The Political Mobilization of Evangelical Protestants

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The Political Mobilization of Evangelical
Protestants

• The advantage we have is that liberals and
  feminists dont generally go to church. They
  dont gather in one place three days before the
  elections
• Ralph Reed

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Defining Evangelicalism
The term "Evangelicalism" is a wide-reaching
definitional "canopy" that covers a diverse
number of Protestant groups. The term originates
in the Greek word evangelion, meaning "the good
news," or, more commonly, the "gospel." During
the Reformation, Martin Luther adapted the Greek
term, dubbing his breakaway movement the
evangelische kirke, or "evangelical church"-a
name still generally applied to the Lutheran
Church in Germany. In the English-speaking world,
however, the modern usage usually connotes the
religious movements and denominations which
sprung forth from a series of revivals that swept
the North Atlantic Anglo-American world in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Key
figures associated with these revivals included
the itinerant English evangelist George
Whitefield (1715-1770) the founder of Methodism
John Wesley (1703-1791) and, the American
philosopher and theologian, Jonathan Edwards
(1703-1758). These revivals were particularly
responsible for the rise of the Baptists and
Methodists from obscure sects to their
traditional position as America's two largest
Protestant denominational families. http//www.wh
eaton.edu/isae/defining_evangelicalism.html
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Defining Evangelicalism 2

• Indeed, by the 1820s evangelical Protestantism
  was by far the dominant expression of
  Christianity in the United States. The concept of
  evangelism and the revival-codified, streamlined,
  and routinized by evangelists like Charles G.
  Finney (1792-1875)-became "revivalism" as
  evangelicals set out to convert the nation. By
  the decades prior to the American Civil War
  (1861-1865), a largely-evangelical "Benevolent
  Empire" was actively attempting to reshape
  American society through such reforms as
  temperance, the early women's movement, various
  benevolent and betterment societies, and-most
  controversial of all-the abolition movement.
  After the war, the changes in American society
  wrought by such powerful forces as urbanization
  and industrialization, along with new
  intellectual and theological developments began
  to diminish the power of evangelicalism within
  American culture. Likewise, evangelical cultural
  hegemony was diminished in pure numeric terms
  with the influx of millions of non-Protestant
  immigrants in the latter 19th and early
  20th-centuries. Nonetheless, evangelical
  Protestantism remained a powerful presence within
  American culture. Going into the 20th-century
  evangelicalism still held the status of an
  American "folk religion" in many sectors of the
  United States-particularly the South.

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Defining Evangelicalism 3

• There are three senses in which the term
  "evangelical" is used today as we enter the
  21st-century. The first is to see as
  "evangelical" all Christians who affirm a few key
  doctrines and practical emphases. British
  historian David Bebbington approaches
  evangelicalism from this direction and notes four
  specific hallmarks of evangelical religion
  conversionism, the belief that lives need to be
  changed activism, the expression of the gospel
  in effort biblicism, a particular regard for the
  Bible and crucicentrism, a stress on the
  sacrifice of Christ on the cross. A second sense
  is to look at evangelicalism as an organic group
  of movements and religious tradition. Within this
  context "evangelical" denotes a style as much as
  a set of beliefs. As a result, groups as
  disparate as black Baptists and Dutch Reformed
  Churches, Mennonites and Pentecostals, Catholic
  charismatics and Southern Baptists all come under
  the evangelical umbrella-demonstrating just how
  diverse the movement really is. A third sense of
  the term is as the self-ascribed label for a
  coalition that arose during the Second World War.
  This group came into being as a reaction against
  the perceived anti-intellectual, separatist,
  belligerent nature of the fundamentalist movement
  in the 1920s and 1930s. Importantly, its core
  personalities (like Harold John Ockenga and Billy
  Graham), institutions (for instance, Moody Bible
  Institute and Wheaton College), and organizations
  (such as the National Association of Evangelicals
  and Youth for Christ) have played a pivotal role
  in giving the wider movement a sense of cohesion
  that extends beyond these "card-carrying"
  evangelicals.

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The Political Background

• The Nomination of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and the
  restoration of spirited public debate about
  certain moral issues marked the return to
  national prominence.
• Mainline Protestants began soon to doubt the
  literal authority of the Bible and its
  superiority to Science. Evangelicals thought they
  were confronted with threats to orthodox
  Christianity, and they reacted with furious
  defensive activity. One of such reaction was the
  Ku Klux Klan, a massive nationwide social
  movement that defined itself in the 1920s
  primarily as a campaign to preserve Christian
  values. The Klan drew heavily on white
  evangelical Protestants for its mass membership,
  and evangelical clergy were disproportionately
  prominent among the leadership.

Jimmy Carter (1924-) 39th president of the USA
from 1977 to 1981. Democratic, Baptist
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The Political Background

• Attempting to resist the encroachments of
  secularism in the political realm, evangelical
  Protestants concentrated on a pair of causes
  restrict the sale of intoxicating liquor and to
  prohibit the teaching of evolution in the public
  schools. Both movements attained temporary
  success, but in the end, neither could withstand
  the shift of power to the burgeoning cities,
  where evangelicalism was weak and a new set of
  issues command public interest. As many
  predominantly northern denominations embraced
  modernity and expressed a willingness to apply
  scientific insight to religious belief, centre of
  gravity in evangelicalism shifted to the South.
  There were significant political implications in
  the increasing southern orientation of
  traditional Protestantism. Unlike northern
  evangelicals, who had argued that salvation
  depended on both faith and works, the southern
  variety of Protestant Christianity stopped short
  demanding a social transformation as a condition
  for salvation.

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The Political Background

• Evangelical remained with the Democratic Party.
  The alliance can be explained largely in regional
  and class terms. The force of tradition kept
  white Southern Baptists firmly attached to the
  party that had re-established white political
  dominance in the late 19th century and usually
  selected its vice presidential nominee from the
  region. The linkage was further cemented in the
  1930s by the popularity of the New Deal social
  welfare programs that attacked poverty and
  agricultural distress in the region.
• The first changes in attitude were present in the
  presidential election of the 1960s when the DP
  nominated a Catholic for president. Large number
  of white, churchgoing southern Protestants
  defected to the Republican candidate and toward
  conservative values.

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Evangelical Political Action

• The New Christian Right coalesced around the
  candidacy of Ronald Regan in the 1980
  presidential campaign. Divorced (he is the only
  divorced president), an intermittent churchgoer
  from a mainline denomination, the father of
  children who pursued unconventional lives, and a
  veteran of Hollywood, Reagan seemed a most
  unlikely object of support for the devout. But as
  Reagan alone embraced the political efforts of
  the conservative evangelical leaders and pledged
  to work for enactment of their agenda, he
  increasingly drew the New Christian Right into
  his camp. All groups encouraged pastors to sign
  up evangelicals on the voter rolls and to impress
  on churchgoers the necessity of expressing their
  religious convictions in the polling booth. These
  efforts led to a substantial evangelical presence
  in political party activities during the 1980 and
  1984 campaigns.

Ronald Reagan 40th President of the USA from
1981 to 1989
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Evangelical Political Action the second
generation

• The evangelical groups backed also Bush candidacy
  but when he failed to be re-elected, his defeat
  was attributed in part to the concerns of
  moderate voters about Christian Rights capture
  of the party. The Christian Right contribution to
  Rep. victory in 1980 had given evangelical
  leaders a place at the table. However, they were
  not successful in bringing a radical policy
  change. Many politically engaged evangelical
  Protestants resolved to change the strategy and
  the tactics pursued by the Christian Right. In
  particular, they argued, the movement had erred
  by concentrating on changing national government
  by capturing the presidency. The movement,
  however, might do better if it concentrated
  energy at the state and local levels, building up
  an infrastructure of support within the Rep.
  Party and a network of genuine mass-based
  organizations.

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Evangelical Political Action the second
generation

• The Christian Right became a variety of
  well-established membership organizations, whose
  leaders use mainstream language and organize
  followers in the grassroots. Candidates not to
  mention religious motivations or the full range
  of policies they wanted to implement. Similarly,
  candidates were counselled to reach out to voters
  who were not part of the evangelical tradition
  and to build strategic alliances with
  sympathizers from other religious families. The
  target audience evolved from Christians to
  religious conservative to People of faith.

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Examples

• Center for Christian Statesmanship
• http//www.statesman.org/mission.html
• Eagle Forum http//www.eagleforum.org/misc/descrip
  t.html

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The Consequence for Public Policy

• The Presence of NCR may have made politicians
  think about the moral quotient before casting
  their votes.
• The evangelical groups affected national policies
  in ways short of changing public policy.
• Bush made opposition to abortion a litmus test
  for Supreme Court appointees. The president put
  severe limits on the use of federal funds for
  stem cell research, publicly advocated teaching
  intelligent design in biology, and came out for
  a constitutional amendment against gay marriage
  in 2004. Appointments to evangelical and federal
  funds to churches.