How the Religious Right Negatively Impacts Everything-1
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How the Religious Right Negatively Impacts Everything
The more I experience political injustice at the hands of religious conservatives, the more
I realize the magnitude of the negative impact that religious conservatism has on the United States. There once was a time when the separation of church and state was valued and understood, but it seems like those times of understanding are dwindling. R
eligion cannot be used to implement political policies because faith-based belief does not equate to truth/majority opinion. In this essay, I will explain how religious conservatives have ruined everything. I will explain how religious conservatism has made American society less empathetic and tolerant along with how the religious right uses religion to justify their greed, how they force their views into the political sphere, and how they undo previous legal protections to perpetuate hateful ideals.
It was on January 6, 2021, when huge mobs of Trump supporters joined together to storm
the United States Capitol building. They broke through police barricades, windows, and even the
Senate chambers (Welch 2022). These people believed that it was their mission to “save” America and that Trump had told them to. They weren't just trying to save America from four years of Democratic rule, but rather from a biblical fall from grace. Many insurrectionists felt as though it had been their divine calling to protect their people, religious conservatives, against the
unlawful persecution and indoctrination they claimed came from progressives, democrats, and the liberal left. They waved flags and signs reading “Jesus Saves”, even erecting a giant cross on the Senate steps. Upon breaking into the Senate chambers, they collectively bowed their heads in
prayer. It is almost impossible to ignore the role religion and white Christian nationalism played in the insurrection on January 6th (Welch 2022). Due to recent progressive movements, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, immigration protections, civil rights, and many more, a perceived threat overcame the minds of Christian conservatives who began believing that their viewpoints were
the target of persecution. These threats were heightened by an outspoken president and various far-right internet communities and news outlets. Many of these conservatives believe that the United States is a white Christian nation ordained by God.
It is important to define what constitutes someone as a part of the religious right. The religious right is a political movement in America that is composed of lawyers, scholars, politicians, and activists who advocate for political and social conservatism (Greenley et al. 2006). Most members identify as Christian, though their denominations vary. Many of the religious right are also evangelicals. The Evangelical movement is a multi-denominational group
that is comprised of holiness, reform, Pentecostal, Anabaptists, and many more Protestant traditions (Greenley et al. 2006). They believe that one should follow Jesus for life and that one must experience being “born-again” via baptism. Evangelicals must also demonstrate the gospel socially or through missionary efforts. They must look to the Bible as the ultimate authority and obey all that is in it (Cordasco et. al 2018). Evangelicals also hold the sentiment that Jesus Christ was sacrificed on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice to redeem the sins of humanity. Fundamentalist Christians are a group within the Evangelical movement that adheres to the strict,
literal interpretation of the Bible (Cordasco et al. 2018). White Christian nationalists are a group of people who believe that the US was founded as a Christian nation ordained by God to be the only religious force on Earth. They believe that white people go to America first, hence why they
took land that was “rightfully” theirs from the Natives (Maltby 2013). They believed that it was their divine calling to fight, as Jesus did in the book of Revelation, in a holy war against non-
believers, immigrants, and progressives to reclaim their power in the US. White Christian nationalism allowed the Puritans to steal land from Natives and slaveholders to believe that owning humans was their divine right (Greenley 2006).
Immigrants flocked to the US during the turn of the 20th century. The only housing they could find were slums and many resorted to working in sweatshops. These conditions were
responsible for spreading disease, poverty, and overcrowding. A group of Christians known as the Social Gospel Movement believed that they could solve these problems through their beliefs by righting the wrongs of society. Around the same time, another group called the Women's Temperance Movement was created by evangelical protestants (Cordasco et al. 2018). In 1874, the Womans Temperance Union was formed, their main focus was to combat alcoholism through
a pro-prohibition lens. 50 years later the 18th Amendment was passed which banned the sale, manufacturing, and transport of alcohol, excluding churches. During the same time of the 18th Amendment passing, radio was popularized and would become an outlet for evangelists to criticize political movements and promote hate speech such as anti-semitism (Glass 2019).
In 1925 a Tennessee biology teacher would be found guilty of teaching Darwinian evolution, something that was banned at the time by state law. After the trial, though many evangelicals saw this ruling as a win, members of the national press mocked fundamentalists for conservatively interpreting the Bible (Alumkal 2017). This backlash caused many conservatives to retreat from the public sphere and remove themselves from national politics lasting for several
decades (Glass 2019). During the 30s and 40s, evangelicals started building ties with conservative businessmen who identified with the evangelical movement. These ties paved the way and initiated networks of church organizations, colleagues, television, radio stations, and political networks which combined Christian ideals, the belief in a limited federal government, and free market economics (Greenley et al. 2006). This created a union between wealthy corporations and evangelicals which is still very prevalent today.
After World War II, record numbers of Americans began to flock to church. This increased the amount of churches being built, even increasing Bible sales. After this, conservative political propaganda would begin to connect communism to Godlessness and atheism, othering them from real god-fearing Americans. This welcomed in an era of labeling
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non-Christians and atheists as communists and immoral (Mott 2011). If it was secular in any way
contradictory or threatening to Christianity, it would be labeled as communist (Maltby 2013).
It was in 1947 when the Supreme Court passed a law mandating the separation between church and state (Glass 2019). Though it does not appear in the Constitution, the First Amendment permits the free exercise of religion but does not call for a separation of church and state. The reason this may be misinterpreted is due to Thomas Jefferson interpreted free exercise as the guarantee of the separation of church and state (Glass 2019). Since he is an author of the constitution, it is accepted that the constitution intended to have a separation of church and state, though not explicitly stated. A separation of church would entail not being allowed to make someone attend a church or keep them from attending. Public schools would not be permitted to impose prayer or any other religious teachings. The state or federal government would be restricted from establishing a church or making laws that form based on religious belief. The separation of church and state goes much deeper, but those are some examples. Evangelicals argue that Christians must engage and participate in outside culture to save the world and non-
believers. They used radio, media networks, and more to engage more with secular culture. This was made easier when radio evangelists made the switch to television (Greenley 2006). A man Rex Hombard had a TV show called Cathedral of Tomorrow which paved the way for a new time of evangelism. Due to the convenience of TV church services, mainstream churches began seeing a decline in attendance. Billy Graham, a popular TV evangelist began having a close relationship with then-president Richard Nixon. This is, in part due to Nixon’s oath to bring law and order to a chaotic and “sinful” world (Greenley et al. 2006). Supreme Court decisions made within the 60s and 70s helped usher evangelicals into pursuing political action. At the beginning of the 1960s, a New York state law recommended a non-denominational prayer be made for school-aged to recite (Glass 2019). Five families would go on to sue the school district. When the case was brought to the Supreme Court, it was ruled that the prayer had violated the
Establishment Clause, this decision would spark a backlash from Christians who saw no problem
with the state-sanctioned prayer. Another Supreme Court case that happened a year after ruled that mandatory Bible reading and prayer recitation violated not just the Establishment Clause, but the Free Exercise and First Amendment as well (Glass 2019). This also sparked public outrage. In 1973, Roe v Wade legalized abortion in the US, this is when the religious right decided
that they would not take any more progressive rule and sought to undo it (Welch 2022). Conservative Christians saw this as the final straw and viewed laws like these as the political subversion of God's will. The religious right viewed women as having god-given roles of motherhood and homemaking. Roe v Wade turned into a rallying cry that mobilized religious conservatives (Welch 2022). It wasn’t until a DC Circut ruled that segregated institutions could not be classified as charitable therefore losing the tax-exempt status. This ruling was applied to a fundamentalist Christian University that banned interracial relationships and the fraternizing of different sexes (Maltby 2013). The IRS began to investigate the school to determine whether it should keep its tax-exempt status. It is because of all of these laws, investigations, and court rulings that the religious right began to feel they were the victims of persecution. They could no longer have public school prayer, or ban the teaching of evolution, the separation between church
and state was the strongest it had ever been, now women had bodily autonomy, and being outwardly racist wouldn't be untaxed (Alumkal 2017). As a response to all these changes, evangelicals began focusing on marriage and the home, something legislature couldn't as easily interfere with. Leaders of the religious rights movement saw strong support around the sanctity of the family, this meant interracial marriage, gay marriage, abortion, Christian values, and prayer (Welch 2022). Religious conservatives saw the family as under threat as a result of their views being criticized and questioned.
By the late 70s, an advocacy group called the Moral Majority was formed by a fundamentalist preacher. The Moral Majority sought to mobilize evangelical voters around what they deemed as “moral issues”. This was the first time that Christian voters mobilized on the national level, making politics a new priority for the church (Mott 2011). The religious right saw President Ronald Reagan as the solution to all of their problems. They believed that he was the man that would put their religious agenda into action. Regan supported amendments to ban abortion and reinstate prayer in public schools (Welch 2022). Because of these conservative views, Regan won the presidency with two-thirds of his voters identifying as evangelical. Though Regan won the candidacy because of these promises he did not do much for the evangelical movement. During his presidency, the Supreme Court continued enforcing the separation of church and state. By the end of the Regan administration, the Moral Majority disbanded and a new group was founded (Mott, 2011).
In 1989, the Christian Coalition was founded. Instead of focusing on presidential elections, like the Moral Majority, the Coalition's goal was to organize evangelicals at the grassroots level (Gerrard 2022). By 1990, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This act provided more federal protection for religious exercise since the act only covered federal, and not state governments, 21 states would pass similar acts. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the religious right immediately recognized their opportunity to exploit religiosity, him being an evangelical methodist (Gerrard 2022). Bush spoke openly about his faith, even promising to implement policies that were advocated by the evangelicals (Gerrard 2022). He signed bills forbidding late-term abortions as well as restricting embryonic stem cell research. This progress was halted as the events of 9/11 unfolded (Welch 2022). He was forced to prioritize national security and move away from an evangelical agenda. President Obama would be the first president to acknowledge non-believers in his inaugural address. He explains that the United States was a religiously and ethnically diverse
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nation, and this would be met with immense backlash (Maltby 2013). Obama's presidency implemented policies like Obamacare, new Supreme Court appointments, an influx of immigration programs, and the legalization of gay marriage. Obama was also the nation's first black president. All these things, once again, made the religious right feel as though they were the victims of persecution (Maltby 2013). The religious right looked no further than to presidential nominee Donald Trump to right the “wrongs” that Obama had made. Before realizing that religious conservative views would earn him votes, Trump had never discussed religion or his ties to it, instead, he boasted about his ability to use capitalism for financial gain (Alumkal 2017). The religious right saw Trump as someone willing to say the things they felt that they weren't allowed to say out of fear of being labeled as a bigot. Trump appealed to these voters as they related more to him, he didn't use elitist fancy language that career Democrats and Republicans used, and they viewed him as a man of the people, despite his shady business dealings and him being a career-long multi-
millionaire and a serial adulterer, and civilly liable rapist. The religious right saw him as the person who would bring back classic Christian values that they felt had been under attack (Welch 2022). Because of this support, Trump would go on to win the presidency, but not through the popular vote. After running for re-election in 2020 and losing, his loyal supporters, in the religious right, more specifically white Christian nationalists, denied the reality that he had
lost to the point of causing an insurrection in the national Capitol Building. The religious right would achieve its ultimate goal of overturning Roe v Wade in mid-2022 (Welch 2022). This decision was highly praised and celebrated by the religious right even though more than half of the American population believed that abortion access should remain (Welch 2022). R
eligion cannot and should not be used to implement political policies because faith-
based belief does not equate to truth/majority opinion. Religious conservatism has made American society less empathetic and tolerant along with how the religious right uses religion to
justify their greed, how they force their views into the political sphere, and how they undo previous legal protections to perpetuate hateful ideals (Greenley et al. 2006). The American people should not be in fear of their rights being relinquished and determined by any religious basis. America was not founded as a Christian country (Williams 2010).
Work Cited Welch, Emma. “Christian Conservatism as Seen in Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the U.S. Debate on Abortion: Religiously Inspired or Politically Motivated?” Bulletin for the study of religion 51.2 (2023): 56–61. Web.
Alumkal, Antony William. Paranoid Science : the Christian Right’s War on Reality. NEW YORK: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Print.
Glass, J. (2019). Why Aren’t We Paying Attention? Religion and Politics in Everyday Life. Sociology of Religion
, 80
(1), 9-27. Williams, Daniel, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right
(2010; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010),
https://doi-org.argo.library.okstate.edu/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195340846.001.0001, accessed 24 Oct. 2023.
Mott, Stephen Charles. Biblical Ethics and Social Change / Stephen Charles Mott.
2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2011.
Cordasco, Gennaro, et al. “Evangelism in Social Networks: Algorithms and Complexity.” Networks
, vol. 71, no. 4, 2018, pp. 346–57, https://doi.org/10.1002/net.21756.
Gerrard, Jessica, and Helen Proctor. “Activist Women, Schooling and the Rise of Grassroots Christian Conservatism.” Australian Educational Researcher
, vol. 49, no. 5, 2022, pp. 879–95, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-021-00461-9
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Greeley, et al. The Truth About Conservative Christians : What They Think and What They Believe / Andrew Greeley & Michael Hout.
University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Maltby, Paul., and Project Muse. Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment /
Paul Maltby.
Project MUSE, 2013.
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