The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (17 page)

But how did this alarm over cultural changes become transformed into a
political
movement? One major factor was the reaction in conservative religious circles to the role of the
national government in promoting the secularizing and permissive trends that were under way. The US Supreme Court decisions of 1962 and 1963 banning mandated prayers in public schools were early fire bells that would long echo as warnings that the government was turning away from religion. Those decisions were in fact part of a larger effort by the Court not only to end Protestant privilege, but also to limit governmental promotion even of “religion-in-general.” The Court, moreover, seemed to condone permissiveness when, during the next decade, it came to accept that sexually explicit materials had First Amendment protections as free speech. The contrast between what was permitted and even commonplace by the late 1960s compared to the 1950s was dramatic. In the long run, the 1973 ruling in
Roe v. Wade
legalizing abortion was especially momentous. At first, by far the strongest opposition to
Roe
came from conservative Roman Catholics. For the first several years, fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants did not respond with any great outcry, since abortion had not been one of their traditional concerns. Nonetheless, they did see the decision as part of a larger disturbing permissive trend regarding sexuality. Within the span of little more than a decade, the government had abandoned any role in being an ally of the
churches in regulating sexual mores. In the name of pluralism, and reflecting the trend of the time to maximize individual free choice, it seemed to be condoning the sexual revolution.

Not only was the government stepping away from its traditional role in regulating sexual behavior, it was actively promoting the rapidly developing revolution in women's rights, gender equality, homosexuality, and definitions of the family. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Although the amendment seemed simply to guarantee nondiscrimination for women, conservative Christians came to see it as having ominous implications in that it would advance feminist agendas. Phyllis Schlafly, a Roman Catholic, led a strenuous and ultimately successful campaign to prevent ratification of the amendment in a sufficient number of states. Her efforts during the mid-1970s were instrumental in forging a coalition among conservative Catholics and conservative Protestant evangelicals that continued to grow.

Into the mid-1970s conservative Catholics were more active than conservative evangelical Protestants in organizing what would eventually become a larger political coalition. The story of the transition of the American Catholicism of the 1950s to that of the 1980s is both dramatic and complex. Broadly speaking, the Catholic community became divided between, on the one hand, the more liberal elements, which were eager to put the days of authoritarian Catholic ghettoes behind them and assimilate with the American mainstream, and, on the other hand, the more conservative Catholics, who were alarmed by mainstream cultural trends and eager to preserve a strong Catholic identity and the essentials of church
teaching, especially regarding marriage and sexuality. Conservative Catholics had a relationship to the early American heritage that was very different from that of most evangelical Protestants. Early “Christian” America had often been anti-Catholic. In the 1950s, anti-Catholicism was still strong, but, simply because of the sheer numbers of Catholics, the church could command some deference. By the 1980s, conservative Catholics had an acute sense of how much that deference had slipped, especially regarding film censorship, birth control, and abortion. Catholics also had a sophisticated heritage of church teaching regarding natural law and the establishment of church teachings in societies. And, after the moderating reforms of Vatican II, these teachings could be adapted to the late twentieth-century American scene in ways that dovetailed with evangelical concerns to restore Christian influences.

Despite these important
Catholic contributions, the religious right would not have had anything like the grassroots impact that it did without the leadership of fundamentalistic Protestants in mobilizing a large segment of revivalist Protestantism as a self-consciously political force.

As late as 1976, the political sensibilities of revivalist evangelicals were still unformed when many of them voted Democratic for Jimmy Carter, largely on the basis that he had declared himself “born again.” Prior to 1976, “born again” was not a familiar phrase in mainstream public discourse. Moreover, the term “evangelical” was seldom used, at least not in connection to politics. When
Newsweek
declared 1976 to be “The Year of the Evangelical,” the publicity helped to create a
sense of potential among evangelicals, who began to think of themselves as a political force. Conservative evangelical and Catholic leaders, however, soon became disillusioned with President Carter. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment, he did not take a stand against abortion, and he was friendly to the Democratic Party agenda to guarantee rights for homosexuals and to broaden the definition of the family. In that context, in 1979 fundamentalist Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a political-action organization to mobilize religious conservatives. Revivalist evangelicalism had suddenly emerged as a conspicuous player in national politics.

The government was not, of course, the only force in furthering the sexual revolution. Rather, the courts and governmental agencies were responding to much larger social trends and agendas that were energized by vigorous movements and lobbies and supported by most of the media and the intellectual community. The mainstream media and commercial interests often supported the new permissiveness. Nonetheless, for those alarmed by the sexual revolution, the government's role in permitting and promoting it was sufficient to provoke a political response, even among evangelicals who traditionally had warned against political involvements.

One of the factors evident in the support for Ronald Reagan in 1980 was nostalgia for the 1950s. Many conservative Americans had been alarmed by the cultural changes unleashed by the counterculture and antiwar movements of the 1960s and felt that something essential about the culture was fast slipping away. Reagan himself cultivated his image as a champion of
traditional values. Just one of many examples was a “Morning
in America” series of TV ads in his 1984 campaign depicting the small-town America of more peaceful and ordered days.
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Unquestionably, Reagan's staunch anticommunism also evoked an image of the 1950s, a time when Americans were proud to be united by their flag-waving patriotism. Newly
politicized revivalist evangelicals were no doubt attracted by
this nostalgia, as were many other Republican voters, but they
added their own variation on the theme. They were not simply proposing to bring America back to a time when traditional family values, respect for authority, and unquestioning love of nation were intact. Rather, they were blending such Reaganesque images with something more basic: America, they said, needed to return to its “Christian foundations.” And understanding what revivalist evangelicals had in mind by such rhetoric is one key to understanding the cultural wars and revivalist evangelicalism's part in them.

The formulations of
Francis Schaeffer, the most influential theorist of the evangelical side of the religious right, offer an illuminating window into some of the issues involved. Schaeffer was an American evangelist who spent most of his career ministering to young people at his chalet, called L'Abri, in Switzerland. During the late 1960s he became famous in American evangelical circles for a series of small popular books that provided critiques of Western cultural trends, arguing that Christianity was the only viable alternative to the emptiness and the relativism of modern thought. He was also an important influence in convincing many younger fundamentalists and evangelicals to engage with the arts, literature,
and philosophy. In these early cultural analyses, he almost never mentioned politics, past or present. That changed dramatically in the mid-1970s. Not long after
Roe v. Wade
, while Schaeffer and his son Frank were working on a film series of his cultural critique, Frank argued that they should highlight abortion on demand as evidence of how America had gone wrong. At first the elder Schaeffer strongly resisted this suggestion, on the grounds that abortion was seen mostly as a “Catholic issue” and that he did not want to get into politics. He eventually changed his mind and decided to include it. A critique of the abortion decision became the culminating feature of the series, called
How Should We Then Live?
and the accompanying book by the same title. He and Frank also made the abortion issue the centerpiece of a second series that they developed with Dr. C. Everett Koop (later US surgeon general under Ronald Reagan), called
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
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In addition to being a major force in raising consciousness among fundamentalists and many other evangelicals regarding the necessity of opposing legalized abortion, Schaeffer provided what became the most influential analyses of what he believed was the larger issue at the heart of the new culture wars. The choice for America, he proclaimed, was simply between a return to Christianity or a takeover by secular humanism and eventually authoritarianism. In
How Should We Then Live?
he wrote that humanists were determined to destroy Christianity and hence they would leave the culture with no adequate basis on which to maintain its values. But, he declared, “society cannot stand chaos.” Echoing Erich Fromm's
classic account of totalitarianism, Schaeffer continued: “Some group or person will fill the vacuum. An elite will offer us arbitrary absolutes and who will stand in its way?” Schaeffer intimated that this takeover could involve some cooperation with international movements, but he put most of his emphasis on the role of secular humanists in America itself. That formula quickly took root among American fundamentalists. Simple dichotomized choices were the stock in trade of fundamentalists, and Schaeffer, who had fundamentalist roots, was a master at dichotomizing. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell often repeated the Christianity-versus-secular-humanism formula, and Tim LaHaye elaborated on it in his very popular 1980 book
The Battle for the Mind
.
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Schaeffer himself developed the theme in his most influential call to action,
A Christian Manifesto
, a 1981 book that Falwell described as “probably the most important piece of literature in America today.” As in his other recent works, Schaeffer stressed the inevitability of an authoritarian takeover if Bible-believing Christians remained indifferent to politics and failed to take a stand. He believed that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 might represent a window of opportunity to reassert Christian values. But he also warned that the power of relativistic secular humanism was so strong in the government, in the courts, and in the schools that it soon might be necessary for Christians to resist through civil disobedience—and even with violence—much as the United States had resisted British tyranny at the time of the American Revolution. Christianity and secular humanism, he emphasized, were opposites. “These two world views stand as totals in complete
antithesis to each other,” he declared. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”
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Part of Schaeffer's appeal was that he repeatedly reminded his audiences that the loss of what he called America's “Christian consensus” had taken place only within living memory. “It is a horrible thing,” he wrote in his final book,
The Great Evangelical Disaster
, published in 1984, “for a man like myself to see my country and my culture go down the drain in my lifetime.” He remembered a time when the Christian consensus still prevailed. By a “Christian consensus,” he did not mean that everybody was Christian, but rather, that “the Christian worldview, and biblical knowledge in particular, were widely disseminated throughout the culture and were a decisive influence in giving shape to the culture.” Such outlooks were characteristic, he said, of “Reformation countries and in our own country until the last forty to sixty years,” when “most people believed these things—albeit sometimes only in a vague way.” Schaeffer's audiences, at least in many regions of the country, especially across the South and in some areas of the Midwest, may have recalled the 1950s as the sort of time he was evoking, when evangelical Christianity was virtually the default religion. Schaeffer himself was from the Northeast, where the changes had come earlier; in the 1950s, he had already been a separatist fundamentalist attacking the mainstream culture and its churches. So he set the date of the end of the Christian consensus further back, to the 1930s.
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Schaeffer combined nostalgia for more Christian-friendly
times with his own version of an argument that was reemerging
in popularity among fundamentalistic evangelicals around the bicentennial year of 1976: that America had been founded as a Christian nation. Schaeffer emphasized that the American nation was based on a Christian consensus inherited specifically from the Reformation. He argued that the principles on which the United States was founded, especially the idea that higher law applied even to kings, came from Scottish Protestantism at the time of the English Civil Wars of the mid-1600s. Even though Schaeffer acknowledged that most of the American founders were not born-again Christians, and that they had
their blind spots (as regarding slavery), he nonetheless insisted
that they still operated on the Reformation “Christian base.” Those principles, he believed, dominated American culture until recent decades. Secular humanism was destroying those principles and would inevitably lead to total relativism, chaos, and then totalitarianism. To remain neutral, as so many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians had tried to do at midcentury, would be to capitulate to government enforcement of a worldview that was the opposite of Christianity. As Schaeffer put it, “Here is a sentence to memorize: ‘
To make no decision in regard to the growth of authoritarian government is already a decision for it
.
'
”
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