Art

AWarforthe Soul of America

A History of the Culture Wars

ANDREW HARTMAN

The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO AND LONDON

3

Taking God's Country Back

In an influential 1976 essay, "What Is a Neoconservative? ," Irving Kris­ tal wrote that he and his fellow neoconservatives tended "to be re­ spectful of traditional values and institutions," religion being perhaps the most important such traditional institution. Yet Kristal was not very religious himself. As it was for other New York intellectuals, even most neoconservatives, Judaism was more about his cultural identity than about his religious affiliation. Nevertheless, he valued religion as foundational to representative democracy, believing it helped curb the unmoored urges of people left to their own devices. "The indi­ vidual who is abruptly 'liberated' from the sovereignty of traditional values will soon find himself experiencing the vertigo and despair of nihilism." These feelings, Kristal warned, were what tempted people to submit to authoritarian rule.1

In this elocution, neoconservatives helped articulate yet another conservative paradigm for understanding the dangers presented by cultural radicalism, endowing conservative America with a powerful rhetorical weapon to fight the culture wars. And yet it is doubtful that neoconservatives entirely grasped the full extent of "the vertigo and despair" that millions of Christian Americans felt living in post-sixties America. This was particularly true of white evangelicals, whose inter­ pretations of the sixties cultural revolutions grafted onto older under­ standings about the grave dangers posed by modernity.

Thanks to several Great Awakenings since the colonial era, the United States has long been home to the world's largest population of

evangelical Christians, Protestants who pay less attention to liturgy than to personal conversion and piety and who believe entry to God's

Taking God's Country Back 71

kingdom requires that they spread his word on earth. That evangeli­ cals have tended to mix their religious and national identities has long tinged the rhetoric of American cultural politics with an eschatologi­ cal hue. This became increasingly so in the twentieth century as more and more religious Americans felt scarred by the acids of modernity, which burned gaping, irreparable holes in the fabric of Christian America. For them the culture wars, more than a battle over national identity, have served as a struggle for the soul of America, a clash over what it means to live in a world in which all foundations had been pulled out from under, a world in which, at its starkest, "God is dead."2

Even devout evangelicals-devout evangelicals especially-had to act upon the implications of modernity. In pushing back against mod­ ernist forms of knowledge that fanned the flames of religious skep­ ticism, such as biblical criticism and Darwinism, early-twentieth­ century conservative evangelicals-many of whom, by the 1920s, accentuated biblical inerrancy and began referring to themselves as "fundamentalists" -successfully enacted laws that mandated reading the King James Bible in schools and outlawed the teaching of evolu­ tion. Such activism sprang from a desire to reassert religious control over a society that was becoming increasingly modern and secular.3

By the 1970s, conservative white evangelicals were confronted with a perfect storm of secular power that they deemed a threat to their way of life and to the Christian nation they believed the United States once was and ought to be again. This realization, more than anything else, led religious conservatives to take up arms in the culture wars. Worldly activism became more imperative, so much so that conser­ vative evangelicals formed an uneasy political alliance with conserva­ tive Americans from different theological backgrounds. Even funda­ mentalists, whose insistence upon correct doctrine meant that minor differences in biblical interpretation often led to major schisms, reluc­ tantly joined forces with conservative Catholics, Jews, and Mormons. This was all the more remarkable given that many fundamentalists viewed the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as a sign that the end times were fast approaching.4

The overarching issue for religious conservatives, and what brought them together with their former adversaries, was the threat posed by an increasingly secular state. School prayer, long practiced in most

American public schools, had been rendered unconstitutional by the landmark 1962 Engel v. Vitale Supreme Court decision. In 1978, in

72 CHAPTER THREE

another example of how the secular state encroached upon Christian

America, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) implemented a federal

mandate requiring that Christian private schools comply with deseg­ regation practices or risk having their tax-exempt status revoked. The

Christian Right-as it came to be known by 1980, the year it helped

elect Ronald Reagan president, signaling its arrival as a powerful po­

litical alliance-worked from the assumption that an increasingly sec­

ular government represented the gravest threat to Christian values.

Part of this had to do with the conservative religious impression that

the government conspired against the traditional family unit. In an

earlier era, when W illiam Jennings Bryan's biblically inspired popu­

lism appealed to millions of Americans, evangelicals had often mar­

ried their anxieties about the family to progressive economic concerns

about the destructive force of unregulated monopoly capitalism. But

by the 1970s, the traditionalist worldview of conservative Christians

and the antistatist premises that inspired more and more Americans

were no longer mutually exclusive ideological trajectories. As an in­

structive example, conservatives posited that government's meddling in the form of welfare policies weakened the traditional family struc­

ture. "Families are strong when they have a function to perform," con­

servative activist Connie Marshner contended. "And the more gov­

ernment, combined with the helping professions establishment, take

away the functions families need to perform-to provide their health

care, their child care, their housing-the less purpose there is for a

family, per se, to exist."5

By the same logic, the Christian Right focused on the role of public

education. State-run schools were thought to be the primary secular

institution geared to disrupt the inculcation of religious values that

had traditionally transpired in the family.

As long as there has been American public education, there has

been resistance to elements of it, hailing from a variety of different

forces all along the political and religious spectrums. Such resistance

took on mostly conservative overtones in the twentieth century, when

the national curriculum slowly but surely merged with the progres­

sive curriculum innovated by John Dewey and a cohort of prom­

inent pedagogues at Columbia University's Teacher 's College. Pro­

gressive education was a secular movement that sought to distance

the national curriculum from the ecumenical Protestantism that had

Taking God's Country Back 73

been its organizing force since Horace Mann's common school move­

ment in the early nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, progressives

clashed with fundamentalists over an assortment of curricular items,

particularly over mandatory Bible reading and over whether to teach

Darwin's evolutionary science or creationism . 1his collision famously

sparked the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which

put fundamentalists on the map, often as a source of derision for more

cosmopolitan-minded Americans. H. L. Mencken's acerbic commen­

tary on the trial painted a harsh picture of fundamentalists as rubes

who promoted the story of Genesis because it was "so simple that

even a yokel can grasp it."6

By the end of the 1930s, to the dismay of conservatives, the pro­

gressive curriculum had become even more prevalent in many schools

across the country. Teacher 's College professor Harold Rugg's popu­

lar textbooks Man and His Changing Society, which incorporated the scholarship of progressive historian Charles Beard, who subjected

the American past to the paradigm of class conflict, were assigned to

more than five million students in five thousand school districts. But

conservative resistance to progressivism grew as well, made evident

by the successful movement in the early 1940s to remove Rugg's text­

books from schools. By the early Cold War, conservative educational

vigilantism, abetted by McCarthyism, had turned back the tides of

the progressive curriculum across the nation. In the 1950s, as thou­

sands of progressive educators learned the hard way, mere mention

of Dewey was likened to summoning the ghost of Karl Marx. But de­

spite its reach, Cold War conservatism kept a lid on liberalizing cur­

ricular trends for only a short time. The cultural earthquakes of the

sixties shattered the short-lived antiprogressive consensus formed in

the early Cold War. By the 1970s, the Christian Right had valid reason

to believe that the nation's public schools no longer represented their

moral vision.7

The Supreme Court enshrined secularism in the schools with a se­

ries of landmark cases, most famously the 1962 Engel v. Vitale ruling

that New York's twenty-two-word school prayer violated the First

�endment's Establishment Clause. In 1963 the court built an even

.higher wall of separation between church and state with its School

District of Abington Township v. Schempp decision in favor of Ellary

ldiempp, a Unitarian freethinker who challenged the constitutional-

L

74 CHAPTER THREE

ity of mandatory Bible reading in his high school. In polls taken since

the sixties, the school prayer and Bible-reading rulings have routinely

ranked as the most unpopular Supreme Court decisions, particularly

among conservative Christians, many of whom considered Engel and

Abington the beginning of American civilization's downfall. Some

members of Congress received more letters about school prayer and

Bible reading than any other issues. Millions of Americans showed

their displeasure with the new law of the land by disobeying it, as students in schools across the country, particularly in the South and

Midwest, persisted in their age-old practice of praying and reading

the Bible together. Those who disagreed with Engel and Abington con­

tended that it was undemocratic for the "philosopher-kings" on the

Supreme Court to overrule the majority of Americans who wanted

children to pray in school. Wtlliam Buckley Jr. gave voice to a grow­

ing conservative displeasure with the Supreme Court, which, due to

its "ideological fanaticism," he argued, "is making it increasingly dif­

ficult for our society to breathe normally: to govern itself through es­

tablished tradition and authority; to rule by the local consensus; to

deal effectively with its domestic enemies; to carry forward its im­

plicit commitment to the faith of its fathers."8

Post-sixties curriculum trends also distressed conservative Chris­

tians. In social studies classes, students were increasingly challenged to

clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by parents and

churches. In science, teachers slowly overcame the perpetual taboo

against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussion of sex came to replace moral exhortation. A popular anthropology

curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome

Bruner in the early 197os-MACOS, or Man: A Course of Study­

exemplified the secularization of the curriculum. During a MA COS

unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their

practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand and not judge

cultural differences. Such relativistic lesson plans became the norm.

In 1969 the National Education Association (NEA) advocated what

it called the "inquiry method" of instruction, a Socratic discussion

technique that would allow students "to view knowledge as tentative

rather than absolute" and thus "to see that value judgments cannot be

accepted solely on faith." Opposing MACOS-style learning became a

rallying cry for Christian culture warriors. "Your tax dollars are being

Taking God's Country Back 75

used," Jesse Helms cautioned recipients of a 1976 fundraising letter,

"to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that canni­

balism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are

acceptable behavior."9

Religious conservatives organized against these curriculum reform

efforts from the outset, particularly against sex education, which was

becoming an increasingly common feature of the national curriculum.

In 1963 Dr. Mary Calderone founded the Sex Information and Educa­

tion Council of the United States (SIECUS) on the premise that ob­

jective sex education was a more realistic means to suppress the sex­

ual revolution than chastisement. Many educators agreed with her,

including Sally Williams, a school nurse in Anaheim, California, who created a popular sex education curriculum. Williams sought to direct

students away from premarital sex, but her curriculum described sex­

ual intercourse in relatively graphic fashion for students as young as

twelve and provided information to older students about birth con­ trol, in recognition that premarital sex was likely. Religious conserva­

tives, predictably moralist, opposed such an approach and in 1969, af­

ter gaining a majority on the Anaheim school board, promptly ended

the sex education program.10

Conservatives elsewhere replicated the efforts of Anaheim activ­

ists. Fundamentalist preacher Billy James Hatgis's Christian Crusade

helped launch a national movement against sex education. Hargis's

lieutenant Gordon Drake authored a pamphlet-"Is the Schoolhouse

the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?" -that purportedly sold ninety

thousand copies in three months. Hargis and Drake forever engraved

SIECUS, "the pornographic arm of liberal education," as a subversive

group in the conservative lexicon, "all a part of a giant communist

conspiracy." In his stock speech, Hargis claimed that sex education

was part of a larger plan hatched by progressive educators to "destroy

the traditional moral fiber of America and replace it with a pervasive

sickly humanism." In a letter to Christian Crusaders, Hargis com­

plained about a sex education program in Jefferson County, Colorado,

where the principal "said that the concept of morality being taught in

his school to elementary grade children was quite different from that

of their parents and pastors, and the kids would have to decide which was right."11

In Kanawha County, West Virginia, violent protests erupted when

76 CHAPTER THREE

the school board sought to align with a 1970 state regulation mandat­ ing that all West Virginia students read texts reflecting the nation's multiethnic composition. Toe Kanawha textbook fight, described in hyperbolic fashion as "the shot heard around the world," influenced the Christian Right's approach to later curriculum battles. Alice Moore, the wife of a local evangelical minister who was elected to the Kanawha board in 1970 on a conservative platform that included an anti-sex education plank, was the first to object to the proposed read­ ing list. Due to her tireless campaigning during the summer of 1974, when the Kanawha schools opened that September at least 20 percent of the student population stayed home. In sympathy, county coal min­ ers organized a wildcat strike. Violence marred the campaign: buses were shot at, teachers were harassed, and a school district building was firebombed. National right-wing groups descended upon West Virginia to join the cause, including the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, the latter of which held a notorious rally at the state capitol. Behind the scenes, the newly formed Heritage Foundation, still a rel­ atively unknown right-wing think tank, offered free legal support to protestors and organized a conference on the rights of parents. Con­ nie Marshner, the Heritage Foundation's first director of education, later maintained that the West Virginia story called attention to "the textbook problem across the country " and helped inform the Chris­ tian Right during its later culture war struggles.12

Not surprisingly, racial anxieties factored into the Kanawha text­ book battle. Local conservatives seemed horrified that Eldridge Cleav­ er's Soul on Ice, depicted as "anti-white racism, " appeared on the read­ ing list. However, such racial concerns often mixed with religious and moral panic. Toe inclusion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X on the approved list seemingly offended Alice Moore not because ofits frank discussion of white supremacy but rather due to Malcolm's giving "all praise to Allah" that he was no longer a "brainwashed Christian." Jack Maurice, editor of the local newspaper, attributed the controversy to the "renewal of the theological dispute ... pitting the Fundamental­ ists against the Modernists ... the Literalists in their interpretation of scripture, against the Symbolists." As opposed to traditionalism, the modernist educators glorified, in Moore's words, "self-actualization, " "clarification of their own values," and the dangerous idea that "truth is whatever is truth to that individual." For the Kanawha conserva­ tives, such relativism was a slippery slope to a host of dangerous anti-

Taking God's Country Back 77

Christian ideologies. As one parent remembered: "They were teach­ ing my kids socialism, homosexuality, and situational ethics."13

Toe NEA sent a panel of educators to Kanawha County in Decem­ ber 1974 to hold hearings on the nature and scope of the protests. Toe panel issued a final report recognizing that religious differences moved the protestors to action. "For generations, a fundamentalist religious belief has given meaning to the mountain way of life and has given the mountain people the strength to withstand its hardships." This echoed how a national correspondent described the protests: as "a full-scale eruption of frustrations against a worldly culture imposed on an area literally a world apart from the rest of the country." Though correct about opposition to cosmopolitan ideas, the condescending notion that such anger was isolated to a rural backwater failed to cap­ ture the growing national dissatisfaction with the increasingly secular features of public education in the United States.14

The movement against the secular curriculum was part and parcel of the rising Christian Right, in part because it blended so easily with the politics of "family values," a new umbrella referent for concerns about feminism, abortion, divorce, premarital sex, and gay rights. Mel and Norma Gabler, devout Southern Baptists who converted their small-town Texas home into a national center for exposing liberal bias in the nation's textbooks, said that their main concern was that textbooks were "destroying the family" by means of so-called values clarification. Interviewed about the West Virginia textbook brouhaha, Mel Gabler said: "What really bugged me was that textbooks seem to divide the children from their parents, especially the social studies which appear to teach the child a philosophy alien to the parents." Such pedagogy violated the biblical mandate that parents raise their children to be Christians. "Considering Ephesians 6:4, which tells us to bring up our children 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,'" they asked, "can we as Christian parents entrust the education of our children to current textbooks?" The Gablers became enormously in­ fluential. This owed in part to the fact that they lived in Texas, where citizens were automatically granted a hearing before the state board of education. As the Gablers became trusted fixtures at board meetings, publishers were forced to tailor books to pass muster with them. And

�ince Texas was one of the nation's largest textbook purchasers, giving 1t the power to dictate to the national textbook market, the Gablers'

eological inspections had far-reaching implications. Yet their influ-

78 CHAPTER THREE

ence resulted from more than mere coincidence of geography. Their message was convincing. And they were far from alone in their holy war against secular schools.15

Some of the most influential evangelical writers of the 1970s, m- cluding Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHay e, placed education at the center of their plans to redeem American culture. They contended that the schools had been taken over by an elite who sought to spread an anti-Christian ideology they termed "secular humanism:' In the religious conservative imagination, secular humanism_re_placed c�m­ munism as the alien ideology most threatening to Christian America. Rousas John Rushdoony, an evangelical intellectual who founded the somewhat theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement, taught conservatives that secular humanism rationalized a blasphemous cul­ ture because it was a hubristic philosophy of "man striving to be God." In this way, the critique of secular humanism allowed conservatives to make sense of previously unimaginable cultural trends, such as the teaching of sex in the public schools. Such manifestations of cultural decadence were the logical consequences of a society's abandonment of long-standing traditions rooted in biblical tenets.16

Although Christian Right rhetoric about the dangers posed by sec­ ular humanism was overstated, the United States had indeed become a more secular nation. Proof of this was not necessarily found in the growing number of Americans who adhered to the cr�ed set for� in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto: "that the nature of the uruverse depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values." Yes, the number of secularists, natural­ ists, humanists, freethinkers, and atheists increased throughout the twentieth century, owing much to the fact that universities, secular­ izing institutions par excel lence, bulked so large in the culture. But the United States remained an extremely religious nation, particularly relative to nations of comparable wealth. Gallup polls from the 1950s through the end of the century showed that upwards of 90 percent of Americans claimed to believe in God.17

Twentieth-century America became more secular due not to a lapse in the number of religious people but rather �o a wan�g in �e scope of religious authority. The most obvious engme of this decline was the Supreme Court's revolution in constitutional interpretation,, which radically redrew the boundaries between church and state. In its 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, the

Taking God's Country Back 79

court applied the First Amendment's establishment clause to the states. This reinterpretation of incorporation then led to a series of cases that strengthened individual rights relative to religious or moral authority. All of a sudden, viewing obscene material in private was le­ gal, but organized prayer and Bible reading in school were not.18

The paradox of American secularization-the perplexing fact that religious authority dwindled even as the vast majority of Americans doggedly persisted in religious belief-helps explain the culture wars. White Protestant moral authority, which extended beyond the reli­ gious sphere for most of American history, had been put on the de­ fensive. Conservative Christians, formerly part of the establishment, had come to see themselves as cultural counterrevolutionaries. Fore­ grounding such a counterrevolution was the fact that for many con­ servatives, particularly white evangelicals, religion expressed a larger national identity. Christianity was crucial to a normative framework of Americanism. One of the primary aspirations of the Christian Right was to reestablish, in the words of philosopher Charles Tay lor, an "un­ derstanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being 'one na­ tion under God,' or at least with the ethic which was interwoven with this." But as Tay lor also posits, "the very embattled nature of these at­ tempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation." In other words, the Christian Right's emergence was predicated on a secular shift. Its efforts to return the sacred to the realm of national politics were in symbiosis with secularization.19

Despite the interdependent relationship between secularization and the growth of the Religious Right, the culture wars were not only a battle between religious and secular Americans; they were also an in­ ternal feature of American Protestantism. Some Protestant thinkers, especially mainline Protestants, who tended to be more liberal than their evangelical counterparts in both theology and politics, sought to radically adjust their doctrines to the eartli-shattering epistemologi­ cal implications of modernity. Conservative evangelicals, in contrast, �sponded to the challenges of modernity with doctrinal and political reaction. This intra-Protestant struggle played out at the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where conservatives who felt threatened by modern sexual mores-feminism, abortion, and gay rights-took �ontrol of the SBC, to the dismay of their more moderate coreligion­ ists. Conservatives elected as their new president Adrian Rogers, a

Bo CHAPTER THREE

Memphis pastor whose platform urged that the SBC return to the prin­ ciples of "conservative, Bible-believing congregations ... that believe in the inerrant, infallible word of God." Given that the SBC was the na­ tion's largest Protestant denomination, the Christian Right's political fortunes grew rosier after the SBC's 1979 political jump to the right.20

That evangelicals resisted some of the implications of modernity is not to say that they did not find ways to accommodate moder­ nity, with the qualification that accommodation did not entail agree­ ment or, much less, wholesale adoption. The influence of evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer demonstrated that conservative Protestant­ ism found ways to adjust to secular modernity and that the Christian Right was both reactionary and often innovative. Schaeffer furnished evangelical Christianity-despite the notorious fundamentalist insis­ tence upon doctrinal purity-with an ecumenical spirit, at least in its willingness to form political alliances with nonevangelical conser­ vatives. Such an ecumenical disposition was crucial to the Christian Right culture wars. "It is little exaggeration," James Sire writes, with just a touch of exaggeration, "to say that if Schaeffer had not lived, historians of the future looking back on these decades would have to invent him in order to explain what happened."21

Schaeffer, the hippielike evangelical sage ofL'Abri, a Swiss moun­ tain retreat for Christian and non-Christian wanderers alike, became famous in the 1970s, late in his life, when his books and documen­ tary films touched millions of American evangelicals. Growing up in working-class Pennsylvania, Schaeffer had been "saved" at a tent revival in 1929. His theology was shaped by the great debates of the 1920s, when his mentor J. Graham Machen was fired from Princeton Theological Seminary for maintaining fundamentalist beliefs at a time when liberal theologians-those who more actively reconciled their faiths to modernist thought, including Darwinism-were on the rise. Schaeffer attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadel­ phia, which Machen founded as a conservative alternative to the more liberal divinity schools. He pastored a number of churches in the United States before moving to Switzerland as a missionary in 194 7. After fun­ damentalist firebrand Carl McIntire astonishingly accused him of be­ ing a communist and fired him from the mission, Schaeffer and his wife Edith founded L'Abri in 1955. Although charging Schaeffer with communism was outrageous even by the standards of McIntire, living in Europe had indeed led Schaeffer to reject the pietism of American

Taking God's Country Back g1

evangelicalism and to embrace a more modern spiritualism, part and parcel of his newfound interest in art, music, and philosophy.22

Edith Schaeffer, the child of Christian fundamentalist missionar­ ies, was also a persuasively modernist force in her husband's life. Toe product of a privileged upbringing in a mission in China, Edith pas­ sionately loved high culture. But she was not always happy about the tension inherent to being both a cultural highbrow and a Christian fundamentalist. Her son Franky remembers his mother's defensive objections to H. L. Mencken's antifundamentalist caricatures: "We're not like that! He would never have written those horrible things if he had ever met me!" Franky, who ultimately rejected his parents' the­ ology, puts a somewhat different spin on their seemingly oxymoronic combination of fundamentalism and high culture. "I think my father lived with a tremendous tension," he writes, "that pitted his grow­ ing interest in art, culture, music, and history against a stunted the­ ology frozen in the modernist-fundamentalist battles of his youthful Christian experience." Rather than stunting, however, this modernist­ fundamentalist tension lent great significance to Schaeffer's role: he helped American evangelicals reconcile their fundamentalist readings of scripture to modernity, or at least modernity shorn of modernist epistemologies. In order to do battle with modernity, Schaeffer's the­ ology incorporated all that he had learned from modernist forms. "Dad spent his life trying to somehow reconcile the angry theology that typified movement-fundamentalism with a Christian apologetic that was more attractive."23

Schaeffer's reckoning with the acids of modernity helped reshape evangelical thought. Like early-twentieth-century evangelicals who read Nietzsche in order to better relate their theology to modern America, Schaeffer grappled with modernist giants in order to re­ invigorate fundamentalism. He also tangled with modish artists and musicians. "In the early '6os," his son bragged, "he was probably the only fundamentalist who had even heard of Bob Dylan." Schaeffer's method-what he called his "Christian apologetic," a system of thought for relating the meaning of modern cultural forms to scripture-thus gave biblical inerrancy a wider currency by certifying it for a new generation. Of course, being conversant in countercultural music �d not necessarily translate into eschewing that old-time religion.

Like so many other evangelical thinkers during the 1970s, including lantankerous would-be theocrats like Rushdoony, Schaeffer had an

82 CHAPTER THREE

overarching philosophical mission to demonstrate the flaws in sec­

ular humanism, which he defined as "the system w hereby men and

women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rat ionally to build

out from themselves, having only Man as their inte gration point, to

find all knowledge, meaning and value." 24

Schaeffer believed himself to be one of the only thinke rs who truly

grasped the anxieties that modernity presented peop le with. He theo­

rized that Western society, by adopting secular huma nism as its orga­

nizing principle, had crossed a "line of despair." Mod ern people lived

in despair because they no longer knew truth; they w ere mired in rel­

ativism. Prior to being pushed over this precipice, e verybody, even

non-Christians, could make sense of truth claims. "One could tell a

non-Christian to 'be a good girl' and, while she mig ht not have fol­

lowed your advice, at least she would have understo od what you were

talking about," he reasoned. "To say the same thing to a truly modern

girl today would be to make a 'nonsense' statement. The blank look

you might receive would not mean that your standard s had been re-

. gl "25 jected, but that your message was mearun ess.

Schaeffer contended that Western civilization had b ecome post­

Christian in its rejection of antithesis, a method of th ought based on

the proposition that since this is absolutely true, that is absolutely un­

true. Schaeffer argued that Hegel represented the fi rst step toward

the post-Christian line of despair because Hegel the orized that syn­

thesis, not antithesis, was the superior method of thou ght . Synthesis,

in Schaeffer 's reading of Hegel, implied relativism, sin ce all acts, all

gestures, had an equal claim to truth, in that the dial ectical process

would eventually envelop everything. Napoleon's conqu est of Europe

was to be judged not by the brutality of its individual acts but by the

synthesis of the "world spirit on horseback" that Hege l famously be­

lieved Napoleon signified. Furthering his eclectic int ellectual history

of modernity, informed by his unique Christian apologe tic, Schaeffer

wrote that existentialism announced humanity's nihilis tic trek across

the line of despair. Sartre, Schaeffer posited, believed there was no

way of knowing truth absolutely and that, given this, hu man existence

was ridiculous. "Nevertheless, you try to authenticate yourself by an

act of the will. It does not really matter in which direct ion you act as

long as you act." An individual could choose to eith er help an elderly

woman walk across a street or attack her and steal her purse; in ei­

ther act the person was "authenticated:' Although this critique of ex-

Taking God's Country Back 83

istentialism ignored some of its key facets -namely, the unrelativistic premise that an authenticating project was worthwhile only if it cre­ ated space for more people to experience freedom -by reading exis­ tentialism against the grain of scripture, Schaeffer appealed to some of the young, modish Americans who voraciously read Sartre. Even­ tually, powerful Christian conservatives sought him out precisely be­ cause of this appeal.26

Although Schaeffer presented a softer side to fundamentalism, and although he avoided politicizing his theology until he was pressed into serving a growing conservative Christian movement in the 1970s, his antithesis methodology had conservative political implications. Schaeffer made clear, for instance, that he considered homosexual­ ity an expression of modern despair. "In much of modern thinking all antithesis and all the order of God's creation is to be fought against­ including the male-female distinctions." And yet despite the anti­ homosexual connotations of his theology, his son Frank describes his father as having been decidedly unprejudiced. "Dad thought it cruel and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by 'accepting Christ."' Schaeffer thought homosexuality was a sin, of course, but a sin on par with other, less politicized sins, such as gluttony. He be­ lieved all sins could be forgiven and all sinners treated with kindness. 27

Although such parsing offered little comfort to most gays and les­ bians, Schaeffer 's take on homosexuality was certainly more tolerant than the demagogic antigay messages that other religious conserva­ tives were preaching, particularly by the late 1970s, when opposition to gay rights became a cardinal standpoint of the broader Christian Right outlook. Of course ideas have consequences beyond the inten­ tions of their authors. The modern sensibilities that Schaeffer con­ ferred upon conservative Christianity undoubtedly attracted follow­ ers who would have otherwise remained neutral in the culture wars. But partisan operatives who had few qualms about appearing mean­ spirited and bigoted also took note of how Schaeffer could be used to their advantage.

Once Schaeffer gained a measure of American fame-once the families of evangelical dignitaries such as Billy Graham became reg­ ular guests at L'Abri-conservative Christian leaders identified him as the ideal conduit to a youth culture they failed to understand. �vangelical leaders came to L'.Abri," Franky writes, "so Dad could teach them how to inoculate Johnny and Susie born-again against the

84 CHAPTER THREE

hedonistic out-of-control culture that had Johnny's older brother on

drugs and Susie's older sister marching o n the capital." After being

recruited by evangelical pitchman Billy Ze oli, who enrolled wealt�y

conservatives like Rich DeVos, the right-w ing founder of Amway, m

the cause, Francis and Franky Schaeffer w ent into the documentary

filmmaking business. Their partnership pr oduced a thirteen-episode

film series in 1976-How Should We Then L ive? The Rise and Decline

oif Western Thought and Culture- which delivered Schaeffer's wide-.

di 28 ranging Christian apologetic to enormous A

merican au ences. . After speaking to packed houses on a film

tour across America,

the father-son tandem made another docu mentary film series in 1979

with help from C. Everett Koop, an ardentl y pro-life evangelical phy­

sician. This second series-W hatever Happe ned to the Human Race?­

focused on pro-life issues, especially aborti on. Franky says that their

films gave "the evangelical community a fr ame of reference through

which to understand the secularization of Am erican culture." In this

way, Francis Schaeffer helped conservative e vangelicals adjust to mo­

dernity by preparing them for the culture w ars. His emergence as the

most influential evangelical theologian-as a formative Christian cul­

ture warrior-also served notice that the i ssues that aroused Ameri-

. h . 29 can conservatives were c angmg.

In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, the prim ary political concerns

of many white evangelicals, especially in th e South, were related to

racial desegregation. Jerry Falwell, pas tor of the enormous Thomas

Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virgin ia, and one of the most

recognizable evangelicals due to The Old-Ti me Gospel Hour, a mi�s­

try television program that broadcast his se rmons, preached agamst

religious leaders involved in civil rights activis m. In his infamous 1964

sermon "Minsters and Marches," Falwell lec tured : "Preachers are not

called to be politicians, but soul winners." He also questioned "the

sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some c ivil rights leaders such as

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:' Several evange lical churches aided mas­

sive resistance to the civil rights movement by starting Christian day

schools, where whites could send their childr en to avoid the federally

mandated desegregation of the public schoo ls. Bob Jones University,

an evangelical college located in Greenville , South Carolina, forba�e

blacks from enrolling until 1971, after whi ch it prohibited interracial

dating and marriage on the stated grounds that "cultural or biologi-

Taking God's Country Back 85

cal mixing of the races is regarded as a violation of God's command:' Given this, it was difficult to argue with the implicit rationale that in­ formed the IRS decision to revoke Bob Jones University's tax-exempt status in 1978, logic then upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1983 rul­ ing Bob Jones University v. the United States: for many white evangeli­ cals, Christian education was a cover for perpetuating racial segrega­ tion and discrimination. Indeed, disentangling the Christian Right's moral panic from white racial panic is no easy task. Even by the 1970s, when most conservative Christians increasingly spoke about how ev­ eryone, regardless of race, was created in God's image, racial anxieties persisted in motivating many in their ranks. And yet there was more to the Christian day school movement.30

Between 1965 and 1975 Christian day school enrollment grew by over 202 percent, and by 1979 more than one million American chil­ dren attended Christian schools. The timing of such precipitous growth suggests that it was a response to desegregation. Falwell's Lynchburg Christian Academy, for instance, opened its doors in 1967, the year Virginia's commissioner of education demanded proactive school desegregation. But Falwell, seeking to distance himself from his ear­ lier position against civil rights, never spoke in racial terms about his school, which admitted its first black students in 1969. He, did, how­ ever, speak in religious terms, arguing that the Supreme Court's ruling on school prayer justified the Christian day school movement, "the hope of this Republic." "When a group of nine 'idiots' can pass a ruling down that it is illegal to read the Bible in our public schools, they need to be called idiots." The Christian day school movement grew in the South, but it also exploded in states far removed from the old Confed­ eracy where desegregation was less of a concern. The California As­ sociation of Christian Schools listed 350 schools as members, includ­ ing a growing network of schools in San Diego run by Tim LaHaye, who consistently made clear that his schools existed as an alternative to secular humanist schools. Indiana Baptist school principal Robert Billings's widely circulated 1971 manualA Guide to the Christian School

�ed up the reason.that so many Christians were vacating the pub­ lic schools: it was the "growing trend toward the secularization." In sum, the popularity of Christian day schools owed as much to fears a�out the secularization of curriculum as to resistance to desegrega­ lion, or at the very least showed that these two anxieties were not

86 CHAPTER THREE

mutually exclusive. Christian parents sent their children to Christian schools out of a desire to have them avoid sex education, values clari­ fication, and Darwinism, not just blacks.31

No matter the actual motivations of the Christian day school move­ ment, in 1978 the IRS announced its intentions to enforce a 1970 law that empowered it to revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools proven to be racially discriminatory. Toe IRS stated that it would prosecute those private schools that failed to make a good-faith ef­ fort to achieve student populations comprising at least s percent mi­ norities. Conservative Christians interpreted the IRS declaration as government persecution. W hite evangelicals in particular felt be­ trayed because it came under the watch of one of their own, President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist who had admitted during the 1976 campaign to having a "born-again" personal redemption experience. Rather than actively seek to admit more black students in order to comply with federal law-a difficult endeavor in any case since few Af­ rican American parents were inclined to send their children to white Christian day schools-evangelicals inundated the IRS with 120,000 angry letters of protest. Even though the IRS prosecuted only a few Christian day schools due to the widespread hostility its ruling pro­ voked, Christian Right leaders attributed the politicization of evangel­ icals to the hazard posed by the IRS. "The IRS made us realize," Fal­ well claimed, "that we had to fight for our lives." Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich, reflecting on his efforts to bring conservative Christians into the Republican Party fold, said he "had utterly failed" for most of the 1970s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools." For religious conserva­ tives, Carter's IRS symbolized the federal government's brazen disre­ gard for their values.32

Before the IRS incited a burst of evangelical political energy, con- servative anxieties about how the secular state was a menace to fam­ ily values had been bubbling to the surface for years. Toe traditional family, an idealized version of the 1950s family unit that many Ameri­ cans thought to be the norm, embodied a conservative religious con­ ception of gender roles. It encompassed one man, one woman, and children born within the confines of this heterosexual partnership. Whereas "scripture declares," according to Falwell, that the husband should "be the spiritual leader in his family," the wife was expected to accept her subordinate but ultimately more gratifying role as home-

Taking God's Country Back 87 maker. Add to this the fact that religious conservatives believed thatthe secular state impinged upon the social roles traditionally fulfilledby the family, and the fight for family values became essential to theChristian culture wars. As Falwell declared: "It is my conviction thatthe family is God's basic unit in society. No wonder then, we are in aholy war for the survival of the family."33

Family politics were so intense during and after the 1970s becausethe traditional nuclear family had experienced a period of unusual sta­bi_lity in the 1950s, followed by an era of unprecedented instability inthe 1960s. By the 1970s, signals that the traditional family was in declinewere everywhere, such as higher rates of divorce and out-of-wedlockpregnancy. This was the result of several factors, including economicchanges associated with deindustrialization and falling wages. The de­cay of the historically male "blue-collar" job market, mostly factorywork that tended to be well-paying and secure due to high degrees ofunionization, coincided with the explosion of the historically female"pink-collar" job market, mostly service work that tended to be low­paying, insecure, and nonunionized. Women entering the workforcein unprecedented numbers, in addition to the hardships associatedwith falling wages, put pressure on the traditional family model thatrelied upon a male breadwinner and a female caretaker. Christian conservatives ignored such sociological explanations forthe crumbling family. Instead they blamed feminists, who had indeedbeen critical of the sexism inherent to the traditional family well be­fore economic transformations rendered that paradigm increasinglyobsolete. As opposed to feminist solutions to family problems, whichtook into account the new sociological realities of the late 197os-suchas a proposal for more flexible work schedules, which would, in the­ory, afford working parents more time to spend with their children -Falwell offered a streamlined solution. Men and women, he argued,needed "to get in a right relationship with God and His principles forthe home," implying that women needed to stay home and care fortheir children while men worked to earn the family wage. Falwell didnot explain how American families might attain such an increasinglyIUDattainable objective.34

The traditional family remained at the forefront of American pol­itics during the 1970s not only because of its dissolution but also be­cause of the ongoing struggle to ratify the Equal Rights AmendmentiERA). The historical struggle for the ERA, of course, predated the

88 CHAPTER THREE

sixties. It had been on the agenda of woman's right s activists since

shortly after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendm ent gave women

the right to vote in 1920. Politicians from both major p arties endorsed

the ERA in the 1940s, but when it was first introduced in Congress in

1947, liberal and conservative opponents objected th at it would ne­

gate legislation that endowed women with special pr otection.

Toe sixties feminist movement injected new life into the struggle

for the ERA. As a sign of the feminist movement's succe ss, both houses

of Congress passed the amendment in 1972, sending it to the states,

which were given seven years to ratify it. Thirty-eight s tates were re­

quired for the proposed amendment to become law, an d thirty ratified

the ERA in the first year of the process. But before the fin al eight states

voted on ratification, a movement to stop the ERA gat hered, ensur­

ing its eventual demise. Although the amendment's ma in provision -

"equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or a bridged by the

United States or by any State on account of sex" -sound ed innocuous

enough, both proponents and opponents thought it w ould enlist the

federal government in the feminist movement's goal of t otal equality

between the sexes. Conservatives deemed such a prosp ect dangerous

to the traditional family. 35

Toe individual most responsible for foiling the ERA w as Phyllis

Schlafly, a conservative activist from St. Louis who firs t made a name

for herself with her self-published bookA Choice, Not an Echo, widely

distributed in support of Barry Goldwater's 1964 campa ign for presi­

dent. In September 1972, after being convinced of the nee d to resist the

feminist movement, Schlafly founded STOP ERA. Unt il then she had

focused her activism primarily on national defense issues . As a Cath­

olic, she had not yet been attuned to the social issues th at animated

evangelicals, like school prayer. By shifting gears, Schla fly brought a

large network of conservative Catholic women -those w ho read her

Phyllis Schlafly Report, which had in the range of thirty t housand sub­

scribers throughout the 197os-into the majority-evange lical move­

ment to defeat the ERA. In this, like Francis Schaeffer, she built ec­

umenical bridges to likeminded conservatives of differ ent religious

faiths.36

Schlafly's first shot against the ERA hit its mark, in th e form of a

1972 Phyllis Schlajly Report essay, "What's Wrong with 'Equal Rights'

for Women?" Schlafly argued that the ERA would oblite rate special.le­

gal protections afforded to women, including the insul ation provide

Taking God's Country Back

by the traditional family, which "assures a woman the most precious and important right of all-the right to keep her baby and be sup­ ported and protected in the enjoyment of watching her baby grow and develop." In this Schlafly defined the parameters of the winning cam­ paign to defeat the ERA: if men and women were legal equals, fathers had no obligation to provide for mothers. In other words, equal rights for women actually meant that special rights for mothers would be re­ voked. Such special rights were paramount because Schlafly believed that motherhood was a woman's most fulfilling calling, a belief that di­ rectly challenged "women's libbers" like Betty Friedan, who "view the home as a prison, and the wife and mother as a slave." Schlafly tarred feminists as enemies of motherhood, an association that stuck.37

As resistance to the ERA grew throughout the 1970s, the ratifi­ cation process stalled. Some states that had previously ratified the amendment even reversed their votes. As it became less and less likely that the ERA would be ratified, Schlafly's reputation as the intellectual force behind the movement to defeat the ERA grew. With the 1977 publication of The Power of the Positive Woman, arguably the definitive

antifeminist manifesto, her status as the nation's most iconic antifemi­ nist was cemented. The first step in becoming a "positive woman," an­ other term for a confident antifeminist in Schlafly's vocabulary, was to embrace the natural differences between men and women. Consistent with such an essentialist understanding of sexual difference, Schla­ fly encouraged STOP ERA activists to accentuate traditional gender roles, such as dressing particularly femininely when lobbying state leg­ islators. To the dismay of feminists, this strategy worked to perfection. Some of the more conservative legislators, of course, hardly needed their paternalistic egos stroked in such a way. "To pass a law or con­ stitutional amendment saying that we are all alike in every respect," argued lliinois state representative Monroe Flynn, "flies in the face of what our Creator intended." Conservative Christians like Flynn re­ lated feminist attempts to eliminate sexual difference to secular efforts to erase God from the public sphere. Schlafly snidely suggested that if feminists had a problem with sexual difference they might also have a problem with God. "Someone, it is not clear who, perhaps God," she wrote, "dealt women a foul blow by making them female."38

Schlafly's antifeminism had a playful side to it. When addressing ,Onservative crowds, she often started in the following way: "First of all, I want to thank my husband Fred, for letting me come-I always

90 CHAPTER THR

EE

like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!" Suc h friskines� �as

an effective contrast to the humorless recrimination s that feIIllrusts

directed her way. During a 1973 debate on the lllinois State University

campus, Friedan infamously told Schlafly: "I would like to bur� you

at the stake .... I consider you a traitor to your sex, an A unt Tom. Flo­

rynce Kennedy wondered "why some people don't hit Phyllis Schlafly

in the mouth." Such nastiness spoke to the fact that Sc hlafly had come

to signify the backlash against feminism and the impen ding defeat of

the ERA, which feminists believed was a necessary and inevitable step

to full equality.39 Schlafly's rhetoric, of course, could also be hard-hit

ting, such as

when she theorized about the ways feminism migh t empower an

immoral government over and against the moral fam ily. Describing

these implications in hypothetical fashion, she wrote: "[I]f fathers ar_e

not expected to stay home and care for their infant chi ldren, then nei­

ther should mothers be expected to do so ; and, therefo re, it becomes

the duty of the government to provide kiddy-care cen ters to relieve

mothers of that unfair and unequal burden." Such analy sis suggested

that women's liberationists, in their demand for total eq uality, wanted

to empower Washington bureaucrats to enforce soc ial engineering

programs that would undermine the traditional fami ly. In this Schla­

fly helped bring together two conservative trajectories -cultural tra­

ditionalism and antistatism-demonstrating that the culture wars,

rather than being an evasion of political-economic deba tes about how

power and resources were to be distributed, represent ed a new way

of having such debates. Exemplifying this comminglin g of conserva­

tive ideologies, a 1976 Phyllis Schlajly Report headline a bout a coming

convention on women screamed about "How the Lib s and the Feds

d M ,,40 Plan to Spen Your oney. Toe convention referenced in Schlafly's headline, a go

vernment-

sponsored International Women's Year (IWY) confere nce, became a

lightning rod for cultural conservatives. Schlafly descr ibed the 1977

Houston convention as "a front for radicals and lesb ians." Indeed,

many of those involved in organizing the IWY conven tion �ere_ out­

spoken feminists, thanks to Midge Costanza, who, as C ar�er s chie_f of

the White House's Office of Public Liaison, was charged with appoi.ntj

ing members to the IWY Commission. Costanza de si�ate� liberal

New York congresswoman Bella Abzug-who once cl aimed a wom­

an's place is in the house, the House of Representatives " -to chair the

Taking God's Country Back 91

commission. Pentecostal televangelist Pat Robertson, who until then, happy to have a fellow born-again Christian in the White House, had sung Carter's praises, seethed: "I wouldn't let Bella Abzug scrub the floors of any organization that I was head of, but Carter put her in charge of all the women in America, and used our tax funds to support that convention in Houston." Costanza's other selections, highlighted by feminist notable Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. magazine, did little to inspire the confidence of religious conservatives, who organized to gain their share of delegates to the Houston convention. After manag­ ing to secure control of only 25 percent of the delegation, Schlafly and other conservative women decided to put on a counter-IWY confer­ ence at Houston's Astro Arena . Their Pro-Family Rally attracted some twenty thousand attendees.41

The IWY convention's official platform, approved by vote of the delegation, was decidedly left of center. Not only did it call for the ratification of the ERA, but it also included abortion-on-demand and gay rights planks. Toe staid feminism that had informed NOW at its origins had given way to a more radical vision of gender equality, sig­ naled by Friedan's public change of heart regarding the relationship between feminism and gay rights. In 1969 she infamously called les­ bianism a "lavender herring," charging that gay rights would tarnish the feminist agenda. But at the 1977 Houston convention, Friedan sec­ onded a resolution to support gay and lesbian rights, a huge symbolic victory for the gay rights movement. Although this newly expansive alliance illustrated the power of New Left feminist sensibilities, it also played into the hands of religious conservatives like Schlafly, who be­ lieved the radicalism of the IWY platform signified "the death knell of the women's liberation movement." "The Women's Lib movement has sealed its own doom," she proclaimed, "by deliberately hanging around its own neck the albatross of abortion, lesbianism, pornogra­ phy and Federal contr.ol."42

The national debate between feminists and the Christian Right per­ sisted throughout the Carter administration. In the summer of 1980, another national conference, the White House Conference on Fami­ lies (WHCF), generated even more controversy. During his 1976 pres­ idential campaign Carter had promised that, if elected, he would host � conference on the American family, wrongly assuming that sponsor­ mg such a conference would be politically safe. Since both liberals and l,:>nservatives agreed the family was in crisis, he thought both sides

92 CHAPTER THREE

would be willing to convene to map out common-ground solutions. Such faulty political logic was consistent with Carter's antipartisan

temperament, which, against the grain of his centrist expectations, earned him the enmity of both liberals and conservatives, both femi­ nists and antifeminists. The disputatious Houston convention quickly

disabused Carter and his advisers of the notion that a conference on the family would be uncontroversial. They delayed holding it for as

long as they could without reneging on his campaign promise. They

also organized it such that Carter might keep his distance: instead of

one conference in the nation's capital, which might attract criticism at a time when Carter had enough problems dealing with stagflation and

the Iran hostage crisis, the White House hosted three regional con­

ferences, in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. This strategy failed. In an attempt to appease feminists annoyed with him for not

being an enthusiastic enough supporter of the ERA, and for stating his personal discomfort with abortion, Carter gave his consent to a plu­

ral conference title: White House Conference on Families. Whereas feminists believed that official recognition of the pluralistic ways an

increasing number of Americans lived would help remove the stain of

illegitimacy affixed to nontraditional families, such as those headed by single mothers or gay couples, the Christian Right, abiding by tra­

ditional norms, defined the family in the singular and considered the

plural WHCF title an insult.43

The publicity generated by the battle over the WHCF gave con­ servatives an opportunity to advertise their own vision of the family, which they presented in the form of the Family Protection Act, first

introduced in Congress in 1979 by Senator Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Re­ publican. This proposed legislation was an effortless mix of cultural and economic conservatism. Had it passed, for example, it would have

drastically cut government childcare services, a menace to both fam­

ily values and anti tax conservatives. Among a laundry list of conserva­

tive wishes, the Family Protection Act prominently included an anti­

abortion provision that sought to deny Supreme Court jurisdiction to review state laws that pertained to abortion.44

By the late 1970s, abortion had become a defining issue for the

Christian Right. But prior to Roe v. Wade, the momentous 1973 Su­

preme Court decision that legalized most abortions ih the first two

trimesters of pregnancy on the grounds that a woman's right to pri­

vacy included control over her pregnant body, this was not necessarily

Taking God's Country Back 93

the case. Before it was legalized, many evangelicals, like a majority of

Americans, held nonabsolute views on abortion. Though they might have considered a fetus a living being, they might also have believed

that a fetus's right to life should be balanced against other consider­

ations, including the health of the woman carrying it. fu short, prior

to Roe v. Wade many evangelicals held relativistic views about abor­ tion: they did not support an absolute right to privacy, but neither did

they favor a fetus's absolute right to life. Aside from a few marginalized

fundamentalists-such as far-right preacher John Rice, the longtime

editor of The Sword of the Lord, who in 1971 wrote that he "viewed the abortion legalization campaign as the latest liberal assault on morality

in a rapidly escalating culture war" -most evangelical leaders were

ambivalent. The SBC even supported liberal abortion laws, a posi­ tion it maintained until 1979, when conservatives ousted the moder­

ate leadership.45

The movement to legalize abortion, which had been banned in most states since 1880, had ramped up in the 1950s. Doctors led the

early push to overturn anti-abortion laws, believing their status as professional experts granted them the authority to decide what was

best for their patients. In the 1960s some states legalized "therapeu­

tic abortions," those deemed necessary to protect the health of preg­ nant women as determined by doctors. In response, Catholics, the

only religious group consistently outspoken against the liberalization

of abortion laws, formed the nation's first anti-abortion group in 1968,

the Right to Life League. For conservative Catholics, abortion seemed

like a clear-cut affront to the epistemological views that underpinned

their faith. They believed that the universe had an objective moral or­ der to which humans were bound. Abortion was murder, and murder

was wrong, plain and simple. Translated into the language of conser­

vative evangelicals, who eventually overcame their inhibitions about

joining a signature Catholic cause, abortion offended God's will.46

Roe v. Wade forced forty-six states to liberalize their abortion laws, leading to a national debate that compelled more Americans to take a firm stance on the issue. Justice Harry Black.mun, who delivered

the Supreme Court's majority opinion, recognized that the decision was fraught with peril. In his opinion he wrote: "One's philosophy,

one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human exis­ tence, one's religious training, one's attitude towards life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks

94 CHAPTER THREE

to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion ." Blackmun was certainly right about that. But he could not have predicted the degree to which abortion was to be tied up with the war for the soul of America.47

Toe day after Roe v. Wade, a small-town Minnesota evangelical wrote a scathing letter to the editor of her local newspaper, charging that the "diabolical" decision was "glaring evidence that our society is decaying rapidly with moral corruption." Christianity Today, the most important magazine of highbrow evangelical opinion, editorial­ ized: "Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws of God, and prepare themselves spiritually for the prospect that it may one day formally repudiate them and turn against those who seek to live by them:' Although most evangelical leaders were slower to re­ spond, the Christianity Today editorial anticipated the ways in which an emerging evangelical opposition to abortion would be framed.

48

Francis Schaeffer nudged many evangelicals to oppose abortion. Jerry Falwell credited Schaeffer for convincing him to become ar­ dently pro-life. So too did Randall Terry, who became the nation's most prominent anti-abortion activist in 1986, when he founded Op­ eration Rescue, which premised its militant tactics on the slogan "If you believe abortion is murder, act like it's murder." Schaeffer saw abortion as evidence of the humanistic disregard for life as a moral absolute. He theorized that it was a slippery slope from abortion to euthanasia and, more broadly, to the state's having total authority over decisions regarding who gets to live and who gets to die. "In regards to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated 'aliveness' from 'per­ sonhood,' and if this is so,'' he asked, "why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged?" In the 1979 pro-life film series W hatever Happened to the Human Race? Schaeffer argued that abortion was a result of a shift from a Christian-based society, in which each individual was viewed as a unique creation of God, to a secular humanist society, in which individuals were conceptualized as cogs in a larger biological machine. Franky Schaeffer writes that his father pointed "to the 'hu­ man life issue' as the watershed between a 'Christian society' and a utilitarian relativistic 'post-Christian' future stripped of compassion and beauty."49

Falwell, who by the end of the 1970s routinely referred to abortion

Taking God's Country Back 95

as "murder according to the Word of God,'' quoted Schaeffer exten­ sively whenever he discussed the topic. Like Schaeffer, Falwell be­ lieved that legalized abortion represented the tragic if logical conse­ quence of secular humanism's negation of God. In this way Schaeffer helped evangelicals like Falwell recognize that resistance to abortion was of a piece with their anxieties about how a secular state was im­ posing its anti-Christian will on the nation. Recognizing as much com­ plicates the simplistic view held by many political observers that abor­ tion as a stand-alone issue pushed erstwhile Democrats into voting for the Republican Party, which has included an anti-abortion plank in every one of its platforms since 1980. This might have been true for some Americans, especially for anti-abortion Catholics with historical ties to the Democratic Party. And certainly some Republican politi­ cians have kept abortion on the national radar in order to gain elec­ toral advantage. For example, beginning in 1976 with Congressman Henry Hyde from Illinois, Republicans have annually proposed rid­ ers to yearly appropriations bills-the so-called Hyde Amendments­ that would prohibit federal funds from being used for abortion. But by the end of the 1970s the vast majority of pro-life Americans were re­ ligious conservatives who would have voted Republican whether the Supreme Court had legalized abortion or not. As demonstrated by the Family Values Act, proposed and supported by many Republicans but hardly any Democrats, the Republican Party was increasingly coming to represent a Christian Right worldview in general. Opposition to abortion was a paramount component of that worldview, but only one ingredient of a more general antisecular perspective.50

Another issue that religious conservatives felt strongly about was the gay rights movement. The Christian Right opposed gay rights on the grounds that homosexuality flouted the will of God as expressed in the traditional family. When the Dade County Commission in Mi­ ami, Florida, approved an ordinance in 1977 that explicitly prohibited discrimination against gays, religious conservatives mobilized under the leadership of Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma and pop­ ular singer who called homosexuality "a disguised attack on God." As a countermeasure, Bryant helped place an anti -gay rights referen­ dum on Dade County ballots, which succeeded in overturning the gay ri�ts ordinance by two to one. The Dade County ordinance stipu-· lat1on that most disturbed Bryant and her fellow conservatives was

CHAPTER TH REE

96

that schools could not discriminate agains t gays when hiring teachers .

Concerned that gay men were more like ly to be pederasts and that

they would recruit children to their "lifes tyle;' Bryant founded Save

Our children, a coalition that sought to ex clude out-of-the-closet gays

hin & • 51

from the teac g pro1ession.

In 1978 California state senator John Briggs , a Bryant acolyte, intro-

duced Proposition 6, otherwise known a s the Briggs Initiative, which

would have empowered California school districts to fire "open and

notorious" gay teachers. Despite coming quickly on the heels of the

conservative triumph in Florida, the Califo rnia initiative was trounced

by over one million votes . Even former go vernor Ronald R�agan p�b­

licly opposed the Briggs Initiative for the r eason that he did not view

homosexuality as "a contagious disease li ke the measles," perhaps a

brave stance given that Reagan's impend ing run for the presidency

was going to require religious conservat ive votes. Any joy that gay

rights activists felt as a result of such a resou nding victory was crushed

three weeks later when openly gay San Fra ncisco Supervisor Harvey

Milk, the leader of the campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative, was

gunned down, along with San Francisco M ayor George Moscone, by

a homophobic former colleague. Falwell, who had been campaigning

with Bryant against gay rights since the Dade County referendum,

deemed the Milk assassination God's judgm ent. To his mind, the gay

rights movement was putting the nation i tself at risk of �vine �etri­

bution. "Like a spiritual cancer, homosexua lity spread until the city of

Sodom was destroyed. Can we believe that God will spare the United

. . d•"S 2

States if homosexuality contmues to sprea

Tim LaHaye wrote a number of popular books in the 1970s and

19sos that provided readers with a fram ework for understanding

secular humanism in relation to issues like the family, marriage, and

schooling. One such book, The Unhappy G ays, an unsympathetic po­

lemic against homosexuality, was publishe d a few months befor,�

the

vote on the Briggs Initiative, which LaHaye saw as necessary to pro­

tect school children from being taught per verted sex by a homosex­

ual." He and his wife Beverly had relocated to San Diego in 1956 from

the South where LaHaye had been a past or since earning his bach­

elor's de;ee from Bob Jones University. In Southern California th_e

consequences of the sexual revolution, suc h as casual sex and ea_sy di­

vorce were more out in the open than virt ually anywhere else m the

natio�. And yet a large contingent of religi ous conservatives also lived

Taking God's Country Back 97

in Southern California, generating a productive friction that situated the LaHayes at the forefront of resistance to cultural radicalism .53

The thesis LaHaye laid out in The Unhappy Gays, as the title sug­ gests, was that "homosexuals are unquestionably more miserable than straight people." LaHaye argued that the word gay was a deceit­ ful "propaganda word" when used as a synonym for homosexuali ty , citing liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for support . In a 1977 Time magazine article, "The State of Language," Schlesinger wrote the following passage, subsequently quoted by LaHaye : "Gay used to be one of the most agreeable words in the language. Its appropriation by a notably morose group is an act of piracy." LaHaye presented a list of reasons why "gay isn't gay," including that gay men suffered unusually high rates of depression, drug use, and suicide. In this he ignored the likelihood that the cultural stigma attached to homosexuality, which manifested in myriad forms of discrimination, was the actual cause of their unhappiness . But LaHaye's objective was not to cure discrimina­ tion. Like so many other evangelicals, LaHaye believed that commit­ ting oneself to Christianity, which affirmed heterosexuality as God's will, was the only path to personal redemption . In other words, belief in Christ was the cure to homosexuality. In this LaHaye matter-of­ factly denied that homosexuality was occurring naturally. "No one," he wrote, "is born homosexual."54

. Homosexuality was a key theme in right-wing jeremiads of that age.Like Falwell and most evangelical leaders, LaHaye believed that given social space to thrive, homosexuality would be the death of America. LaHaye introduced The Unhappy Gays with a fable about a trip he and Beverly took to Italy, where a guide told them that a public bath at the ruins of Pompeii was "for men only." Mentally comparing that to the public baths frequented by gay men in American cities like New York and San Francisco, he wrote : "No wonder Gibbon concluded that homosexuality w;s one of the moral sins that contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire ." In the same ways that they pointed to Engel v. Vitale as the beginning of American decline, conserva­ tive Christians often alluded to Edward Gibbon's classic eighteenth­ ce�tury book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , which on their reading explained Rome's collapse as the result of sex­ ual depravity, in order to prophesy the downfall of American civili- 2:ation. "A homosexually lenient society," LaHaye warned, "will incur the wrath of God." Whereas America was once great because it was a

CHAPTER THREE

society based on biblical principles, "when sodomy fills the national cup of man's abominations to overflowing, God earmarks that nation for destruction."55

As opposed to those who had a more secular interpretation of American history-including most academic historians-religious conservatives held that America was founded as a Christian nation. For the Christian Right, the belief that the United States was the prod­ uct of divine creation explained American exceptionalism. "I believe that God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has en­ joyed," Falwell preached, "because her heritage is one of a republic governed by laws predicated on the Bible." Beyond explaining na­ tional greatness, the narrative of America's heavenly origins was also important to Christian culture warriors because it undergirded their critique of secularization by drawing a clear boundary between the nation's glorious past and its degraded present. "Either we will return to the moral integrity and original dreams of the founders of this na­ tion," Pat Robertson cautioned, "or we will give ourselves over more and more to hedonism, to all forms of destructive anti-social behavior, to political apathy, and ultimately to the forces of anarchy and disin­ tegration that have throughout history gripped great empires and na­ tions in their tragic and declining years." Historian Donald Critchlow points out that this Christian Right "moral sensibility" about the na­ tion and its history was rooted in the assumption "that free govern­ ment rested upon a moral or religious citizenry whose principal civil responsibility was the protection of virtue. The sensibility upheld the belief that ultimately republican government rested on moral founda­ tions that, if eroded, would lead to the collapse of the polity."56

Given the mobilization of religious conservatives during the 1970s, and given the biblical inspiration upon which their triumphant na­ tionalism rested, the Christian Right's enthusiastic embrace of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential candidacy should not have been surprising. It was Reagan, after all, who famously described the United States as a "city on a hill," a metaphor he borrowed from John Winthrop, who borrowed it from Jesus. It was Reagan, not his evangelical opponent Jimmy Carter, who attended James Robison's 1980 Religious Round­ table in Dallas, where he knowingly told the gathering of adoring evangelicals: "You can' t endorse me, but I endorse you." It was Rea­ gan who promised to reinstate school prayer, who campaigned to end the alleged IRS persecution of Christian schools, who advocated for

Taking God's Country Back 99

the teaching of creationism, saying that evolution was "theory only," and who vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade, avowing deep regret about his earlier support for pro-choice legislation. It was Reagan who said: "The First Amendment was written not to protect the people and their laws from religious values, but to protect those values from gov­ ernment tyranny."57

Reagan should hardly have been theologically palatable to white evangelicals: despite dabbling in premillennial dispensationalism, a distinctive Christian fundamentalist eschatology in which adherents sought to decode signs of the coming rapture, he also showed interest in Baha'i, astrology, and the Shroud of Turin. As one Carter supporter bitterly pointed out, Reagan was "a Hollywood libertine, had a child conceived out of wedlock before he and Nancy married, admitted to drug use during his Hollywood years, and according to Henry Steele Commager, was one of the least religious presidents in American his­ tory." Yet Reagan won nearly 75 percent of white evangelical voters in 1980-and this should not have puzzled anyone. By unambiguously aligning himself with Christian Right efforts to take God's country back, Reagan won over conservative evangelicals less interested in his theology or his personal history than in his politics.58

Winning over the Christian Right in 1980 was a big deal. In re­ sponse to developments that they believed imperiled the nation­ secularization, feminism, abortion, gay rights-religious conserva­ tives intensified their involvement in political activism. Evangelical leaders told their congregants that it was their duty to inject their reli­ gious beliefs into the political sphere. Falwell, in an apparent reversal of his earlier claim that preachers should not participate in the civil rights movement because it was not the role God had called them to, proclaimed: "This idea of 'religion and politics don't mix' was in­ vented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own coun­ �-" Tapp�d by_ well-connected Republican operatives Paul Weyrich, ��hard V1guene, and Hc,ward Phillips, Falwell founded Moral Major­ ity m 1979 as part of a larger effort to bring religious conservatives into a powerful new political alliance. Falwell justified the need for Moral Majority by arguing that Christian fundamentalists like himself had more in common with similarly orthodox Jews and Catholics "than we ever will with the secularizers of this country. It is time for all re­ ligious!� committed citizens to unite against our common enemy."

59

Despite such ecumenical rhetoric, the vast majority of Moral

-- -

100 CHAPTER THREE

Majority members were evangelicals. Other than abortion, its core issues were evangelical concerns such as opposition to feminism, gay rights, pornography, and the teaching of evolution. Nonevangelical conservatives were welcome in Moral Majority: indeed, Catholics purportedly constituted nearly 30 percent of the membership at the peak of its influence in the early 1980s. But Moral Majority was im­ mediately powerful because there was an obvious need for a political organization that would act as a vehicle for white evangelical causes. In its first year it enrolled 2.5 inillion mostly evangelical members and reported contributions in excess of $35 million. Moral Majority's in­ fluence increased after it was deemed to have been crucial to Reagan's victory. In the immediate aftermath of the election, one prominent headline read: "The Preachers Gave It to Reagan." Such press fed into Christian Right hyperbole, as Falwell claimed Moral Majority was the main reason Reagan got elected. Liberals reacted to the 1980 election results similarly, if from a different evaluative perspective. They fret­ ted about an impending theocracy, comparing the Christian Right to Iranian fundamentalists who had taken American hostages, and often called Falwell the American Ayatollah.60

Claims about the importance of newly energized evangelicals were only half true. They ignored that even before 1980, conservative evan­ gelicals had often organized effectively behind conservative politi­ cians. The lnistake is repeated often by historians, who tend to argue that 1980 represented the reemergence of conservative Christians in a political sphere they had deserted after the huiniliation of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Nixon's 1972 reelection serves as an instructive coun­ terexample. Neoconservatives believed Nixon's landslide represented the will of urban ethnic whites like themselves who had grown weary of a New Left they believed was dictating the McGovern campaign. Such an account, though not entirely false, ignored that the key to Nixon's victory was winning over evangelicals. Nixon did better with urban white ethnics than any Republican since the early twentieth century, thanks largely to organized labor's lack of enthusiasm for Mc­ Govern. But a startlingly high 84 percent of white evangelicals voted for Nixon in 1972. The Nixon campaign was nothing if not smart about demographic trends. The Sunbelt states were becoming incre�singly populous, and evangelicals were the fastest-growing population in those states. By the early 1970s the ten largest churches in the nation, all evangelical, were located in the southern and western parts of the

Taking God's Country Back 101

country. With this in mind, Nixon exploited issues that drew themto the voting booths. For instance, he leaked news that he had or­dered Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth's novel about masturbationremoved from the White House library.61 Neoconservatives-the intellectual spokespeople for urban whiteethnics-might have innovated much of the logic that informed theconservative side of the culture wars, particularly in relation to late­twentieth-century racial discourse. But the Christian Right formedthe demographic bedrock of the conservative culture wars. Because ofthis, the war for the soul of America was as much a religious strugglebetween people of incompatible faiths-conservative Christians andse�ular liberals-as it was a fight over the nation's ethnic and racial leg­ac1es. Of course these two distinct battle lines often overlapped in the1980s and 1990s, giving the culture wars narrative its valence.

306 NOTES TO PAGES 60-68

41. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean

Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Kenneth

Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Boston: Beacon, 1955); Kenneth Clark, Dark

Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 131. 42. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools

(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 251-380.

43. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes,

Puerto Ricans,Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1963). Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan,

1909), 139, quoted by David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Ox­

ford: Oxford University Press, 2ou), 206.

44. The teacher's discussion question and the unsigned letter are quoted in Podair,

Strike That Changed New York, 58, 124. The anti-Semitic poem is quoted in Gerson,

Neoconservative Vision, 159.

45. The Carmichael quote is in Ben Carson, "Stokely Carmichael," inAfricanAmerican

Lives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham ( Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004); Nathan Glazer, "Blacks,Jews and Intellectuals," Commen­

tary, April 1969. "Podhoretz on Intellectuals," Manhattan Tribune, February 1, 1969,

4. Harnett and Young are quoted in Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 131,126.

46. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Blacks (Cam­

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 216-17.

47. Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race,

Rights, and Taxes on America Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 31.

48. Nathan Glazer, "Is Busing Necessary?" Commentary, March 1972, 50. J. Anthony

Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Fam­

ilies (New York: Vintage Books, 1985). Matthew Richer, "Boston's Busing Massa­

cre," Policy Review, November 1, 1998.

49. James Q Wilson, "Crime and the Liberal Audience," Commentary, January 1971,

71-78.

50. Ibid., 77. 51. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 10th anniversary

ed. (orig. 1995; New York: Basic Books, 2005), 177; Heilbrunn, They Knew They

Were Right, 14.

52. Historians of neoconservatism tend to ignore Midge Deeter. Ronnie Grinberg

serves as a useful corrective: "Jewish Intellectuals, Masculinity, and the Making of

Modern American Conservatism, 1930-1980 " (PhD diss., Northwestern Univer­

sity, 2010 ). Jeffers, Norman Podhoretz, 207. Midge Deeter, The Liberated Woman

and Other Americans (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghehan, 1971), and

The New Chastity and Other Arguments against Women's Liberation (orig. 1972;

New York: Capricorn Books, 1974).

53. Deeter, New Chastity, 43.

54. Deeter, Liberated Woman and Other Americans, 12.

55. For Bell's self-label, see his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th anni­

versary ed. (orig. 1976; New York: Basic Books, 1996), xi. Daniel Bell, "Sensibility

NOTES TO PAGES 69-74 307

in tbe 6o's," Commentary, June 1971, 63. Midge Deeter, "Boys on tbe Beach," Com­

mentary, September 1980, 38. 56. Gore Vidal, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal,

ed. Jay Parini (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 343,345,341 (originally published in

The Nation, November 14, 1981).

57. George Nash, Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conserva­

tism (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 243-44.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Irving Kristo!, "What Is a Neoconservative?," in The Neoconservative Persuasion:

Selected Essays, 1942-2009, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Basic Books,

2011), 149.

2. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen analyzes how Americans have come to grips with

modernity through reading Nietzsche, who made famous the "God is dead " utter­

ance. American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2012).

3, George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping ofTwentieth­

Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 ).

4, James Davison Hunter pointed out that religious Americans gave up their sectarian

prejudices in order to form political and ideological alliances in the culture wars

in his now classic book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

5. Leo Ribuffo, "Family Policy Past as Prologue: Jimmy Carter, the White House Conference on Families, and the Mobilization of the New Christian Right," Review of Policy Research 23, no. 2 (2006): 311-37. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Marshner quote is found in William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 182.

6. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the American School: Progressivism in

American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). John Dewey,

Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New

York: Macmillan, 1916). Adam Laats, Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes

Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America's Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010 ). Mencken's quote is found in Richard T. Hughes, Christian

America and the Kingdom of God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 137.

7. Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66-78. Andrew Hartman, Educa­

tion and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2008). 8. Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle over School Prayer: How "Engel v. Vitale" Changed

America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). For the conservative re­

sponse to Engel, see Christopher Hickman, The Most Dangerous Branch: The Su­

preme Court and Its Critics in the Warren Court Era (PhD diss., George Washington

University, 2010); the Buckley passage is quoted on p. 1.

308 NOTES TO PAGES 75-79

9. Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004). The NEA advocacy of inquiry learn­ ing is found in Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Ken­ neth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence (hereafter Wilcox Collection), Eagle Forum, Folder 4. The Helms letter is quoted in Joanne Omang, '"New Right' Figure Sees McCarthyism in NEA's Conference on Conservatism," Washington Post, February 24, 1979, found in National Education Association Re­ cords, Special Collections Research Center, Gelman Library, the George Washing­ ton University, Washington, DC (hereafter NEA Papers), Box 2128, Folder 9.

10. Martin, With God on Our Side, 102-16. Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shap­ ing of Adolescence in the 20th Century ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

11. First Hargis quote is found in Moran, Teaching Sex, 183. For others: Wilcox Collec­ tion, Billy James Hargis Folder 3: Letters, 1967-1969.

12. Trey Key, "The Great Textbook War," West Virginia Public Radio, October 31, 2009. The "shot heard" and Marshner quotes are from the broadcast transcript. Carol Mason, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); William H. Denman, "'Them Dirty, Filthy Books': The Textbook War in West Virginia," in Free Speech Yearbook 1976, ed. Greg Phipher (Falls Church, VA: Free Speech Association, 1976), 42-50; and Ann L. Page and Donald A. Clelland, "The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy: A Study of the Politics ofLife Style Concern," Social Forces 57, no. 1 (September 1978).

13. Most of these quotes can be found in "The Great Textbook War" radio transcripts. The Jack Maurice quote is found in the NEA Archives, Box 2162, Folder 1. The pamphlet passage is from Martin, With God on Our Side, 122.

14. NEA Archives, Box 2161, Folders 4-8: "Inquiry Report: Kanawha County, West Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict" (NEA Teacher Rights Division, Washington DC, 1975). The national correspondent was Russell Gibbons, writing in Commonweal, found in Denman, "Them Dirty, Filthy Books," 44,

15. J. Brooks Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Re­ ligious Right (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Wilcox Collection, Mel and Norma Gabler, Folders 1 and 2. Daniel K. Williams, God's Own Party: The Mak­ ing of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83-85. Jimmy Brown, "Textbook Reviewing Is No Small Readout," Gladewater Mirror, July 28, 1974, 1, 11.

16. Williams, God's Own Party, 134-3 7. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Char­ acter of Education (Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1963), and Man Striving to Be God (Fenton, MI: Mott Media, 1982).

17. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivi­ alize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

18. Mark Chaves, "Secularization as Declining Religious Authority," Social Forces 72, no. 3 (1994): 749-74.

19. David Sehat shows that the separation of church and state was more abstract than

20.

NOTES TO PAGES 80-8 7 309

real in American life prior to the postwar era: The Myth of American Religions Free­ dom ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age ( Cam­ bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 488. David A. Hollinger, "The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted," D(l!dalus 141, no. 1 (Wmter 2012): 76-88. On the SBC convention, see Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 212. On the importance of the SBC to Christian Right political power, see Williams, God's Own Party, 6.

21. James Sire, foreword to Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (orig. 1968; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 15.

22. Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America ( Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

23. See Frank Schaeffer's illuminating apostate memoir, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All ( or

Almost All) of It Back (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007), 15, 116. 24.

25. 26.

For the reception of Nietzsche, see Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche. Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 118. Schaeffer, God Who Is There, 29-30. Schaeffer, God Who Is There, 2 7. Ibid., 32-38.

27. Ibid., 57; Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 77. 28. Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 271-73. 29. Ibid. Williams, God's Own Party, 141. 30. For quotes from Falwell's "Minsters and Marches" speech, see Lee Edwards, The

Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (New York: Free Press, 1999 ), 198. Bob Jones University v. the United States 461 U.S. 574 (1983), n. 6. Terry Sanford and David Nevin, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Acad­ emies in the South (New York: Acropolis Books, 1976). For a recent argument that Christian day schools were mostly segregation by other means, see Joseph Cre­ spino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevo­ lution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 248-51.

31. William J. Reese, "Soldiers for Christ in the Army of God: The Christian School Movement," in History, Education, and the Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmil­ lan , 2007), m-33. The Falwell quote, as well as the figures on Christian day school growth, is found in Williams, God's Own Party, 85. Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism's Threat to Our Children (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1983). Robert J. Billings, A Guide to the Christian School (Hammond, IN: Hyles-Anderson, 1971), 12.

32. Falwell and Weyrich quotes are from Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Fam­ ily, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 17, 199.

33, Ribuffo, "Family Policy Past as Prologue." For the first Falwell quote: Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 128. For the second: Flip­ pen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 56.

34, Robert 0. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 309-38. Falwell, Listen, America!, 128.

310 NOTES TO PAGES 8 8-97

35. Sharon Whitney, The Equal Rights Amendment: The History and the Movement

(New York: F. Watts, 1984).

36. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Cru-

sade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 212-42.

37. Phyllis Schlafly, "What's Wrong with 'Equal Rights' for Women ?" Phyllis Schlajly

Report, May 1972. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservat ism, 217-18.

38. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochell e, NY: Arlington

House, 1977), 11-12. Monroe Flynn's quote is in Critchlow, Phyllis S chlajly and

Grassroots Conservatism, 226.

39. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 247, 12, 227.

Schlafly, Power of the Positive Woman, 21. Self, All in the Family, 313 .

41. Schlafly quote is in Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots C onservatism, 245.

Robertson quote is in Flippen,]immy Carter, the Politics of the Family, a nd the Rise

40.

42.

of the Religious Right, 121.

Marjorie J. Spruill, "Gender and America's Right Turn," in Rightward B ound: Mak-

ing America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julia n E. Zelizer

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 71-89. "Betty F riedan," in

JoAnn Meyers, The A to z of the Lesbian Liberation Movement: Still the Rage (New

York: Scarecrow, 2009 ), 122. Schlafly's first quote: Flippen,]immy Car ter, the Pol­

itics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 149; second quote: Critchlow,

Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 247-48.

43. Ribuffo, "Family Policy Past as Prologue."

"The Family Protection Act," H.R. 7955, 96th Congress (1979).44.

45. Daniel K. Williams, "No Happy Medium: The Role of Americ ans' Ambivalent

View of Fetal Rights in Political Conflict over Abortion Legalization ," Journal of

Policy History 25, no. 1 (2013): 42-61. The Rice passage is quoted in Wil liams, God's

Own Party, 116.

46. For conservative Catholic philosophical underpinnings and how they related to

abortion, see Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Pol itics inAmer­

ica, 1950-1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

47. Harry A. Blackmun Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Co ngress, Washing-

ton, DC (hereafter: Blackmun Papers), Box 151, Folder 2.

48. Blackmun Papers, Folder 10. The Christianity Today editorial is quoted in Wil-

liams, God's Own Party, 119.

49. Williams, God's Own Party, 141-55. Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 273.

50. Falwell, Listen, America!, 173.

51. Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of th e Religious Right,

136-38.

52. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk

(New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1988). Falwell is quoted in Williams , God's Own

Party, 152. 53. Williams, God's Own Party, 73, 152.

54. Tim LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know a bout Homosexual-

ity (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1978), 41, 62.

NOTES TO PAGES 98-105 311

55. Ibid., 201-2.

56. Falwell, Listen, America!, 16. Robertson is quoted in James Davison Hunter, Cul­ ture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 112-13. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 8.

57. William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan (New York: M. E. Sharp, 1998).

58. Carter supporter is quoted in Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 319.

59. Martin, With God on Our Side, 191-220.

60. Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 315. 61. One of the central revisions that Daniel Williams makes in God's Own Party is that

the Christian Right did not emerge whole cloth in the 1970s, but rather that it was

a movement fifty years in the making. The anecdote about Nixon and Portnoy's Complaint is found in Courtwright, No Right Tum, 76.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library,

Inc, 1903), 19. Frederick Douglass, "The Color Line," NorthAmericanReview, 1881. Ralph Ellison, "What America Would Be Like without Blacks," Time, April 6,

1970. The historiography of how immigrants became white is rich. Two good ex­ amples: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the Amer­ ican Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). On the "one drop" rule, see David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional

Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), especially chap. 2, "The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule."

2. Robin]. Anderson, "Dynamics of Economic Well-Being," in Household Economic Studies (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2011). "Home Ownership Rates by Race and Ethnicity of Householder, 1994-2010," in Housing Vacancies and Home­ ownership: Annual Statistics 2010 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2011).

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid School­

ing in America (New York: Random House, 2005). Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010 ). Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ( orig. 1852; Mos­ cow: Progress Publishers, 1937).

3. Terry Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71. K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 125.

4. Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness, 108-28. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 5. Bunzel, "Black Studies at San Francisco State," 36. Blackmun Papers, Box 260,

Folder 7: Syllabus, University of California Regents v. Bakke, p. II.