From the pews to the polls: The formation of a southern Christian right

摘要

This dissertation analyzes the political mobilization of white evangelicals in the South from the early twentieth century through 1996. Fundamentalists and evangelicals of the early twentieth century were cultural separatists who showed only a limited interest in the political sphere. But this began to change in the 1940s and 1950s, when the anticommunist movement, which conservative Protestants supported, introduced formerly apolitical Christians to political activism and led them to link their religion with American patriotism. After viewing the federal government as an ally in the 1950s, evangelicals in California, Florida, and the Midwest began to realize in the early 1970s that the federal government was no longer championing the causes of Christian conservatism, so they launched a series of single-issue moral campaigns against abortion, feminism, pornography, and gay rights in order to defend American society against secularism. Southern evangelicals were initially reluctant to enlist themselves in these campaigns, but in the 1980s, Southern Baptists who had once ignored the pro-life movement and northern evangelicals' other single-issue moral causes became leaders in the battle against abortion. At the same time, the Republican party's efforts to attract the votes of social conservatives prompted Jerry Falwell and other members of the Moral Majority to transform the single-issue moral campaigns of the late 1970s into a means of mobilizing support for Ronald Reagan's presidential candidacy. During the 1980s, the Christian Right found it difficult to achieve their legislative goals, but in the following decade, Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed helped them take control of Republican party organizations. As southern evangelicals committed themselves to a partisan cause, they transformed their own faith tradition, and moved from cultural separatism to cultural engagement. This dissertation examines religious publications, newspaper articles, and a variety of archival sources to trace the transformation in southern conservative Protestants' political views and the origins of a grassroots political movement that ultimately reshaped the Republican party and the nation's political debate.