A New American God: Eight Decades in the Making

America’s religious journey since the 1930s has been a tale of unexpected twists and turns that yet shows no signs of settling into the straight and narrow. In the course of these eight decades, a new American God emerged and now thrives. This new God is one of complexity, notwithstanding some consistent traits: anti-liberal, pro-nationalist, pro-capitalist, and politically tethered.

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PART ONE

Many of the religious story lines of the 1930s have largely been forgotten. The public historical amnesia is unfortunate, for the decade holds many warnings for those who are willing to listen. An emerging (white) Christian Right, riding an ascendant fundamentalism, entrenched antisemitism and racism at large, found itself molded by a myriad of currents: the fallout from national economic devastation; the coming-of-age of Christ-baptized capitalism; fear of Franklin’s Roosevelt’s popular and progressive politics; the threats of communism and Marxism; the appeal of Nazism and fascism; and the power of radio. From this stew of ideologies, prejudices and fears, the early Christian Right, expressed in numerous fledging organizations that quickly gained clout in conservative circles, voiced support for Nazism and fascism, movements built upon white Christian nationalism. Radio waves and print publications, financed by capitalistic magnates, preached a strident, isolationist, racist, anti-union Gospel that laid the foundation for politically active, conservative American religion of the future. For those interested in exploring this complex narrative, historian Allan J. Lichtman thoroughly documents all of these currents in his recent volume, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement.

While some Baptists expressed support of Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, most refrained. Staying largely with their historical heritage of church state separation, Baptists formed the Baptist Joint Committee in 1937 in order to better champion church state separation.

Soon, when the end of World War II found America’s Christian Right on the wrong side of history regarding Hitler, they quietly walked away from their tainted past. Nonetheless, communism and Marxism, godless ideologies, by now were cemented as public enemy number one. The remainder of the 1940s witnessed a rising tide of ground-level Christian fundamentalism (sometimes referred to as new or neo-evangelicalism) that came to view America as God’s chosen nation to stem global communist ambitions.

While Baptists remained largely aloof from these currents (independent Baptist fundamentalists maintained their insistence upon separation from the world; Southern Baptists were busy evangelizing and building new churches; Northern/American Baptists were increasingly focused on resolving internal stagnation), the anti-communist, nationalist rhetoric appealed to an increasing number of theologically and/or politically conservative Baptists. Baptist evangelist Billy Graham began his ascendancy during this time, becoming the earliest (and most famous) public face of neo-evangelicalism. While his early years of national ministry would be characterized by the anti-communist, pro-nationalist sentiment of the movement, in his later years he moderated such views and, as a result, suffered intense criticism from his fellow neo-evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists at large.

The first half of the 1950s, in turn, proved to the coming of age of the political Christian Right (1930s-1940s) and neo-evangelical (1940s) currents in the religious life of America.

In 1951, Bill Bright founded Campus Crusade for Christ. The university-centered evangelical ministry represented the new evangelical mission: combating communism in the name of Jesus (on college campuses, in this instance), promoting capitalism, advancing the belief that America was a Christian nation and the hope of the world, and engaging politics in order to achieve spiritual ends. Other evangelical organizations with similar missions also sprang up during the decade.

Up until this time, Americans had been pledging their allegiance to “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister, the American Pledge of Allegiance intentionally reflected the Baptist heritage of church state separation. Bill Bright and many other anti-communist evangelicals, however, now found the pledge to be inadequate – and unnervingly godless for a nation fighting godless communism. They were not alone. So strong was anti-communist sentiment of the day that it swept the American landscape, resulting in a public and political witch-hunt against suspected communists, as well as a growing chorus to change the Pledge of Allegiance to affirm the rising popular conviction that America was God’s chosen nation.

In a twist of irony, a Baptist president, Harry S. Truman, paved the way for the altering of the original Pledge of Allegiance to include the words, “under God.”  In 1950, in a conversation with the the president of the Baptist World Alliance, Truman declared: “To succeed in our quest for righteousness we must, in St. Paul’s luminous phrase, put on the armor of God.” Truman was speaking of God in the public and political sphere. He asserted that a revival of religion and a re-dedication of the United States to the “unchanging truths of the Christian religion” (language utilized in a statement read to the eighth Baptist World Congress of the Baptist World Alliance meeting in Cleveland) were needed to defeat communism. As 1950 drew to a close, the President declared:

“Communism attacks our main basic values, our belief in God, our belief in the dignity of man and the value of human life, our belief in justice and freedom. It attacks the institutions that are based on these values. It attacks our churches, our guarantees of civil liberty, our courts, our democratic form of government. Communism claims that all these things are merely tools of self-interest and greed — that they are weapons used by one class to oppress another.”

By 1951, Truman envisioned marshaling America’s religious forces, Protestant and Catholic, as a bulwark against the growth of communism. He cultivated America’s conservative Christians with a passion. As he declared that year,

“Today, our problem is not just to preserve our religious heritage in our own lives and our own country. Our problem is a greater one. It is to preserve a world civilization in which man’s belief in God can survive. Only in such a world can our own Nation follow its basic traditions, and realize the promise of a better life for all our citizens.”

Stoked by Truman’s outreach and public rhetoric, the Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus, among others, petitioned the president to add the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, a phrase that the Knights included in their own recitation of the Pledge beginning in 1951. Although Dwight D. Eisenhower occupied the office of President when the words ‘”under God” were added to the Pledge on June 14, 1954 by an act of Congress, Truman’s evangelical fervor in promoting Christian nationalism led to the changing of the Baptist-written Pledge of Allegiance.

Those two words reflected a sea change in religion and politics. The marriage of the politically-oriented Religious Right with neo-evangelicalism had produced a new center of political and cultural power in America. A Christian nation had been born; never mind America’s secular Constitution.*

The American God would never be the same.

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PART TWO

The June 14, 1954 addition of the phrase “Under God” to the American Pledge of Allegiance represented a watershed event in the history of the United States, a nation whose founders had intentionally avoided mentioning God in the country’s founding documents while establishing the world’s first secular nation, separating church from state. Not only had the Founding Fathers confounded the world by establishing a secular nation, they codified freedom of religion as a founding principle, a corollary to church state separation.

What the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen was a future in which an altogether different kind of secularism — communism, an atheistic political system hostile to religion — would pressure forces within the United States to wed evangelical religion with right-wing politics and capitalism.

Such a marriage of odd bedfellows also never occurred to Scottish social philosopher and father of capitalism, Adam Smith, a contemporary of America’s Founding Fathers. In his early writings, Smith, an advocate for the working class, developed his concept of “an invisible hand” that should naturally (but not necessarily intentionally) lead selfish individuals with over-abundance to spend their wealth in ways that would benefit the poor.  Later, he acknowledged the fallacy of believing that most self-interested elites would in reality spread enough of their wealth to generate sustenance for the masses. Indeed, Smith warned that too great a wealth gap between the rich and poor inevitably leads to national destruction. Hence, he advocated progressive taxation (with the rich bearing a larger share of the tax burden); state oversight and regulation of commercial activity (primarily banks and merchant companies in Smith’s day); anti-monopoly laws; universal government-funded education; and worker rights (knowing that owners would tend to gravitate toward worker exploitation).

Karl Marx, a nineteenth century intellectual and economist who birthed modern communism, took to heart Adam Smith’s warnings against unfettered capitalism — to the point of dismissing capitalism altogether as the enemy of the working class. Under V. I. Lenin, Russia in 1917 set out to enact Marx’s ideology, setting up a stark conflict between capitalism and communism. By the 1950s, the clash of ideological and economic systems led the captains of American capitalism to forsake Adam Smith’s balanced capitalism in favor of a new version untethered from restraints and veneered with patriotism.

Using their vast wealth, many capitalists actively sought to steer national politics and suppress worker unions in order to become yet more wealthy and powerful. Yet the capitalist elites needed populist support, and a willing partner among the masses stood ready: America’s Christian Right, haters of godless communism. By bankrolling non-profit Christian organizations and evangelists who denounced communism and socialism while preaching a gospel of the self-made man, America’s financial elites thus manufactured a trifecta of Christianity, politics and wealth.

The years immediately prior to the revised American Pledge of Allegiance were characterized by the formation of many new anti-communist Christian organizations financed by wealthy capitalists. Campus Crusade (originally financed by Nelson Bunker Hunt, heir of the Hunt Oil Company fortune, and Wallace Johnson, founder of Holiday Inn) was merely one of many similar (if now lesser-known) organizations.

A partial listing of such organizations includes: National Education Program (1948), American Council of Christian Layman (1949), Christian Crusade (1950), Christian Freedom Foundation (1950), and The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (1953). In the years following the Pledge modification, many more new organizations were birthed. Collectively, these organizations during the 1950s utilized, with great effectiveness, modern media (radio, mass mailings, conferences, seminars and television) in their crusade against godless communism and on behalf of unfettered capitalism.

The story of one of these organizations — The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade — serves to illustrate the yet emerging new American God during the decade of the 1950s.

Frederick C. Schwarz — an Austrian-born medical doctor, anti-communist crusader, and independent Baptist — was brought to America in 1953 by the American Council of Christian Churches, a popular anti-communist, extreme-capitalist organization founded in 1941 by vocal Christian fundamentalist Carl McIntire. McIntire recruited Schwarz for the purpose of establishing The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.

Schwarz recalled his beginnings in America:

I was an evangelical Christian and the Communists are evangelical in another sense. I knew they intend to destroy what I stood for. I am not ashamed to say that I am a narrow-minded, Bible-believing Baptist. On that basis is built my Crusade.

By 1957, in the midst of the “Red Scare” (a period of intense anti-communist fear stoked by politicians, capitalists and conservative religious leaders) Schwarz was  testifying against communism before the U.S. House of Representatives and receiving extensive press coverage. Soon, Crusade’s annual income topped $1 million annually.

One of the Representatives whom Schwarz testified before was Brooks Hays, a Democratic congressman and Southern Baptist layman from Arkansas whom the Washington Post in 1954 called “one of the foremost experts in psychological warfare against communism.” Yet fear of communism was so heightened that some conservatives charged the relatively moderate Hays as promoting communist programs. While serving as a United States congressman, Hays also held the office of president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1957 to 1958.

Schwarz and Hays were in good Baptist company. The most well-known Baptist of the era, evangelist Billy Graham, was also vigorously anti-communist. The popular evangelist routinely referred to communism as Satanic. “Either Communism must die, or Christianity must die,” Graham wrote in 1954, “because it is actually a battle between Christ and anti-Christ.”

On the other hand, the Baptist World Alliance, because of its global nature, was suspected by some of being soft on communism.

Don Hillis, missionary to India, described the fervor of the times:

In the lives of some, anti-communism conversation has usurped Bible study. Anti-communism movements have supplanted missions. A warm and zealous witness which at one time gave world evangelism its priority has in some hearts been dethroned by a neurotic negativism which spends its energy fighting communism.

The extent of the marriage of conservative politics and the Christian Right in the fight against communism was voiced by David Noebel of Christian Crusade:

For any self-respecting person, any person who loves his country and fears God, there is no such thing as the middle of the road. A special place in hell is being reserved for people who believe in walking down the middle of the politial and religious world. It will be their privilege to fry with Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson.

“Under God” and unfettered capitalism, Carl McIntire, Bill Bright, Frederick Schwarz, David Noebel, and Billy Graham — among many other (always white) Christian Right leaders — used the decade of the fifties to shape a new God-narrative: an American patriotic, nationalistic, capitalist-loving, communist-hating, liberal-despising deity who was the only hope for America’s future. Indeed, their collective crusade, allied with right-wing politics, changed the ethos of the nation during the decade: in 1955 the words “In God We Trust” became the legal motto of the United States, and in 1957 the same words were added to U. S. currency.

Christianity, politics and capitalism thus formally merged in an unholy alliance against the common enemy of all three: communism. Empowered by the nation’s capital and financed by America’s boardrooms, America’s Christian Right strode forth in confidence to further the battle, armed with the God they had helped birth. Church pews were full and liberalism was in decline. Despite increasingly violent racial unrest, a growing feminist movement, the fraying of America’s constitutional heritage, and the threat of nuclear warfare, the American God of the 1950s stood tall as a shining light in a world darkened by atheistic philosophies.

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PART THREE

Hoisted on the shoulders of American capitalism and culturally-conservative politics in the early 1960s, a new American God, wielding spiritual sword and shield, promised to defeat the greatest threat to the human soul and planet earth: communism.

Weighing down this ascendant God, however, was the historical secular nature of American government. In order to fight the godlessness of communism, the Christian Right contended, America’s government needed to be godly.

To this point in history, America’s judicial system had upheld the secular foundation of government, as articulated by early Baptists and incorporated into the Constitution of the United States. Many Christians in the nation’s formative years had grumbled about America’s secular nature, their complaints gradually allayed when the free marketplace of religion allowed Christianity to flourish. Yet the same free marketplace of religion was now perceived, by many, as inadequate in the battle against communism. America’s government needed to ally with Christianity to ably meet unprecedented challenges. Christian politicians were necessary, but not enough. The answer to communism was an unapologetically Christian government.

Standing in the way of preparing God to do battle with communism was the Supreme Court of the United States.

Even as politicians in the 1950s added the words “under God” to America’s pledge and “In God We Trust” to the nation’s currency, state lawsuits were challenging the long-held practice of mandatory Bible reading in public school classrooms. Pennsylvania law, for example, stated: “At least ten verses from the Holy Bible shall be read, without comment, at the opening of each public school on each school day.” Other states had similar laws. But in Pennsylvania, as well as in New York and Maryland,  a mixture of Christian and atheist parents challenged the constitutionality of such laws.

Unfortunately, Baptists were not a part of the lawsuits against this form of church state entanglement. If Baptists had been true to their faith heritage, they would have challenged such practices long ago. “It is unfortunate,” noted a 1964 Southern Baptist-published volume entitled Religious Liberty, “that such cases are brought to the attention of the nation by nonbelievers or persons of a persuasion different from ours.”

The state lawsuits progressed to the Supreme Court in 1962. In striking down New York’s mandatory Bible reading on June 25 of that year, the nation’s highest court declared (in Engel v. Vitale) that “it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.” Reviewing the struggle for religious liberty in colonial New England and the First Amendment’s guarantee of church state separation, the Court declared that the First Amendment decreed that “neither the power nor the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support, or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say–that the people’s religions must not be subjected to the pressures of government for change each time a new political administration is elected to office.”

The following year, the Supreme Court also ruled (in Schempp v. Murray) against compulsory religious prayers in Pennsylvania and Maryland, again noting that the First Amendment prohibited the government from mandating religious expressions.

In response, many conservative Christians at large expressed rage following the Supreme Court decisions. Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, declared, “I am shocked and frightened that the Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional a simple and voluntary declaration of belief in God by public school children. The decision strikes at the very heart of the Godly tradition in which America’s children have for so long been raised.” Popular Baptist evangelist and anti-communism crusader Billy Graham weighed in, stating “This is another step toward the secularization of the United States. …The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.”

Nonetheless, many Christian denominations, led by Baptists, largely voiced support for both judicial decisions. At the local, associational, state, and national levels, many Baptist voices applauded the court rulings as consistent with Baptist faith and heritage, and true to America’s founding as a secular nation.

And yet the contending voice of Billy Graham contributed to a tearing of the Baptist fabric. Graham’s comment about “the secularization of the United States” and his mis-characterization of the First Amendment as a one-way street (that is, prohibiting the government from interfering with religion, but not religion from interfering with government) resonated with many Baptists fearful of communism. The ascendant Christian Right had led many to view “secular” in a negative light. Now, some Baptists began questioning their own faith heritage of church state separation.

Politically, the backlash proved powerful. State and national proposed amendments to mandate prayer and Bible reading in public schools inundated Washington and state capitols. Some 144 such amendments were put before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee by 1964, while state politicians devised various ways to undermine the Supreme Court’s rulings.

While the public anger and the political flurry of activity to re-establish government-sponsored prayer in America’s public schools would ultimately prove fruitless, the Supreme Court prayer decisions of 1962 and 1963, against the backdrop of anti-communist fever, ignited a fire that galvanized America’s slowly-maturing Christian Right.

At the 1964 Republican National Convention, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater further stirred the flames, declaring communism to be the “principal disturber of the peace in the world today,” adding, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Moderation had not characterized the Christian Right since its inception in the 1930s, nor would it become a descriptor of the movement in the future. The secularization of America was to be opposed at all cost, for the fate of the world rested upon America’s relationship with God. The Anti-Communism Christian Crusade–as well as many other Christian anti-communist organizations–in 1964 continued working tirelessly on behalf of God and government to defeat the “Red Menace.” Campus Crusade founder and strident anti-communist Bill Bright informed his staff, in the words of one of the organization’s leaders, “that if we don’t elect Goldwater, the communist flag will be hoisted over the White House.” In response, “many Campus Crusaders actively” campaigned for Goldwater.

By 1965, the Christian Right, an exclusively white movement, had emerged as a reliable ally of conservative politics. (Commitment to the Republican Party would come later; at the moment, significant blocs within both national political parties were conservative.) The Christian crusade against secularization, communism, and liberalism in general, however, would come at a cost to Americans neither white nor male.

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PART FOUR

The mid-1960s witnessed a ratcheting up of a clash between social and cultural ideologies in America. As white political and religious conservatives increasingly sought security in racial, sexual and theological homogeneity couched within a nationalistic framework, other Americans (non-whites, plus a young white generation increasingly willing to question sexual norms and the growing industrial-military complex) focused on greater freedom, striving to expand the American experience. The new American God of the Christian Right was now well-positioned to reinforce the conservative retrenchment, even as some progressive thinkers posited that the traditional God had become irrelevant. In short, conservatives reshaped God to meet escalating American challenges, while liberal scholars argued that modernity had outgrown a need for God. From either perspective, the 1960s signaled a sea change for religion in America.

The conservatives’ new American God served as a divine general battling the forces of secularization, communism and liberalism, directing his foot soldiers on earth toward a siege-focused mentality in a world increasingly viewed as under the power of evil. Racial structures and sexual codes became the home front defense for saving America.

Since the American Civil War, cultural and social conservatives in the Southern U.S., ideological descendants of a white Confederacy that shed blood of biblical proportions in order to defend God’s ordained will that African Americans live enslaved to whites, had fought bitterly to keep the white race from being tainted by proximity to blacks. As racial integration inched forward beginning in the 1950s, white southerners at large resisted black advancement by acts of terrorism upon African Americans, while simultaneously defending the purity of the white race by entrenching in their holy fortresses. Rhetorically, they accused black Civil Rights leaders of being in league with communists, secularists and liberals, while dismissing the significance of the fact that African American ministers and churches stood at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, preaching the Gospel of Christ.

The story of Southern white resistance to racial mingling is one of the more documented periods of American history. Many white conservatives, often self-proclaimed Christians, beat, tortured and murdered blacks who actively sought equality with whites, or who came into too close contact with whites. Many millions more white Christians cheered on the campaign of intimidation and terrorism. The story of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama offers a glimpse into the racial war that engulfed the South in the 1950s and 1960s, including the chasm that developed between conservative and progressive white Christians over the issue of Civil Rights.

During the Civil Rights struggle, most white Baptist churches refused to allow blacks into their sanctuaries. Many Baptist colleges, universities and seminaries also resisted integration. On the other hand, some were among the first Baptist institutions to integrate. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act formally brought to an end a long history of racial segregation and inequality in American public life, many Southern white Christians, including Baptists, carried on informal segregation. In addition to barring blacks from their worship services, white conservative Christians birthed the modern private school movement in order to prevent white children from sitting in classrooms with blacks. The story of Mississippi’s private school movement was representative of a widespread white, grassroots Southern effort to keep the races separate in the realm of education. Meanwhile, many Baptist and other Christian colleges and universities began opening their doors to black students, in part a reflection of the progressive element within Christian higher education.

Two more events cemented racism as a core characteristic of the Christian Right’s God. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, allowing, for the first time, Asians and Africans to immigrate to America, further enraged and motivated the Christian Right. On the heels of the voting rights and immigration acts, Republican Richard Nixon squeaked out a win in the 1968 U.S. presidential contest by deploying a “Southern Strategy” of flipping white southern Democrats to the Republican Party through appeals to the racial fears of the region’s Caucasian voters. Nixon’s strategy furthered the Christian Right’s loyalty to the national Republican Party, while ushering in the modern era of overwhelming African American loyalty to the Democratic Party, and ensuring that black Christians (with very few exceptions) would remain apart from the Christan Right.

Extending beyond race, the new American God’s home front agenda included resistance to a new era of sexual expressions. As feminism emerged and domestic violence became a topic of public conversation in the latter half of the 1960s, religious conservatives in America responded by preaching female subordination and framing marriage as a patriarchal institution designed for child-bearing and child-rearing, while loudly condemning nonmarital sex, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church resisted women’s rights and birth control when Pope John Paul VI–overriding a large number of theologians and cardinals within the Church–nixed widespread calls to dissolve the Catholic prohibition against artificial contraception. Protestant and Catholic women alike by the millions, however, promptly ignored renewed male efforts to repress female freedom and sexuality, setting the stage for a fierce, public battle over sexuality in the decade of the 70s.

As racial and sexual home front battles heated up in the middle and late 1960s, evidenced by the conservative backlash against perceived domestic secularism and liberalism, the new American God remained committed to combating the spread of communism abroad. The Vietnam war, viewed by political and religious conservatives as a godly offensive against Satan, further transformed many American Christians into warmongers while increasingly positioning, in the estimation of many other nations, America as a war-minded, hostile Christian nation. Opposition to the war by a growing progressive Christian movement in America merely served to further galvanize the followers of a racial, patriarchal, communist-hating, capitalistic, nationalist, politically-Republican, Christian Right God.

Within Baptist life North and South, a percolating battle between conservatives and progressives heated up. Among Southern Baptists, ultra-conservatives, fueled by the rapid growth of independent fundamentalist Baptists and angry at the presence of theological and social progressives within convention leadership, forced the passage of a new statement of faith (the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message), resisted progressive calls for racial integration, and increasingly pressured denominational leaders to move rightward. Meanwhile, Southern Baptist growth peaked and began a permanent decline, paralleling the denomination’s escalating conservatism. For now, fundamentalists inside and outside of Southern Baptist life played the role of troublesome gadfly. Signs of all-out impending denominational warfare, however, were all too apparent for knowledgeable observers of Southern Baptist life.

Northward, American Baptists, less evangelistically-oriented than many Baptists and more progressive than their Southern counterparts, proved more open to social and cultural changes, yet experienced significant numerical decline. The denomination lost members both to Northern fundamentalist Baptist congregations and, on the other end, to a popular culture increasingly skeptical that Christian teachings and morality remained either truthful or relative.

Against this backdrop of multi-faceted and escalating religious tensions in America, a new decade approached. The 1970s would prove to be a period of time in which the rising tide of the Christian Right’s American God turned into crashing waves in prelude to a coming conservative religious tsunami in America.

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PART FIVE

The decade of the sixties witnessed the ushering in of the Christian Right’s new American God into the halls of power in Washington, D.C. Supreme Court decisions upholding the separation of church and state by prohibiting government-sponsored prayer in public schools not only failed to blunt the advance of this political God, but instead provided his advocate-creators with more momentum.

And so it came as no surprise to astute observers when newly-elected president Richard Nixon, a Quaker and fully aware of the power of a politicized deity, on the Sunday following his first inauguration in 1969 formalized the worship of the new American God who mirrored his own anti-liberal and anti-communist sentiments. That Sunday, Nixon hosted the first of what would be many White House worship services, with popular Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham as worship leader. Nixon, framing the worship services as empowering his administration, declared “we feel God’s presence here, and we seek his guidance here.”

Noting how far the God of the Christian Right had risen, the cover of the Fall 1972 edition of the Post-American (later renamed Sojourners magazine), summarizing the state of American religion and the coalescing of a “Christian Coalition” under Nixon’s presidency, announced:

“God is an American and Nixon is His Prophet”

Billy Graham, fellow anti-communist and serving the role of priest to the Christian Right’s God and supporter of and spiritual advisor to Nixon and the Republican Party, in private did not mask feelings of hatred of liberals and Jews that the two men shared. Meanwhile, many mainstream Christians grew increasingly critical of Nixon’s character and policies. Early in 1974, many Quakers and the National Council of Churches issued calls for the president’s impeachment, months before such sentiment became widespread.

By the time Nixon did resign the presidency that August, the marriage of God and conservative politics had been consummated, a union that reflected the racial, cultural, social and economic divisions that had increasingly characterized America during the decade of the sixties. A post-denominational era dawned, as Christians began finding more affinity in political and theological ideologies than in denominational identities.

Against this backdrop, the decade of the seventies evidenced a transition from the new American God impacting politics to sitting in the front seat of a successful conservative political agenda. While the trajectory was uneven–Nixon himself embraced environmentalism and civil rights, issues opposed by conservatives–the larger movement was focused. White Conservative Christians increasingly placed their faith in politics as a means of forcing their social and moral beliefs upon the nation, in the process vocally opposing America’s founding principle of church state separation.

Veering noticeably from their faith heritage, many Baptists joined like-minded social and cultural conservative members of other denominations in efforts to formally enjoin state with church. Independent fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell represented this remarkable transition. In the 1960s, Falwell openly embraced his Baptist heritage of church state separation. In the 1970s, he re-defined the concept of church state separation as a one-way street applying only to Christianity: Christianity (alone of all religions) should be allowed to shape the state, but the state should not interfere with Christian expressions. As Falwell explained in a July 4, 1976 sermon, “The idea [that] religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” A few years afterward, Falwell altogether abandoned the “separation” language of his Baptist forebears. [Although many independent Baptists, to their credit, remained committed to their separationist heritage.]

The crusade to reconstruct America’s history was underway. Many (almost always white) conservative and fundamentalist Christians, concerned about cultural and social trends, expressed their desire to “return America to God,” envisioning a pre-Civil Rights time when the nation was devoted to God. Projecting 1950s-era civil religion upon America’s founding fathers while ignoring the historical narrative of the nation’s founding, they created a mythical story of a country established by Christian evangelicals as God’s special, chosen nation.

Certain events and developments in the decades of the 1970s signified the empowerment of the new American God as never before, while fostering the growth of Christian nation mythology. As in the 1950s and early 1960s, Supreme Court decisions addressing issues of race, religion and morality, and perceived as “liberal,” served as a call to action. This time around, however, the white Christian Right was much more prepared to wage war against the evil forces of liberalism.

Many historians, politicians and Christian leaders point to the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, overturning legal prohibitions against many abortions, as the singular event that provided the catalyst for the creation of the organized, modern Christian Right. Some Christian Right leaders, however, point to the lesser-known 1971 Supreme Court decision Green v. Connally as the fuel that energized the movement in unprecedented ways, a narrative explored by Randall Balmer. Green v. Connally ruled that segregated institutions could not claim tax exempt status, setting in motion a fight between Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian university that openly discriminated against African Americans, and the Internal Revenue Service. In defending Bob Jones’ right to racially discriminate in the years following, Paul Weyrich, conservative political activist and founder of the extremist Heritage Foundation (1973), recruited James Dobson (fundamentalist Christian and founder of Focus on the Family) and Jerry Falwell to rally the white Christian public against government intrusion into the life of conservative Christian institutions.

Meanwhile, Lutherans, Presbyterian, Southern Baptists–the latter the largest Protestant body in America–and other Christian groups were experiencing varying degrees of internal conflict brought about by fundamentalists’ theological, moral, social and nationalist agendas. The pressure was most intense within Southern Baptist life. Progressive Southern Baptist leaders did not protest Roe v. Wade and embraced Civil Rights, and were increasingly attacked by fundamentalist pastors as theological and social liberals. In the midst of the religious tension, the election of Southern Baptist layman and Sunday School teacher Jimmy Carter as U. S. president in 1976 brought the nation’s swirling religious currents to the public forefront, prompting Time Magazine to proclaim 1976 as “The Year of the Evangelical.”

Many fundamentalist, conservative, moderate and liberal Christians voted for Carter, a self-proclaimed “evangelical” Christian whose ethical and moral ideals offered a respite from the disgraced Nixon presidency. Carter’s election was viewed with great hope by many Christians, white and black. A vocal “born again” Christian, Carter openly talked of Jesus and his religious faith. Nonetheless, conservatives and fundamentalists, including many white Baptists, quickly soured on Carter for his refusal to protect Christian institutions that discriminated against African Americans, his insistence on upholding church state separation, and his propensity for reading and quoting from so-called liberal theologians.

Consequently, fundamentalist and conservative Christian opposition to Carter during the second half of his administration proved to be the capstone of the now decade-old flight of white conservative Protestants to the Republican Party, provided an impetus for the creation of the Moral Majority (of which Falwell and Weyrich were founders), and created an opening for fundamentalists to begin a self-proclaimed takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As a result, by the closing months of the decade, the Southern Baptist Convention was reeling from a well-orchestrated fundamentalist onslaught led by two politically powerful Texans, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, and supported by independent Baptist fundamentalist Jerry Falwell. Simultaneously, Falwell’s Moral Majority was crusading against abortion, homosexuals, church state separation, sex education in the schools, pornography, liberalism, communism, and the Equal Rights Amendment, and for prayer in public schools, strong national defense, Israel, and free enterprise. Working in sync, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, a self-proclaimed Christian who rarely attended church, was cobbling together a platform that mirrored the agenda of the Moral Majority, plotting to capture the swelling energy and momentum of a white, conservative Christian movement that was convinced America was speeding down the highway to hell and that a holy government backed by military might and unfettered capitalism was the only way to prevent the destruction of God’s chosen nation.

Thus, five decades in the making and benefiting from the allure of legalistic religion and historical mythology, the new American God finally stepped upon the dais of the throne prepared for him by his creators.

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PART SIX

The year 1980 witnessed a battle among American evangelicalism, as two presidential candidates–conservative Republican Ronald Reagan and sitting president and progressive evangelical Democrat Jimmy Carter–dueled for the nation’s highest position.

Carter’s evangelical credentials were widely known, yet an economic recession, insufficiently conservative theology, and racial progressivism alienated white Christian fundamentalists angry at perceived moral decline and mandated desegregation in America. Coalescing under  Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, these white fundamentalists turned to Reagan, a Hollywood actor and nominal Christian who embraced the Christian Right’s agenda of church state partnership.

Reagan knew how to appeal to white fundamentalists. Campaigning against Carter’s pro-desegregation and affirmative action positions, Reagan promised to overturn the IRS’s ongoing attempts to revoke fundamentalist Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status because of the school’s policies of racial discrimination. The IRS action, initiated in the 1970s, was credited by leading fundamentalists in America as the singular event that birthed the modern Christian Right and quickly found expression in Falwell’s Moral Majority.

Reagan also shared with the Christian Right a fascination with biblical prophecy, including the belief (obscure to the world at large) that the biblical Armageddon was close at hand. In an interview with televangelist Jim Bakker, Reagan declared, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.”

In return, Falwell spoke at the Republican National Convention, voicing the Moral Majority’s support of Reagan’s candidacy. Delivering a huge slice of the evangelical vote to the victorious Reagan in the November presidential election, Falwell and his fellow fundamentalist leaders gained immediate access to the upper echelons of political power.

The new American god had finally ascended to the throne he had so long coveted. President Reagan and the Moral Majority locked political arms on a host of moral and social issues, including pro-prayer in public school, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-affirmative action, anti-equal rights, pro-unfettered capitalism, and anti-church state separation. In addition, the Christian Right now had a staunchly anti-communist, pro-war American president who shared their view that the conflict between America and communism was a prelude to the biblical prophecy of Armageddon.

The following decade under Reagan’s presidency and into that of George H. W. Bush witnessed unparalleled successes on the part of the Christian Right in three distinct yet interconnected ways.

First, numerous Christian Right organizations other than the Moral Majority were formed and collectively achieved great success in capturing the hearts and minds of the white conservative Christians who had voted for Reagan. The story of the Christian Right in the 1980s and early 1990s is well documented; a good bibliography is online here. Broadly speaking, the overarching goal of Christian Right leaders was (and remains) to turn America into a theocratic-leaning nation, harnessing Divine power to eradicate immorality within the nation and subdue external threats with military power.

Under Reagan and Bush, the new American God achieved his greatest victory to date: the defeat of Soviet communism. Devoted to thwarting communism since the 1930s, the Christian Right witnessed the fulfillment of their long-standing quest as the Soviet Union began crumbling in the late 80s and collapsed in the early 90s. Yet stronger than the accompanying satisfaction was the ever-growing thirst to bring the nation and world under Old Testament-type laws. In this regard, Reagan and Bush ultimately failed to lead America into the biblical “promised land.” Despite defeating communism, Reagan and Bush did not return government prayer to public schools, failed to stem growing sexual immorality, were unable to slow the trend of ethnic diversity, and expressed little tangible interest in eradicating abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade.

In addition, conservative Christian leaders and their organizations–long supported by powerful corporations and individuals preaching unfettered capitalism as a means to systematically redistribute wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, and now themselves men of power at the helm of influential religious organizations–were left wanting in regards to making the government and the public more subservient to the corporate empires of benevolent barons. While Reagan and Bush rhetorically preached smaller government and enacted policies favorable to the privileged elite, they also expanded the government and enacted new taxes. Reagan raised taxes 11 times (including the largest tax increase since World War II), while Bush broke a public pledge not to raise taxes. Their anti-government, pro-capitalistic appetites whetted but unrealized, the agenda of the Christian Right in the years following would be steered to an even greater degree by a gospel of earthly wealth.

Second, the Council for National Policy, quietly formed in 1981 by conservative Christian activist Tim LaHaye with the blessing of Reagan and the goal of integrating the beliefs and policies of the Christian Right into government structures, became a very powerful, if largely secretive, force in Washington, D.C. The CNP website notes: “Our over 600 members include many of our nation’s leaders from the fields of government, business, the media, religion, and the professions. Our members are united in their belief in a free enterprise system, a strong national defense, and support for traditional western values. They meet to share the best information available on national and world problems, know one another on a personal basis, and collaborate in achieving their shared goals.” Joined at the hip with the Republican Party, the CNP was secretly helping shape government policy during the Reagan and Bush I years. Early executive directors included Christian Right leaders (including Southern Baptist Paul Pressler), and former Reagan cabinet secretaries.

The Council for National Policy grew to become one of the most powerful, yet one of the least visible, policy-shaping institutions in America. While the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and other poular fundamentalist organizations publicly rallied theological and social conservatives to the Republican Party and for the cause of theocratizing America, the CNP, financed by major corporations and wealthy businessmen, steered Republican politicians and helped craft legislation in the nation’s capital. The New York Times in 2004 called the CNP a highly-secretive, “little-known group of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.”

Third, fundamentalist Baptists, led by Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler (Texas Court of Appeals Judge and Reagan champion) and Jerry Fawell, systematically and successfully executed a political takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. A beginning bibliography of the SBC takeover is online here. In short, the conquering of the SBC was enabled by the wielding of a literal, “inerrant” Bible in one hand and Reagan/Republican politics in the other, tools used to rally thousands of conservative messengers at annual SBC meetings to elect fundamentalist convention presidents, who in turn nominated fundamentalist slates of trustees of denominational boards and agencies. The foundational Baptist traditions of church state separation, freedom of conscience, and an authoritative-but-not-inerrant Bible were summarily discarded and vilified by fundamentalists, who by 1990 had seized virtually total control of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The new American God thus entered the decade of the 1990s with greater power and influence than ever. Three decades earlier he had sought entrance into the halls of political power. Now, the nation’s highest political leaders inscribed his commandments into their policy statements and bowed before his disciples. The entanglement of church and state reached a point not seen since the Civil War, a time when Church and Confederacy had labored hand-in-hand to preserve an earlier imperative of God’s Kingdom: African slavery, the “peculiar institution” to which God’s Confederate’s were committed to perpetuating worldwide–until a bitter defeat by the more powerful United States of America.

Yet much Kingdom work lay ahead. The evils of abortion and homosexuality remained a dark cloud over God’s chosen nation; Christian nationalism had yet to permeate the land; government social programs for the poor were thwarting the will of righteous, unfettered capitalism; and in the background lurked the most ominous sign of all–the numerical dominance of white males was steadily being eroded by immigration and internal growth of ethnic minorities.

Then, in an untimely fashion and just as the urgency of reforming America and conquering the world was greater than ever, a Democrat president ascended to the White House.

Making matters worse, the new president was a Southern Baptist, as had been the last Democrat president. The new American God faced yet another battle with a recalcitrant Baptist, one who would prove to be more wily than his predecessor.

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PART SEVEN

By the mid-1990s, the Christian Rights’ God, once a new God on the American landscape was embedded in the nation’s conscience. Observant citizens could not help but notice the political partnership between the Republican Party and the Religious Right, openly evidenced in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. In addition, the fundamentalist takeover of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — the Southern Baptist Convention — had played out in secular news outlets during the 1980s, while the largely-regional body now displayed itself, in effect, as the Southern Baptist Republican Convention. So great was this latter political alliance that by the 1990s, Southern Baptist leaders had seemingly rejected their faith heritage of church state separation in favor of advocating a form of theocratic government.

Nonetheless, Republican Christians felt shortchanged. Ronald Reagan had promised much, but delivered relatively little. Ex-Baptist Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign of 1988 garnered lots of noise but ultimately fizzled. Republican George H. W. Bush won the presidential election of 1988 yet never evidenced the enthusiastic religious rhetoric of Reagan, and made little effort to advance the primary agenda of white conservative Christians. Baptist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, with Pat Robertson picking up the remnants and forming the Christian Coalition.

Yet Robertson was on to something. Focusing on the grassroots rather than an ambivalent American president, the Christian Coalition appropriated white Christian media (radio and television) and recruited white conservative and fundamentalist Protestant Christian pastors and leaders in America to stoke Christian nationalistic sentiment among the Caucasian evangelistic masses. Pursuing a multi-dimensional approach for turning America into a godly nation (Old Testament style), the strategy involved harnessing the voices of millions of conservative Protestant followers to exert increased pressure upon Washington, D.C. through Congress and the judicial system, double-down on a Christian rationale for unfettered capitalism, raise the decibel level on the social issues of abortion and homosexuality, and escalate the demonizing of liberalism on both the religious and political fronts.

This broad-based effort to mold America into the image of white fundamentalist Christianity seemed to be paying dividends, despite lack of concrete action in the White House. Complementing the Christian Coalition was the Texas-based Wallbuilders ministry, formed in 1989 by fundamentalist pseudo-historian David Barton (BA, Religious Education, Oral Roberts University) for the purpose of rewriting American history in order to remove America’s heritage of church state separation and advocate for Christian nationalism.

The successes of the Christian Coalition and other Religious Right organizations, however, soon confronted a new, and unexpectedly sinister, foe: yet another moderate Southern Baptist in the White House who opposed fundamentalist Christianity.

Bill Clinton proved much more formidable than had Jimmy Carter. Capturing the American presidency at a time when seemingly most white conservative Christians in America had been led to believe that Democrats — as champions of the rights of women and ethnic minorities — were necessarily liberal and acted as the tool of Satan, Clinton, while less theologically-sophisticated than Carter, played the game of politics far better than had the Sunday School teacher from Georgia. While unable to entirely hold back the Reagan-stoked policies of redistributing wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich (in the name of free markets and a so-called Christian work-ethic), Clinton nonetheless successfully pursued policies that championed the poor and minorities, and was not above invoking biblical themes of caring for Society’s underprivileged. Whereas Reagan had increased America’s debt to record levels in record time, Clinton, displaying deft political skills, managed to both balance the nation’s budget and bring prosperity to America.

The more Clinton succeeded as a politician and in the public eye (he was widely popular with the larger American public, including African American Christians), however, the greater the hatred of the white Christian Right grew. An advocate of church state separation, Clinton did not embrace Christian nationalism. Furthermore, the president’s Christian and biblical values, expressed in social policies, were of the wrong kind: liberal. At the same time, his economic policies were not targeted at the right people: Protestant white folk, especially the well-to-do. And his sins were the worst of all: sexual.

Essentially, Baptist Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalist Christian leaders spent the eight years of Clinton’s presidency in all-out opposition to the Baptist president. Christian Reconstructionist groups, opposing Clinton and demanding theocracy, grew dramatically. In just one example, on February 4, 1998, Christian Reconstruction advocates held a press conference in Washington, D.C. to argue that all U.S. law should be based on Old Testament legal codes, including death to adulterers. News of Clinton’s affair with Monical Lewinsky had recently emerged, meaning the president would be punished with death if the Reconstructionists had their way.

Aiding and abetting the Christian Right’s hatred of Clinton was a newly formed media organization. Founded by long-time Republican-political operative Roger Ailes in October 1996, the Republican-allied Fox News television channel was tasked with opposing Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, while boosting and reshaping the Grand Old Party by driving it further to the political right. Fox News performed its mission admirably during Clinton’s second term, elevating the level of conservative hatred toward Clinton, further embedding politically extremist ideology within the Christian Right, and shaping the agenda of the Republican Party.

Having galvanized and energized the white Christian Right grassroots, further cemented conservative Christian bonds with the Republican Party, and spawned a new level of Christian hate rhetoric, Bill Clinton’s otherwise successful presidency drew to a close in 2000. Discouraged over Clinton’s successes and popularity yet committed more than ever to forcing America to bow to their religious and ideological wishes, the Christian Right God and his followers, allied with a Republican Congress and a conservative judicial system, were determined to secure the election of an evangelical Republican president who would do their every bidding.

A religiously-conservative grassroots-fueled animosity of all things Democrat and liberal (terms viewed as interchangeable) thus overshadowed the early months of the 2000 election campaign. Gary Bauer, former director of the fundamentalist Family Research Council, although a long shot, became the early favorite of the Christian Right in a crowded Republican field. Among the competing candidates was one George W. Bush, son of the former lackluster president George H. W. Bush, wealthy businessman and oilman, known as an intellectual lightweight, member of a “liberal” denomination, and a man with a history of moral problems.

Across the chasm in the enemy camp, however, stood a favored Democratic candidate whose presence embodied, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “déjà vu all over again.” Al Gore had been Bill Clinton’s vice president the past eight years, and he was the third moderate Southern Baptist from the South in the past quarter century to stand in the way of an increasingly ultra-conservative Republican Party. The previous two Southern Baptists had emerged victorious in three of their four presidential quests.

The prospect of yet another moderate Southern Baptist derailing the Republican Party put Christian Right organizations and Fox News into overdrive. The new millennium was at hand. Against the backdrop of religiously-driven apocalyptic rhetoric, the Christian Right was certain that America was doomed if Democrats won the White House yet again.

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PART EIGHT

The new millennium arrived with a sobering truth for the Christian Right: in the past three decades, the only Democrats elected president (Jimmy Carter from Georgia and Bill Clinton from Arkansas) had been Southern Baptists, while a third Southern Baptist–Al Gore from Tennessee–stood poised to challenge the eventual Republican nominee.

By now, the Christian Right, including Southern Baptist Convention leaders, were completely loyal to the Republican Party, having long-castigated Democrats as liberals and the enemy of their God, terms deemed synonymous. That they had thus far been unable to defeat moderate Southern Baptist candidates in presidential politics was an irony that hung thick in the election year air.

For round three of Southern Baptist Democrat presidential candidates vs unchurced (Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole), lightly churched (George H. W. Bush) and churched (Gerald Ford) Republican contenders, yet another religious lightweight figure emerged as the  standard bearer of the Republican Party and Christian Right: George W. Bush, the former wayward son of George H. W. Bush.

A former alcoholic with no interest in religion for much of his life, in November 1999, in the heat of the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush suddenly ingratiated himself with the Christian Right with the timely release of a book, A Charge to Keep, that was a testimony of his personal faith in Christ. This was followed by a December 1999 public statement, made during a debate between Republican candidates, that Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher. During the campaign, Bush frequently told evangelical audiences that Christ had “changed” his heart and in the years following his election described his salvation experience, or more properly, experiences. At various times in his writings and discourses Bush credited either evangelist Arthur Blessit in 1984, or evangelist Billy Graham in 1985, for leading him to Christ. Regardless of the eventual differing salvation experiences (Graham disputed Bush’s account concerning him), a major part of Bush’s narrative of sin and redemption during the 2000 campaign was his turning from alcohol in 1986 and his belief that public service was his divine destiny.

Although Al Gore also frequently invoked his personal [Baptist] faith and utilized biblical quotations on the campaign trail, the Christian Right, long committed to the Republican Party, felt that they had finally found a presidential candidate who was one of them. Bush, in effect, was the first major Republican candidate in three decades who not only told conservative evangelicals what they wanted to hear, but lived in their world (never mind that his membership was in the liberal United Methodist Church). In the end, Bush ended the string of Southern Baptist Democrat victories when a highly-divided, conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court handed a controversial victory to the Republican in the face of uncertainty over which candidate actually won the Florida vote count. Although Gore garnered the greater share of the U.S. popular vote, Bush barely won the electoral count, thanks to the Bush v. Gore decision, in one of the most controversial presidential elections in the nation’s history. The Christian Right’s God thus secured his greatest victory yet in his quest to remake America into his image.

George W. Bush, as providence would have it, came to office at just the right time. The attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 by Islamic fundamentalists made it clear to the Christian Right that America was called to a holy war against Islam and secular liberalism. Two days after 9/11, Southern Baptist leader Jerry Falwell declared:

“But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

In the months and years following, the Christian Right, including Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy and the Southern Baptist Convention (with many individuals convinced that Armageddon was at hand), cheered on George W. Bush (69% of conservative Christians supported the invasion of Iraq) as Bush trumped up a pretext for invading Iraq, a Muslim nation that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Conservative evangelicals took political marching orders from their Bush-gushing pastors and, at home, the Republican news network Fox News.

Exceptions were few. The most notable dissenting voice was conservative, evangelical Baptist pastor Greg Boyd of megachurch Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota. In the summer of 2006, Boyd publicly opposed president Bush, the Iraq war, and the theocratic agenda of the Christian Right in a series of six sermons in which he declared (among other things):

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state….

I am sorry to tell you that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Boyd’s dissension split his church and brought down the wrath of the Christian Right. A year later, the conservative evangelical war against Islam channeled through Bush’s wars remained front and center on the Christian Right’s agenda. By this time, the Iraq war had turned into a seemingly endless slog with no victory in sight, souring the American public. Only the war-mongering Christian Right remained solidly behind the president.

In the meantime, Bush the evangelical had fully captivated the Christian Right in the presidential campaign of 2004. Conservative evangelicals turned out in record numbers to vote for their Republican hero, citing moral issues as their greatest concerns. Following Bush’s re-election over Democrat opponent John Kerry (a northeastern Catholic), Southern Baptist leader Richard Land intoned, “The Bible says godly leadership is a sign of God’s blessings and a lack of godly leadership is a sign of God’s judgment. I don’t see Kerry as a godly leader.” Many other Christian Right leaders declared America to be blessed with Bush as president, and declared that Kerry’s election would have been a curse from God. Through Bush’s leadership, America was destined to defeat the global Muslim threat (which had replaced the former global communist threat) abroad, while God had also called upon his faithful to oppose Muslim advances within the United States.

Remarkably, however, the Christian Right’s God abandoned Bush by the end of his second term, even as the crusade against Islam yet galvanized conservative evangelicals. As late as the summer of 2007 the Southern Baptist Convention wanted to believe in Bush. But having conspired with the president to invade Iraq (and hopefully light the fuse to Armageddon) and pinned their hopes for America’s global triumph and moral revival on his shoulders, conservative evangelicals grew increasingly disappointed in Bush’s moral character, his seeming inability to ultimately ensure the safety of America, and the economic downturn brought about by his domestic policies. By the 2008 election year, the Christian Right no longer wanted to talk about Bush, and instead turned their attention to finding a new Republican hero to fulfill their not-yet-realized agenda.

Thus, the 2008 election season unfolded against the backdrop of the ongoing and widely unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan wars, America in the midst of a financial collapse, the global economy on the skids, and the Christian Right desperate (again) to elect a Republican president to represent their God and rescue the nation from domestic immorality and global threats to Christianity. Yet some of the Christian Right faithful could not help but wonder: if George W. Bush, who for a time had been all that they wanted but in the end turned into a bitter disappointment, could not take America to the Promised Land–could any Republican?

Whatever might transpire next, however, the Christian Right entered into the 2008 election season with a newly-honed weapon: the successful redefining of the concept of “religious liberty” in public discourse to mean special (and divinely deserved) privileges for evangelical Christians over against Muslims, secular liberals, Christian liberals, and Democrats (or any combination thereof).

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PART NINE

While the George W. Bush presidency ended on a sour note for the white Christian Right, the 2008 candidacy of Democrat Sen. Barack O’bama (Illinois) breathed new life and energy into the then-diffused movement.

On the surface, the Christian Right’s God and his followers might well have rejoiced in a presidential contender telling Christianity Today:

I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.

This clear Christian testimony from a member of the United Church of Christ, however, came from a black Democrat whose Kenyan-born father had been raised as a Muslim and then converted to atheism as a young man. In the minds of many white conservatives, Obama’s public Christian testimony was phony: the candidate’s blackness, Kenyan family background, and Muslim family heritage (vividly evidenced in his middle name, “Hussein”) was surely proof that Barack Obama was in reality a Muslim, a foreigner, and a socialist — in short, of the devil. By way of contrast, black Christians (whether conservative, moderate or liberal) did not disparage Obama’s Christian faith or question his loyalty to America. The issue of race had been instrumental in the forging of the modern, political Christian Right (as early movement leaders acknowledged), and now racism again moved to the forefront of national politics.

The 2008 election thus took place with a professing Christian Democratic candidate challenging an Episcopalian-recently-turned-Baptist Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain from Arizona (reversing a pattern of Baptist presidential candidates confined to the Democratic Party). While McCain’s relative reticence at discussing issues of faith generated less-than-stellar enthusiasm among the Christian Right, his choice of little-known Sarah Palin, evangelical fundamentalist governor of Alaska, almost instantly galvanized white Christian conservatives. When the votes were tallied in the Bible Belt South, less than 15% of white voters in the Baptist-saturated states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi cast their ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate (an all time low). Nonetheless, Obama easily defeated McCain for the presidency, a victory attributed in no small part to the larger nation’s disappointment with Republican evangelical George W. Bush’s failings as president.

During the 1990s the Christian Right’s hatred of Baptist President Bill Clinton had taken ugly political discourse to a new level. The election and early presidency of Barack Obama, however, brought about a level of Christian Right hatred even greater than that earlier directed at Clinton, much of it funneled through the largely white, Protestant evangelical, “Tea Party” movement.

In addition to bitter hatred of the president, conservative Christians brought to bear, in the larger political landscape, a stark redefining of the historical American concept of religious liberty as extending to all persons. In short, the Christian Right, counting many notable Baptists among its leadership, quickened the theocratic journey the movement had been on for years, expressed in a campaign to restrict religious liberty to conservative Christians only (ironically, a position long ago advocated by the colonial Christian theocrats who persecuted early Baptists). Non-believers, especially Muslims, were not eligible for religious liberty in the Christian Right’s vision of America.

Surprisingly, however, conservative Christian opposition to President Obama’s “contraception mandate” — a George W. Bush administration policy (requiring businesses and institutions to include contraception coverage in employee health care policies) that Obama included in the Affordable Care Act health care law — proved to be an even greater catalyst for restricting religious liberties. Under Bush, the policy had not been controversial. And unlike Bush, Obama made exceptions for churches and religious organizations. Nonetheless, conservatives suddenly became outraged when Obama adopted the Bush policy. Seeking judicial action, conservative Christians flooded America’s court system with lawsuits in an effort to deny religious liberty for all. The lawsuits argued that private and public institutions and businesses (whether non-profit or for-profit) that serve the general public but are owned or operated by a Christian(s) who does not believe in birth control, should be allowed to deny employees, students and customers access to birth control in health insurance policies (i.e., the Bush-now-Obama contraception mandate) on religious grounds in order to avoid violating the business/institutional owner’s personal religious convictions.

In addition to defying the contraception mandate, the Christian Right during the Obama presidency ratcheted up the utilization of politics and judicial courts in an effort to legally impose many standard conservative religious beliefs upon the American people at large, including:

• legal restrictions on homosexuality and eradication of same-sex marriage
• promotion of creationism over evolution in public schools
• legal favoritism of conservative Christian beliefs in public schools
• outlawing abortion (one Baptist politician declared that some rapes are legitimate)

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Christian Right leaders (Protestant and Catholics alike), under the guise of “Values Voters” and evidencing renewed urgency, painted doomsday scenarios should Obama win re-election. Comparisons of Obama to Nazism and fascism, common during the 2008 election, became popular yet again. In the words of one Catholic priest:

“The national election in 2012 will either give Christians one last chance to rally, or it will be the last free election in our nation. This can only sound like hyperbole to those who are unaware of what happened… to Western Europe in the [fascist] 1930′s.”

Hatred of Obama and the rush to restrict religious liberty to theologically, socially and politically correct persons only, in turn, led to the surprise marriage of the Christian Right’s God with polytheistic, clearly unorthodox (thus heretical) Mormon theology. Weeks before the 2012 presidential election and following a personal visit with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (a Mormon), Billy Graham, veteran public dean of Baptists and evangelicals in America and a long-time and leading proponent of the New American God of the Christian Right, recanted his belief that Mormonism is not a Christian faith. Graham’s changed theological convictions reflected a larger movement among conservative evangelicals to the placing of their faith in a Mormon candidate for the presidency (previously an unthinkable position) in hopes of defeating a sitting Christian president in order to further a theocratic-leaning political agenda.

Thus, eight decades in the making, the New American God of the Christian Right, facing the prospect of yet another political defeat, in the fall of 2012 underwent a metamorphosis, allying with polytheism and heresy for the sake of unseating a (perceived) satanic Barack Obama. The level of religiously-themed discourse and biblically apocalyptic imagery surrounding the 2012 election, however, masked an unfolding counter-reality: the number of Americans identifying themselves as atheists and/or claiming no religious affiliation reached an all-time high of 20%. At the ground level of the American experience, in short, religion was falling out of public favor even as the battle for God at the ballot box escalated to new heights.

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PART TEN

In this month’s elections, the God of the Christian Right was soundly defeated, as widely noted by America’s leading Christian conservatives. American voters rejected the Christian Right’s insistence that their religious liberties should trump the liberties of others (the contraception mandate being the most recent issue hijacked in a never-ending quest for special political privileges for God’s chosen), that rape “is something that God intended to happen” (Calvin would be proud), that abortion must be outlawed in all circumstances (never mind that abortion is not mentioned in the Bible), and that marriage should be limited to one man and one woman (gay marriage is the bogeyman, with nary a word about Old Testament biblical approval of one man and many women).

Franklin Graham summarized the disastrous results of Barack Obama’s re-election: America is now on a “path of destruction.”

And what will America’s destruction look like, should her citizens continue to reject the demands of the Christian Right? Armageddon, according to Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas: “the course [Obama] is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.” While some Christian Right leaders yet hold out hope for finding a better way to package their extreme political positions in an effort to save America, others are not so sure it can be done within the confines of the Republican Party. To avert Armageddon, some are renewing efforts for a third party, while still others are calling for secession from the United States.

Meanwhile, many non-religious Republican Party leaders are blaming their party’s losses on “the more extreme elements of the religious right,” and demanding that the party break its allegiance to the Christian Right.

At least one Christian Right leader, however, is taking off the war paint. Jim Daly, head of Focus on the Family, has raised the ire of his allies by declaring, “If the Christian message has been too wrapped around the axle of the Republican Party, then a) that’s our fault, and b) we’ve got to rethink that.” In addition, Daly is calling for conservative Christians to work with abortion-rights groups to find common ground on adoption–a previously unthinkable proposition. Few of his fellow conservatives, however, are anxious to ally with their enemies.

Only time will tell if the Republican / Christian Right marriage is over, but it is easy to see why the Christian Right is wallowing in end-of-the-world imagery: although conservatives spent several billion dollars on the elections and projected confidence to the very last moment, not only did Barack Obama win reelection as president, but Democrats gained seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The electoral count was lopsidedly Democratic, while Democrats won the popular vote for the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Conversely, Republicans failed to win the popular vote for the presidency for the fifth time in the last six elections.

Exactly who voted for and against the Republican / Christian Right ideology in November 2012? Thanks to our data-driven era, the answer is readily available. Republican candidates won the vote among older, white, married, well-off, male, Protestant evangelicals (Catholic bishops also voted Republican). Everyone else (people of color, women, young people, non-evangelical clergy and laity) voted mostly Democratic, including rapidly growing “nones,” individuals (typically young people) who voice no religious affinity. Ominously, not only are young people now largely Democratic, but they are strongly supportive of equal rights for homosexuals, a position anathema to the Christian Right. Robert P. Jones, politics and religion pollster, calls this new reality “hard to overstate.” In the face of young America’s support for same-sex marriage, “it’s unlikely this issue will reappear as a major national wedge issue.”

The Christian Right God, crowned under George W. Bush, has thus been pushed aside by an electorate who values liberty and equality for all. Dethroned, Republicans and their Christian Right allies are yet stuck in a world view that demands special privileges for white, Christian men. Time, however, has expired on Anglo-Saxon supremacy in America. The election year 2012 is the maturing of upheavals in two earlier years: 1865 and 1965.

Cultural changes sometimes begin in ways unanticipated, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses being a prime example: Luther envisioned basic reforms within the Roman Catholic Church, but instead he kindled a fire and forever changed Christianity.

The year 1865 witnessed just such an advance for human equality. The immediate context was the victory of the United States over the Confederate States of America, resulting in a triumph in the march of the principle of equality for all, and constitutional liberty for black Americans in particular. The long-term consequences, however, were both more broader and uneven than political leaders of the era could have envisioned.

In effect, in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery and cleared a path to legally wrest from white males (in 1868) an exclusive franchise over the voting booth–only to have white supremacists, for nearly a century following, use violence and a majoritarian status to largely prevent African Americans from voting. The door having been opened, however, women in turn muscled their way to the ballot box in 1920. And in 1964, the United States finally enforced racial and ethnic equality in the voting booth.

On the heels of the securing of voter equality, the United States in 1965 passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, opening America’s shores to non-Anglo Saxon immigrants. Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and Africans were allowed to legally migrate to America and become voting U. S. citizens. White conservative Christians bemoaned the pluralism of the immigrants, but the long-term results were inevitable. By the 1990s, one-third of America’s population growth was driven by legal immigration, compared to 10% prior to the legislation. The white population in America plummeted from 88.6% in 1960 to 72.4% in 2010. And in 2012, Latinos–the fastest growing group of American immigrants–voted over 70% for President Obama, their votes combining with that of the 93% of African Americans who voted Democratic, thus dethroning the Christian Right’s white, male God.

Recognizing that the 2012 elections are not a lark, the Republican Party is now scrambling to find a way to attract Latino voters (although not African Americans, who have long been considered a lost cause by the Grand Old Party and the white Christian Right). While the next four years will likely witness growing friction between Christian conservatives and traditional Republicans, both are expected to abandon the anti-immigration rhetoric of the party’s angry white men.

Amidst the white male angst and despair, intra-party fighting, second-guessing, and doomsday scenarios, where does the Christian Right’s God go from here? Has he played his last starring role in the history of America? Will he finally divorce the Republican Party in favor of a yet-formed Christian Right Party that will more fully embrace His whiteness? Or will the Republican Party find it impossible to part ways with the God who helped Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush claim the presidency?

It is hard to imagine the white, male Christian Right God finding favor again in pluralistic, ethnically diverse twenty-first America. After all, white males comprise only 34% of the population now, while non-whites account for 28% of citizens (up from 20% in 2000).

There are some historical frames of reference with which to ponder the future. Placing God on a political throne has always produced disastrous results, from the theocracies of the Roman Empire to those of colonial America and the current Islamic Middle East. While maligned by the Christian Right, the four-centuries old Baptist heritage of religious liberty for all, church state separation, and welcoming of pluralism continues to provide a way beyond the lethal nature of deity-driven politics. Perhaps, in the long view, a public reclaiming of the Baptist heritage will help rescue both religion and government from the poison of entanglement.