Book Review: Evangelicals and Politics (Part 1)

Why do they even care about politics if the world is ending?

Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America caught a lot of attention in 2017 in the wake of the Trump election and evangelical support for such an un-Godly candidate. The book’s emphasis is on the political involvement of evangelicals, but much of the first half of this book is laying the groundwork for their entry into politics via Falwell and the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.

There’s a lot going on here, I’ll break down some of the highlights over two posts. FitzGerald deftly moves between different levels, from the macro history of ideas and theology to the micro level of congregants’ experiences. All the while, she situates these movements in broader American society and politics and paints effective biographical portraits of important figures like Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell. Plus it’s great at the sentence level. In its scope, prose quality, and deftness at exploring many levels with nuance it’s up there with another recent favorite, Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History.

Why would fundamentalists be involved in politics?

I hadn’t thought of it before reading this book, but it is really quite curious that particularly the fundamentalist evangelicals became as involved in politics as they did. Historically, they’ve mostly been separatist movements, viewing American society as so corrupt that the only way to live a moral and Christian life is to retreat and insulate your family.

This separatism is still a common strain in the religious right across denominations, and we can see it on display in the Mormon fundamentalists of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven or in Catholic Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Dreher calls America a “Post-Christian nation” in the book’s subtitle: the ship has sailed on this society of sinners and it’s every man for himself in the quest to get to heaven. The Mormon fundamentalists that Krakauer covers aren’t organizing for collective impact – they’re retreating because even their conservative, highly Mormon state isn’t Godly enough for them.

As the Mormon fundamenalist example highlights, the coalitional nature of politics is another barrier for purity-obsessed fundamentalists. You’ll inevitably end up working and compromising with sinners, including other Christians. Evangelicals often refer to Catholics, for example, as cult members. If you think leftist factionalism is bad, wait until you learn about the history of Western Christendom!

So why compromise your fundamentalist purity and get involved in politics? Well, it seems like both practical and theological concerns pushed some fundamentalist evangelicals over the edge. The irony is that it was America’s first evangelical president who precipitated the rise of right-wing evangelical politics, along with noted conservative darling the IRS [emphasis added here and elsewhere]:

In 1978 the IRS announced plans to revoke the tax exemption of private schools that did not meet certain standards of racial integration, and these schools were white, or predominantly white, because their churches were… The proposed IRS action, once publicized, caused an uproar among advocates of Christian schools… According to several of those involved, the controversy played a pivotal role in the formation of the Christian right. ‘The IRS ignited the dynamite that had been lying around for years,’ [Robert] Billings reported. Later, [Paul] Weyrich told an interviewer, ‘What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.’ Christians, he explained, thought they could insulate themselves and their families in their communities and schools, but the IRS ruling was a direct threat to their interests and it could not be ignored. (pg 303-304)

So they needed to fight back. And they took inspiration for their political organizing from an unlikely source:

[Falwell] and other fundamentalist pastors described their move into politics–and their abandonment of separation–as a response to the national crisis of the late 1970s. Yet clearly the emergence of the civil rights movement had been a turning point. It had shown them that preachers could be politically effective, and it had ended their support of the status quo… Further, the success of the movement had removed the obstacle that would have prevented Falwell and other fundamentalist leaders from assuming a role in national politics. (pg 287)

That last “obstacle” was their support for segregation. Ironically, Falwell delivered a famous speech called “Ministers and Marches” that decried the civil rights movement for mixing politics and ministry. As he moved to form the Moral Majority, he backpedaled and acted as if this speech never happened. In this way, Falwell embodied this tension within the fundamentalist movement.

Those damn Millenials! Wait, not that kind...

Another motivating factor was, unsurprisingly, religious belief. Many of these fundamentalists were millenialists, focused on the end times and Armageddon. FitzGerald has a really handy glossary in the back, which includes definitions of two strands of millenialism:

Postmillenialism — the belief that Christians are preparing the way for the Second Coming in a thousand years by making civilization more just and more righteous

Premillenialism — the contrary belief that civilization is becoming more wicked so that God will intervene and subject civilization to a thousand years of tribulations before He comes again with his army of saints and destroys Satan and the earth.

Particularly the postmillenialist orientation lends a clear urgency to politics. It’s literally a battle between Good and Evil, Jesus and Satan. In their eyes, Satan is winning, and we need to beat back the forces of Evil to prepare for the Second Coming. Premillenialism, on the other hand, seems de-motivating to me and like it would lead to separatism. Unsurprisingly, these two groups don’t always get along, even though they share many views about morality and American society.

FitzGerald at one point posits that Falwell critically shaped US politics, not just the Republican Party, by introducing this Good vs. Evil rhetoric and raising the stakes, in his case literally to apocalyptic levels. I’m a bit less convinced that this is an innovation and not a reintroduction. As Ezra Klein points out in his Why We’re Polarized, the era of civility in American politics post-WWII is in many ways the exception, and I’ve read enough about 18th and 19th century American history to know that there have been other Good vs. Evil, high stakes political conflicts. But whether this Manichaean is “new” or not, it’s still a significant way that Falwell and the Religious Right helped raise the stakes and contribute to the era of intense polarization and populist rage that we find ourselves in now.

Bottom-up religion and fundamentalists’ unlikely brethren

[William] Branham, often credited with starting the movement [of healing revivals], was a Baptist preacher, born dirt poor, who took to Pentecostalism and healing… [Here, stories of him healing people of various afflictions, including a former US congressman from 1937-1950s] At the height of his fame in the mid-1950s, he denounced all the denominations and veered off into wholly original doctrines. God, he said, had written three works: the Zodiac, the Great Pyramid, and the Holy Bible. Man, he maintained, came ‘of the serpent seed,’ for, after eating the fruit in the Garden, Eve had mated with the snake and given birth to Cain. He claimed to have opened the seven seals and said that God had told him that a latter-day Elijah, whom he described as someone much like himself, would come to serve as His messenger to announce the Second Coming…. His popularity waned in the late 1950s, but when he died in an auto crash in 1965, his followers held his body in state for four months, hoping to see a resurrection. (pg 214)

This book is full of wild stories like this. There’s plenty to hate about organized religion. You often see a critique of organized religion from “spiritual” people who juxtapose it in their head with individual and calm, small spiritual communities. But sometimes non-organized religion looks like this– a full explosion of creativity and conspiracy.

FitzGerald draws an interesting parallel not only with the politically-engaged ministers of the civil rights movement, but also with others who reckoned with modernity. While Pentecostals were widely mocked for their charismatic miracle-working and healing wonders, they eventually worked their way into mainline Christianity, even being recognized and celebrated after Vatican II. FitzGerald broadens the scope:

Still, what is striking about the movement is how much it had in common with many of the countercultural movements of the same period. In the 1960s and ‘70s young people were taking variously to Buddhist meditation, Hare Krishna chanting, crystal reading, and ‘channeling.’ They were joining communes, human potential movements, and consciousness-raising sessions; they were getting high with mind-altering drugs and losing themselves in the great communal melding of rock concerts. Queried by their puzzled elders, some spoke of a desire for authentic experience and authentic spirituality, some about the oppressiveness of institutions, and of the need for liberation from empty hierarchical social conventions. Some railed against the rule of scientific and technological thinking that seemed to be turning people into mechanisms and called for individual autonomy and self-realization. They advocated for peace, love, and genuine community, but unlike their more political contemporaries in the antiwar movement, they tended to turn their attention inward and to see the future in apocalyptic terms. The difference was that the charismatics, like so many other Protestant renewal movements, envisioned going not forward to a new age but back to primitive Christianity. They read the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and most became social and political conservatives.

The book briefly covers Jim Wallis and the evangelical left, which provides another branching path, distinct from the fundamentalists. It’s fascinating to see fundamentalists and hippies as contemporaneous divergent paths in the struggle to make meaning of modernity. It must hurt either group to see themselves as in some ways the mirror image of the other, a religious version of the horseshoe theory of politics.

Who is the target audience for fundamentalism?

Back to this question of wrestling with modernity, another excerpt:

[Nancy] Ammerman [in Baptist Battles], then went on to ask what it was about city life–or “modernity”--that created a sense of cultural dislocation among some newcomers and not among others. From interviews she determined that the division had much to do with attitudes toward cultural pluralism and toward change as a fact of life. The theological moderates tended to say they liked the diversity of the cities and thought it important that their children be exposed to a variety of educational offerings so that they could make informed choices and learn how to deal with change. The fundamentalists tended to reject diversity and the idea that their children should be educated for a changing world. But then many of the moderates had college educations, and most of the fundamentalists did not. Fundamentalists, by and large, were not the poorest or the least educated of Ammerman’s respondents. Rather they tended to be people with some college education, but not a degree, blue-collar workers, and those with incomes in the middle of the scale. They were, in other words, those whose exposure to diversity was high, but whose experience and resources least equipped them to deal with it. It is such people, Ammerman wrote, who ‘build congregational cultures in which they can be protected from the cognitive challenges of the world, adding schools, Christian media, and a network of friends to their organizational armor." (pg 278)

We have a group “left behind” by pluralism and modernity. This reminds me of some literature on the Mormons that I read during a deep dive last summer, particularly Marvin Hill’s Quest for Refuge:​​ The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism. Modernity is messy! Pluralism is hard! Particularly the diversity of a pluralist society can lead to a lot of conflict, and it’s understandable that many people reject this and crave a simpler life. Mormonism does, in fact, spring from the Second Great Awakening and its evangelical moment.

Fundamentalism seems to only have meaning for those engaged with modernity. If everyone in the world agreed with you on a particular issue, there’s no reason to structure your identity around that issue. Plus, if things don’t work out for you in your quest to, say, find a job in an industrializing town like Lynchburg, Virginia, I’m sure it softens the blow to have fundamentalism’s enemies of “American society” or “secular humanism” to blame. Ironically, the tenets of this community could actually help someone become a more functioning member of society, up to a point:

The pastors at Thomas Road [Jerry Falwell’s church in Lynchburg] talked about creating a society apart from the world. But by the ‘world’ they clearly meant the evils of the world as they saw them, not American life in general. In Falwell’s sermons scriptural lessons on how to become a better Christian often segued into practical advice on how to gain the respect of others and achieve success. Material wealth, Falwell once said, ‘is God’s way of blessing those who put him first.’ It was not, then, really paradoxical that many of the pastor’s prescriptions for life looked very much like tactics for integrating people into society rather than separating them from it. Most communities, after all, would be happy to have a clean, hardworking family man who respected authority, obeyed the law, and kept off the welfare rolls. A factory manager, a city official, or landlord would find such a man an ideal type–certainly if the alternative was a drinking, brawling country fellow with no steady job, six unruly children, and a shotgun he might consider using against a law officer. Conversely, such a fellow would get nowhere with General Electric, even if he desperately wanted to. As for the Thomas Road women, they might have invented the church, so heavily did the prohibitions fall on traditional male vices like drinking, running around, and paying no heed to the children. To tell ‘Dad’ that he made all the decisions might be a small price to pay to get the father of your children to become a respectable middle class citizen. On the other hand, the virtues instilled by the church seemed better suited to work in assembly line manufacturing than on software design. (pg 281)

This excerpt also explains some of the participation of women in these systems. There is something in it for them in the form of more present husbands. Plus, retreating to the home and traditional gender roles is their own safe haven from the confusing liberties of modernity. It’s no wonder that these groups were allied with Phyllis Schlafly and mobilized against the Equal Rights Amendment.

Stay tuned for Part 2: abortion! televangelists! left wing evangelicals! dubya and obama!

Note: I wrote this review a couple of years ago but didn’t publish it. If you’re reading it and wondering “why did he not address [obviously salient event from 2023],” that’s why.