Dear Bruce,

The causes you cite behind the rise of the Religious Right – the civil rights movement, Francis Schaeffer, Reconstructionism, and the like – are absolutely correct, though I think we can push it back even farther. (I might add to your list the reaction to the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.)

William Jennings Bryan, probably the most identifiable evangelical in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, would be considered a political liberal by almost any standard today. Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president and Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, was involved in liberal and progressive causes.

Bryan, however, suffered a brutal character assassination at the hands of H. L. Mencken during the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925. He died in Dayton several days after the trial, and evangelicals thereafter retreated into a subculture of their own making. Evangelicals (at least those in the North) were largely inactive in political matters during those years, until the emergence of Jimmy Carter as a national figure in the mid-1970s.

During this half-century of political quiescence, there was a good bit of cold war rhetoric in evangelical circles, and this had the effect of nudging evangelicals toward the right. That tendency was abetted also by the very public friendship between Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, who formed a bond in the 1950s when they were both coming of age as anti-communist crusaders.

At that point, the forces you mentioned came into play, leading to the organization of the Religious Right as a political entity in the late 1970s. This coalition, as I demonstrate in the book, coalesced, not as a direct response to the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, but rather in an attempt to defend the tax-exempt status of institutions like Bob Jones University, despite their racially discriminatory policies.

By the way, as you know from reading Thy Kingdom Come, I don’t much care for the term Christian Right to describe this loose federation of politically conservative evangelicals. I think Religious Right is far better. I find the term Christian Right offensive, because I detect little that I would identify as Christian in the actions and the agenda of the Religious Right.

Randall Balmer