driving force behind a full-fledged battle over schools."
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