What Were the Real Origins of the Christian Right?

When conservative evangelicals launched the Christian Right in the late 1970s, were they acting to protect the unborn by rescinding Roe v. Wade? Or were they motivated instead by a self-interested desire to protect their own racially segregated Christian schools from federal civil rights policy?

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, David French said that as an evangelical who believed in the pro-life cause, he had long defended the view that the Christian Right formed as a principled campaign to protect unborn life, but in the wake of evangelicals’ enthusiasm for Trump and their willingness to abandon nearly every principle they claimed to espouse, he’s not so sure. He’s beginning to wonder whether the Christian Right really was motivated by racism all along, and their pious professions of interest in moral character or defending the unborn were merely a cynical façade.

But maybe neither of the two explanations French suggested is fully correct. There’s a better way to tell the story of the Christian Right’s origins that makes sense of all the data – the timing of the Christian Right’s formation, the commitment of evangelicals to the Republican Party, and even the enthusiasm of evangelical voters for Donald Trump. And when we tell that nuanced story, it will address French’s frustrations with the Christian Right without resorting to caricature.

In our search for the origins of the Christian Right, it’s important to dispel one common misconception right away: the idea that it was the Christian Right that made evangelicals vote Republican. Evangelicals were voting Republican for a long time before Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority. And the reasons why they vote Republican today are not necessarily the same as they were in the late 1970s or 1980s.

In the early twentieth century, northern fundamentalists (like many other Protestants in the North) were mostly conservative Republicans in the mold of Calvin Coolidge. As Matthew Avery Sutton noted in his history of American evangelicalism, fundamentalist dispensationalist magazines of the 1930s routinely warned that the New Deal might be a harbinger of the antichrist.

This Republican orientation also pervaded the broader northern evangelical movement of the 1940s and 1950s (which included Wheaton College, the National Association of Evangelicals, and a host of other institutions). When Christianity Today surveyed Protestant ministers about their preferences in the 1956 presidential election, it found that 85 percent supported Dwight Eisenhower and only 11 percent favored his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson. In 1960, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats among Christianity Today subscribers by four to one.

But northern evangelicals were not the primary creators of the Christian Right. Instead, the Christian Right of the 1970s was the product of the Sunbelt – a region stretching from Atlanta to Los Angeles that was characterized by upwardly mobile white southerners who had flocked to the cities during World War II and then moved out to the suburbs after the war was over. 

Like Billy Graham, the quintessential Sunbelt evangelical of the mid-twentieth century, nearly all of them had grown up as poor southern Democrats, but sometime between the 1950s and the 1970s, as they moved solidly into the middle class, they started voting Republican, at least in presidential elections. As strong anticommunist hawks who supported the military industrial complex, they shared the values of a Republican Party that was quickly becoming the preferred partisan choice in Sunbelt centers such as Orange County, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Houston, Texas; and Cobb County, Georgia, in suburban Atlanta.

With evangelicals in both the Sunbelt and the northern Midwest voting Republican by the early 1970s, the evangelical conversion to the GOP was already well underway years before Falwell created the Moral Majority. More than 80 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Nixon in 1972. 

But Falwell and some of the other Sunbelt evangelicals who launched the Christian Right in the late 1970s wanted more than merely the election of Republicans. They wanted to fight both the sexual revolution and the secularization of the nation – or, in their words, “take back America” from the liberals they accused of destroying its Christian values.

Like Falwell, most of the prominent figures in the Christian Right of the late 1970s were Sunbelt conservative Republicans. Some of them had been born in the poor rural or small-town South, and they might have once been Democrats – maybe even the type of southern Democrats who supported George Wallace. Falwell himself had once been a segregationist. But he reinvented himself as a Sunbelt religious entrepreneur in the 1970s and repudiated his former support for racial segregation. He was now upwardly mobile, and he was ready to support the color-blind conservatism of Reagan-style free-enterprise. 

But he was also angry about the liberal cultural direction of the country, and he was sure that evangelicals now had the political power to take back their nation and restore the values of the Eisenhower era. Nearly all of the leaders in the Christian Right of the late 1970s and 1980s – people such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye – were born in the 1930s, which meant that they had come of political age at the height of the nation’s Cold War civil religion in the 1950s, during Eisenhower’s presidency. They had then seen the Supreme Court rule against prayer in schools. They had seen the rise of a drug-infused counterculture. They had seen the divorce rate double in less than a decade. They had witnessed the rise of a gay rights movement. And they had seen the beginning of legalized abortion.

If they had merely wanted to protest against abortion, there was already a vibrant pro-life movement that they could have joined, because Catholics had been mobilizing against abortion since the 1960s. But for the evangelicals who launched the Christian Right in the late 1970s, abortion was merely one facet of a much larger problem. Roe v. Wade was evil not merely because it legalized abortion (in fact, there had been more than half a million legal abortions in the United States in 1972, the year before Roe) but because it symbolized all of the things they opposed: the sexual revolution, feminism, and a secularized, liberal Supreme Court that had abandoned moral absolutes. 

Citing the intellectual influence of Francis Schaeffer, Sunbelt megachurch pastors and radio and television broadcasters launched a political movement to retake the nation. Their hero at first was the leading Sunbelt political practitioner of the politics of nostalgia and Cold War civil religion: Ronald Reagan.

All of the leaders in the Christian Right took the same view of race that Reagan did – that is, they were color-blind conservatives. They also took the same view of free enterprise and religious liberty. And because of that, they supported Reagan’s tax cuts and also thought that Christian schools, including Bob Jones University, should have the right to run their enterprises the way they saw fit. But this was not the main reason they launched the Christian Right. Those who make this claim have a hard time explaining why James Dobson became such an enthusiastic Christian Right partisan or why Schaeffer encouraged Falwell to launch the Moral Majority. Instead, what united all of the Christian Right activists was a perception that they were losing the battle for the culture, and they had to take it back from the liberals who were destroying the nation and attacking evangelical institutions.

Central to this was a new Sunbelt-style confidence in evangelical voting power. For upwardly mobile people whose new megachurches, colleges, and television programs were a testament to their entrepreneurial success, the idea that they could mobilize enough voters to take over a party (and then a nation) did not seem far-fetched. “We have together, with the Protestants and the Catholics, enough votes to run the country,” Pat Robertson claimed in 1979. “And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we are going to take over.”

Many northern evangelicals at places like Wheaton and Christianity Today had mixed feelings about Falwell and Robertson. But they liked Schaeffer, and they supported the Republican Party, so they generally went along with the Christian Right. At the same time, poorer Southern Baptists in the rural South, though initially slower than Sunbelt evangelicals to support Reagan, became part of the coalition by the mid-1980s. From the 1980s through the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, evangelicals across the nation seemed to be more-or-less united in a political program that was centered on the goal of fighting secularization and the sexual revolution – which by the late 1980s had generally been shortened to fighting the twin evils of abortion and homosexuality.

This was the Christian Right that David French entered as a young man. At the time, it was solidly centered on the Sunbelt – which meant that it shared most of the values of the upwardly mobile suburban communities in that region, even while putting more emphasis on a few religiously based concerns (mainly abortion and homosexuality) than non-evangelical residents of the Sunbelt did. 

It was never as focused on personal character as he might have believed. Instead, it was a political lobbying movement focused on policy positions. No politician of good character (not even Joe Lieberman) who did not support the Christian Right’s position on the issues was going to get their vote, while some politicians with their own checkered sexual history (such as Newt Gingrich) could still win Christian Right support as long as they supported the Christian Right’s position on the issues. When Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid in 2007, it was a sign that a candidate’s sexual history was probably not the Christian Right’s top area of concern.

But nevertheless, evangelicals’ enthusiastic embrace of Trump in 2016 caught some Sunbelt evangelical conservatives (including David French) by surprise. How could a movement that had ostensibly always been focused on battling the sexual revolution and restoring Christian influence in the nation make a Faustian bargain with Trump? And how could they continue supporting Trump even when he jettisoned the party’s longstanding pledge to seek a Human Life Amendment or national restrictions on abortion?

Actually, most of the veteran Christian Right leaders (including Dobson) were reluctant to support Trump in the 2016 primaries; they did not come over to his side until he had won enough primary votes to secure the nomination and he had promised them a specific slate of judicial nominees who would be likely to overturn Roe.

But such transactional arrangements alone could not explain the enthusiasm that many evangelicals felt toward Trump. What can explain it, I think, is that the center of evangelical conservatism had shifted from the Sunbelt to the rural South – just as a half-century earlier, it had shifted away from the Midwest. Rural southern evangelicals picked up on the culture-war language of their Sunbelt counterparts who had launched the Christian Right in the 1970s, and they retained the dream of an evangelical take-over of governmental institutions, but this time, they melded it not with the politics of upward mobility, free enterprise, and Reagan-style optimism, but with the politics of grievance and defensiveness. They believed that their own way of life was under attack – and this time, they were determined to defend themselves not restoring the values of the Eisenhower era but by engaging in a much more sweeping attack on the establishment.

For this latest version of evangelical culture warriors, what matters most is not policy but identity. Like some of the Christian far-right parties in Europe, the rural-based Christian Right of today is concerned more with identity than policy. Their overarching goal is not so much to restrict abortion but to defend Christian identity in the nation. Nearly all Christian identity movements become quickly enmeshed in racial and nationalist identity, and the same is true for this version of the Christian Right. Some of these Christian nationalist elements were present to a more limited degree in the Christian Right of the 1980s and 1990s, but now that the Christian Right is shorn of the moderating influence of the Sunbelt politics of upward mobility, we are confronted with them in much rawer form.

So, was this the real identity of the Christian Right all along? Not really. The Christian Right could have taken a different turn. Just as the evangelicals who voted Republican in the 1980s did so for somewhat different reasons than the evangelicals who had voted for Nixon in 1972 – let alone those who had voted for Eisenhower in the 1950s – so the evangelicals who voted for Trump in the last three elections likely have a somewhat different set of political priorities than those who voted for Reagan in the 1980s. They still want to defend a Christian America through politics, but this time, they’re seeking to do so not so much through a specific legislative program as through an affirmation of Christian nationalist identity. 

If the Christian Right of the 1980s and 1990s was a lobbying movement that sought to use their political muscle to get specific legislative concessions from the Republican Party, the conservative evangelical voter coalition today is mostly just a practitioner of tribalist identity politics. That’s why, for instance, they didn’t raise much of a fuss when the Republican Party made peace with same-sex marriage and then abandoned its pro-life platform plank. 

With the shift from issue advocacy to tribalist identity politics, a few evangelicals who were veterans of the Sunbelt-centered Christian Right of the Reagan-Bush years decided that they couldn’t support it any longer. One of those Never Trump evangelicals is David French.

Now that he has left the Christian Right, French may have good reason to question the entire political program that he once supported in his youth, but I hope that in his criticism, he’ll recognize that the Christian Right was always far more than a racist façade. A complicated (and maybe even tragic) story lies behind the Christian Right’s political choices – and I hope that in telling that story, we can recognize that complexity. If there is a through line between Protestant ministers’ support for Eisenhower in 1956 and evangelicals’ support for Trump in 2024, it’s a very complicated through line – and I don’t want to shortchange that complexity by reducing the story of the Christian Right to a caricature.