Since the 1930s, American evangelical elites have embraced successively two different and flawed political creeds. Both positions reflected their American identity more than their Christian faith. In this respect, the movement’s leadership failed to serve well the rank and file. When mainstream conservative political leaders didn’t provide astute, biblically informed analysis, white evangelicals had little such reflection of their own to draw upon, ultimately making illiberal authoritarianism an attractive option.
In the mid-thirties, libertarian-minded conservatives began to organize in opposition to the New Deal. Disgruntled conservative Democrats and some prominent Republican businessmen formed the American Liberty League in 1934. Its leaders included former New York Governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith, General Motors executives, and J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil (an evangelical Presbyterian who later bankrolled Christianity Today). The group received substantial financial support from the Du Pont family. Although invited, former President Herbert Hoover declined to join the League, wary of former political opponents whom he accused of being spokesmen for “the Wall Street model of human liberty.” Although the organization eventually claimed 125,000 members and produced roughly five million booklets and tracts, it failed to persuade the general public that it did not primarily represent the privileged few.
In addition to Pew, other evangelical Protestant leaders soon lent their voices to the chorus of attacks on New Deal policies. By 1940, a more defined political movement of evangelicals began to coalesce. One popular evangelical author, Dan Gilbert, began to articulate this new Fundamentalist political theory in the pages of the Moody Monthly and in popular books. Following some earlier evangelicals, Gilbert devised an odd but very influential ideological mixture that joined the limited government classical liberalism of the Liberty League with dispensationalist apocalypticism. Dismayed by the direction of recent political and economic changes, Gilbert warned that “recent American history shows that the initial steps toward this antichrist system have already been taken in this country.” State activism and the consolidation of federal power both prefigured the emergence of the strong government that Fundamentalists feared would persecute Christians at the end of human history.
The individualistic side of evangelicalism thus helped forge closer links with more secular forms of conservatism. Having embraced the market as a sphere of individual moral responsibility enabled evangelicals to accept a minimalist model of the state. The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942 played a key part in evangelicals’ embrace of limited government conservatism. The organization brought together Fundamentalist churches and leaders who had cooperated little since the Scopes Trial, and these efforts signaled a movement toward greater political engagement. Harold J. Ockenga, longtime pastor of Boston’s Park Street Church, was named the NAE’s first president. His appointment “reflected,” in historian Matthew Sutton’s words, “the decade-long cross-fertilization of conservative political ideology with fundamentalist theology, [that] helped give modern American evangelicalism its identity.”
The NAE now tellingly identified “political liberalism” as one of the main challenges to preserving Christian America. Ockenga’s language was typically alarmist: “Already a revolution has taken place in our nation. Whenever the major part of the business of the nation is being done by the government rather than by private interest, capitalism ceases its functioning . . . . The crisis is greater than any of us realize.” Capitalism and biblical Christianity, which Ockenga and other evangelicals now explicitly linked, were, according to these evangelical leaders, both threatened by an activist state. Their concurrent struggle against the fascist Axis powers naturally shaped their concerns.
This informal alliance between a more secular conservatism and white evangelicals grew stronger in the wake of World War II, a product of Cold War concerns about the global expansion of communism and genuine threats from Soviet espionage. As historian Darren Dochuk and others have shown, this coalition solidified during the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Like Pew, Goldwater identified the expanding state as the chief culprit threatening individual liberty and believed that the United States was moving “down the well-travelled road to absolutism.” Goldwater’s decentralist, states’ rights position resonated with southern white conservatives and Californians who were part of the southern diaspora. Goldwater censured the Democratic Party’s “abandonment of States’ Rights” and went as far as criticizing the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown decision that mandated the desegregation of public schools.
These views, combined with Goldwater’s aggressive rhetorical style and populist anticommunism, attracted many evangelicals. Goldwater’s campaign team quickly recognized the pivotal role of conservative Protestant churches and evangelical parachurch organizations in the 1964 election. Central Baptist Church in Anaheim, for example, became a hotbed for Goldwater workers during the summer 1964 Republican primary in California. The congregation had been founded by transplanted Southerners and was connected with ultra-Fundamentalist J. Frank Norris’s Baptist Bible Fellowship. Goldwater’s candidacy was also promoted by the Campus Crusade for Christ staff and students at Pepperdine College. Tim LaHaye, a San Diego pastor who had been a popular speaker at Central Baptist, urged Christians to support Goldwater.
During the sixties, Paul Weyrich (who was active in the Goldwater campaign) first made effective use of direct-mail campaigns and other techniques that many candidates would employ successfully during the 1980s and 1990s. Although a traditionalist Catholic, Weyrich was instrumental in creating an essential building block of the Religious Right in 1978, the Moral Majority, led by Fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell. Ronald Reagan’s landslide election victory in 1980 was built upon the energy these varied elements generated. Reagan drew upon the grassroots conservatism gaining ground since the Goldwater candidacy and received support from antiregulation probusiness groups and secular neoconservative intellectuals. Finally, Reagan’s nostalgic invocations of a simpler American past and criticism of the cultural legacy of the 1960s appealed to many Protestant conservatives.
Thus, during the 1970s, the previously disparate collection of politically conservative evangelicals became a well-organized movement and received significant media attention. Indeed, the broader impact evangelicals came to enjoy prompted George Gallup to label 1976 “the year of the evangelical.” Yet, as evangelicals moved closer to the forefront of the public square, few of them grounded their political activism in careful biblical study or historically informed theological reflection.
The Reagan administration, however, failed to deliver major victories on culture war issues such as abortion, prayer in schools, and censorship. More fundamentally, the unfettered free market it promoted proved incompatible with traditional family values. As Christopher Lasch notes, neoliberal policies that both secular and religious conservatives had supported (such as business deregulation and free trade) had a corrosive effect on local communities and failed to protect domestic manufacturing that had supported stable single-income families.
Meanwhile, those same policies tended to benefit disproportionately high income and college educated Americans. By the late 1990s, the expanding opioid crisis ravaged rural communities and small towns. These developments combined to foment discontent among blue-collar Americans, some of whom were white evangelicals. Having become susceptible to the rhetoric of demagogues, many were easily manipulated by one-sided talk radio and cable news (enabled by the FCC’s 1987 repeal of the ‘fairness doctrine’ that had previously mandated equal time for competing political views on the public airways).
By the early 2000s, the failed invasion of Iraq and the Great Recession further alienated many evangelicals and working-class voters from the Republican party establishment. Rural areas and small towns suffered high casualties in Iraq; analysts label this the ‘working-class burden,’ noting the war’s disproportionate impact on parts of the country characterized by low incomes. The Tea Party movement that emerged in 2009 in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent recession represented both the last gasp of a libertarian Christian Right and a preview of coming attractions.
While Tea Partiers criticized government debt and deficits, they also vilified President Barack Obama as a closet Muslim and portrayed him as an alien ‘other,’ anticipating the nativist xenophobia of MAGA. Increasingly marginalized economically and alienated from mainstream politics, many evangelicals discarded what remained of their limited government principles and were drawn to an amoral strongman. Ever the opportunist, Donald Trump vowed to fight for their interests with ‘no holds barred,’ though his populist posturing proved as phony as the character he had portrayed on reality television.
White evangelicals’ embrace of authoritarian politics reflected their sometimes understandable desperation and demonstrated the extent of their alienation from mainstream democratic and constitutional norms and institutions. Evangelical leaders failed to articulate an attractive alternative to a free-market fundamentalism that truly served working class economic interests and protected their traditional social vision. Consequently, the pendulum swung from an out-of-date small government ideal to an autocratic Caesarism that stressed the acquisition and exercise of power on behalf of one’s tribe unrestrained by principles.
The shift to an authoritarian politics highlights the increasingly circumscribed and privatized place Christian belief holds in evangelicals’ perspective on the public square. It also illuminates how marginal to their thinking any kind of consistent conservative ideology has become, apart from a more tribal concern to protect their community from threats real or imagined. One major feature of populist evangelicalism may have contributed to this. Religious conservatives have long valued hierarchy and stressed deference to authority.
Although important egalitarian streams have also flowed historically within American evangelicalism, its congregations have often adopted an authoritarian leadership model and indulged in a cult of personality centered on celebrity preachers. Studies have indicated a tendency among both conservatives and evangelicals to value obedience to authority more than other groups do. Revering a celebrity candidate with a highly rated television show and an autocratic style, along with manifold personal foibles (including marital infidelity), was not uncommon among evangelicals who had previously followed disgraced evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.
The foregoing analysis of this political transition echoes some of Aaron Renn’s broader explanation of how several post-1960 “changes… produced a society without key cultural bulwarks supporting Christianity.” Specifically, Renn identifies the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the WASP establishment, the decline of intermediate institutions, and other changes. These developments, he maintains, gradually transformed how “official American culture viewed Christianity” from initially positive, to neutral, to now mostly negative. No doubt, these changes contributed to white evangelicals’ sense of being strangers in a culture where they had once been at home.
The lack of careful, historically informed Christian reflection regarding faithful civic engagement has had harmful consequences. Many white evangelicals moved from simply baptizing a limited government libertarianism to embracing a hard-boiled authoritarian model that they assumed would deliver the goods for their tribe and punish their opponents. Instead, they might have benefited from drawing upon the rich reflection on Christian citizenship within their own Protestant tradition.
They could have found critical insights in the writings of neo-orthodox theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and neo-Calvinists such as Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper. All three Protestant thinkers wrestled in a far more consistent, constructive and faithful way with the role of Christians in pluralist liberal democracies. Beginning in the 1970s, some did seek to tap this rich Reformed vein and address a wider evangelical audience on these topics. But books by James Skillen, Richard Mouw, and Paul Marshall (to name only a few) were never bestsellers, and they were easily drowned out in the public square by shriller, more partisan voices. The fallout from this failure has proved destructive of democratic norms.