How Evangelicals became Republicans

so one of the main characteristics of the Republican Party of the United States is the leadership role played by evangelical Christians for example vice president Mike Pence Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and prominent senators like Ted Cruz Tim Scott and Josh Homme all would fall under the broad category of evangelical Christians the same is true for a number of prominent Republican aligned political commentators including and Coulter charlie kirk candice owens phil robertson and even diamondden silk now why are evangelical Christians so drawn to the Republican Party well the obvious answer is they really like its political agenda for example a recent 20/20 Pew Research poll had 76% of evangelicals saying they agree with President Trump on all or many issues with 81 percent saying Trump fights for what I believe in 81 percent was also the rate of support that Trump got from evangelical Christians in the last election though this rate has been pretty steady for Republican presidential candidates for a while now so today we are going to look at how all of this happened why it has become so easy to just take it for granted that evangelical Christians will support the Republican Party and how this rigid support has affected the shape of the American two-party system now it is important to remember that most Americans are not evangelical Christians in fact even most American Christians are not evangelical Christians and things get even narrower when we separate white evangelical Christians from black evangelical Christians who are often considered to be part of a sort of different culture in 2017 the Public Religion Research Institute estimated white evangelical Christians to be about 17 percent of the US population while the polling group Barna which uses a stricter definition says the number might be closer to just 6% now before we go any further we should obviously talk a little bit about what exactly an evangelical Christian even is because as we can see there is clearly a fair bit of subjectivity here evangelical is a Christian identity although it is not exactly a denomination like Baptist or Lutheran or Pentecostal though it may overlap with identities like those No it is really more of a broad theological term that describes how some people understand and practice Christianity at a more conceptual level but I am no theologian so let us now turn things over to my good friend Andrew M Henry a PhD student in Religious Studies from Boston University and the host of a very good religious education channel called religion for breakfast so take it away Andrew thanks JJ so what is evangelicalism evangelicals form a subset of Protestant Christianity that emphasize a born-again experience a personal relationship with Jesus Christ evangelism and biblical let's go through these one by one a born-again experience refers to an emotional conversion experience in which a person accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior the born-again experience is such a big deal to evangelicals that the historian Thomas kid calls evangelicalism the religion of the born again this stems from the earliest decades of evangelicalism history during the revivalist movements of the 18th century called the Great Awakening Protestant ministers like John Wesley and George Whitfield who are sometimes called the founders of the evangelical movement argue that conversion is the experience of a new birth a thorough change of heart and life from sin to holiness next in our definition is that evangelicals tend to describe the religious life as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ now there are various ways to interpret this but this relationship could be described as evangelicals experiencing an interactive sense of God's presence the idea that God personally prompts you to live a righteous life or that God can speak to you in a variety of subtle ways it's a very interactive experience and relational way to think about God anthropologists such as Tonya Lerman who spent years studying the social psychology of American evangelicals found that they tend to emphasize that God personally communicates with them and that they attribute certain thoughts as coming from God himself related to the first two points evangelicals emphasize proselytizing or evangelizing others so that they can have their own born-again experiences and to enter into their own personal relationships with Jesus Christ evangelicals also emphasize sysm or what we would call regarding the Bible as God's divinely inspired Word that is the final authority on everything that you should believe or practice what this looks like on the ground is that evangelicals are much more likely to believe in biblical inerrancy compared to other Christians the belief that the Bible is without error in all of its historical details this leads to a high prevalence among evangelicals to believe in young Earth Creationism the idea that the universe is only six thousand years old now not all evangelicals hold to biblical inerrancy but many will still describe the Bible as authoritative or central to all beliefs and practices and we should probably define one other term here fundamentalism now all religious traditions have some form of fundamentalism but when is applied to evangelicalism we're referring to a subset of evangelicals that are even more socially and theologically strict these are Christian groups that emphasize doctrinal purity the idea that there are certain fundamentals of the faith that cannot be compromised such as biblical inerrancy and groups that emphasize separation from modernity the idea that Christians must remove themselves from the secular world which has resulted in various fundamentalist movements throughout the 20th century against rock music attending movies or dancing almost all fundamentalists or evangelicals but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists back to you JJ thanks Andrew now for much of American history the flavor of Christianity that Andrew was describing was quite unpopular if not openly scorned this was especially true among high-ranking people in government in academia and journalism and even what they call the mainline Christian churches during the late 19th and early 20th century in particular conventional wisdom stated that America was a country in which scientific rationalism had triumphed over religious fundamentalism the United States was still widely believed to be a Christian country but in a more passive abstract cultural sort of way people who went around talking about being born-again or believing every word of the Bible or saying that god could communicate with them we're seen as being very hick ish and backwards they were associated with things like the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 a very famous case that featured a fundamentalist politician arguing against the teaching of evolution in schools which is often credited for souring much of America on evangelical Christianity for at least a generation anyway for a long time this made American evangelical Christian culture a sort of isolated underground sort of thing a very unpopular religious minority who lived very separate and apart from mainstream America a group who didn't really participate in politics and had their own churches and schools and radio shows that last part is particularly important one of the big advantages that the evangelical Christians would have when it came to staging their big comeback was the fact that many of their preachers were enormous ly charismatic men who were very effective communicators indeed many of them literally came from a tradition known as charismatic Christianity which among other things really emphasized the importance of emotionally powerful sermons that could persuade people to feel the Holy Spirit inside them Billy Graham is the guy who is often considered the most responsible for helping burst evangelical Christianity into the American mainstream he was an enormous ly charismatic preacher and radio show host who became a major American celebrity in the 1950s due to the huge success of his traveling public sermons God bear him live for him that is the message of God tonight this great audience with people at Yankee Stadium Billy Graham's popularity made a lot of other evangelical preachers realize that they too could achieve great success by targeting larger audiences through the modern media this led to the rise of so-called televangelism or evangelical preachers getting their own TV shows where they could in theory preach to millions of Americans sitting on their couches there's coming a spiritual move and a revival where we will say thou art the Christ the Son of the Living God God gave on the side Jesus said his Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even mr. son of man benefit up the Bible says we are one with him we are one in him we're one spirit with the Lord were bone of his bone were flesh of his flesh and when Christ changes you everything changes let us pray all right so what does this have to do with politics well Arun the same time as evangelism was starting to rise as a more socially acceptable flavor of American Christianity another very important American movement was also on the rise the conservative movement like evangelical Christianity being a right winger in America was an identity that was long very stigmatized it was mostly associated with people who were bigots or crackpots or basically borderline fascists but beginning in the 1950s there was a growing movement in some intellectual circles to rehabilitate and modernize what it meant to be on the political right they said that this was critical in order to provide America with an alternate philosophy that could challenge the dominance of liberalism in those days liberalism was seen as the overwhelming ideology of the American political elite completely dominant in both political parties and what you asked was so bad about liberalism well by the late 1970s a lot of people felt that it had just failed to deliver the goods the war in Vietnam had ended in disgrace the Soviet Union was slowly taking over the world Watergate had forced a criminal president out of office and the guy who replaced him was a pathetic weakling violent crime had reached record levels America's big cities had become unlivable hellholes of poverty and drugs and high unemployment and inflation was wreaking havoc on the national economy basically the country looked to be a mess and the new conservatives who in those days were sometimes called the neoconservatives blamed it all on liberalism the evangelicals meanwhile reached the same conclusions but for different reasons they saw American decline as a symptom of a ruling class that had abandoned biblical values in favor of a destructive new doctrine that they called secular humanism they agreed with the neoconservatives Abood poverty and crime and drugs and the Soviet Union and all the rest but also focused on a few unique issues as well these included the breakdown of the traditional biblically ordained family structure which they saw evidenced through growing acceptance of divorce and promiscuity and homosexuality the rise of feminism which they saw as encouraging women to abandon their traditional roles as wives and mothers and thus break down the traditional family structure even further the legalization of abortion in all 50 states following the famous roe v wade Supreme Court ruling of 1973 many evangelicals saw this as basically legalizing murder since they believe that God creates life at the moment of conception and in general there was just a lot of frustration at the increasing secularization of American life in which once perfectly mainstream Christian traditions like teachers leading their students in prayer were suddenly being eliminated or even made illegal by a government seen as being hostile to religion what the evangelical and neoconservative leaders had in common was a shared belief that America was being led down a path to ruin by a liberal elite that was grossly out of touch with what most normal Americans actually wanted this was made particularly explicit in 1979 when a guy named Jerry Falwell senior a popular televangelist formed a political activism group called the moral majority Falwell theory of politics was that even if most Americans were not themselves evangelical Christians they were a lot closer to their beliefs than the beliefs of the secular humanist liberals who had amassed so much power in Washington DC [Applause] [Music] in 1980 the former Republican Governor of California Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected president of the United States it was a remarkable turnaround for a man who just a decade earlier had been quite widely written off as being to right-wing to have any sort of future in American politics Reagan was a born-again Christian and although a lot of people would say he was never all that religiously sophisticated he was very captivated by the arguments of the evangelical Christians which aligned very closely with his own conservative beliefs he became good buddies with Jerry Falwell and many of the other top evangelical leaders of the time and it was through this alliance that the modern transformation of the Republican Party began during his presidential campaign Reagan had this one very famous moment where he addressed this big gathering of evangelicals and gave one of his trademark Reagan quips a few days ago I addressed a group in Chicago and received their endorsement for my candidacy now I know this is a nonpartisan gathering and so I know that you can't endorse me but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorsed you and what you are doing now as a purely strategic alliance this was genius evangelical Christians though only a small group of Americans overall made for a fantastic political allies for two main reasons they were very loyal to their leaders who had a broad reach through television and their activist groups and be they were highly motivated to vote because of course they were animated by a sense of religious obligation which can make a big difference in a country where most people can barely be motivated to vote at all so Reagan won the Republican nomination and then the presidency winning a massive 75% of the white evangelical vote in the process and as everybody knows Reagan proceeded to lead a very conservative administration during his eight years in the White House to varying degrees of success his government prioritized addressing all of the anxieties of the 1970s including crime drugs economic malaise and international communism under the Republicans also took a sharply adversarial position towards the legal status of abortion at one point even promising to amend the US Constitution to outlaw it in 1985 the Reagan administration formally requested that the US Supreme Court overturned the roe v wade ruling and then in 1986 the Supreme Court only very narrowly voted to uphold it in a five-to-four decision the narrowness of that loss then gave rise to a popular trope among evangelicals that if they could just get one more judge appointed to the US Supreme Court the battle against legal abortion could be finally won but in many ways the most important legacy of the Reagan years was just the mainstreaming of this general philosophy that government power was something inherently bad to be forever on guard against being government was cast as a force fundamentally threatening to the beliefs and traditions of the American family which meant that it should get out of their lives as much as possible so everything from low taxes to gun rights to home schooling should be supported because they all contributed to the fundamental goal of a small non-invasive government for most of his two terms President Reagan was very popular which helped validate his alliance with the evangelicals as well as reinforce one of their big arguments aboot America namely that it was a much more conservative country than the liberal elites of the previous generation had assumed certainly if you look at public opinion polls from the Reagan years you can find plenty of evidence that Americans from the 1980s did indeed have rather conservative views on things like abortion and sex and LGBT rights and the problems of the country in general for a while it seemed like the evangelicals we're really on an ascendancy in fact at one time one of the most popular candidates to succeed President Reagan was Pat Robertson a very famous televangelist of the time but by the late 1980s public opinion was starting to slowly turn against the evangelicals one problem was that some of the top evangelical leaders had basically become too successful for their own good the traditional televangelist business model relied on public donations for funding but as the went on it was starting to look like a lot of these guys were racing way more money than they actually needed the 1980s saw a massive explosion of evangelical TV stations and universities and charities and hospitals and even theme parks all funded mostly by public donations this allowed many evangelical leaders to a mess a great deal of wealth and power yet they kept asking for even more money and we're seen as relying on increasingly manipulative tactics to get it I need some very quick money so I'll know when March comes I won't be taken I'll get to live then came a number of huge scandals which toppled some of the top televangelists of the time and really captured the nation's attention among other sensationalistic stories the famous TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart was revealed to have repeatedly solicited prostitutes well the equally famous Jim Baker was revealed to both be cheating on his wife and diverting money from his ministry in order to fund his cartoonishly lavish lifestyle Jim Baker was found guilty on all 24 counts of wire and mail fraud and conspiracy so Pat Robertson's presidential campaign wound up going nowhere and American politics in the 1990s was defined not by perpetual Reaganism but by the liberal boomer ISM of Bill Clinton it was a grim setback but the evangelicals would get their second act soon enough [Applause] [Music] so the second great era of evangelical political power in the United States occurred between the years 2001 and 2008 under the presidency of George W Bush now Bush was another born-again Christian but unlike Reagan he wasn't much of a political pioneer elected as the Republican governor of Texas in 1994 he was part of a big wave of post-reagan evangelical politicians getting elected to high office in their own right rather than merely relying on evangelical votes and if the evangelical politics of the 1980s were fresh and experimental the presidency of George W Bush in the early 2000s represented their professionalization by this time evangelical Christian culture had emerged as an increasingly visible force in American pop culture and media televangelism had declined quite a bit but in its place we got things like evangelical Christian novels and movies and rock music and even video games at the political level meanwhile a large and sophisticated network of evangelical Christian politicians and advisers and activists and lobbyists helped make the Republican Party much more serious and businesslike aboot focusing on a few core religiously inspired priorities first was abortion which was an issue that proved to have continuing resonance in a way that some of the earlier stuff aboot say feminism or prayer and schools had not now the fact that abortion has wound up as one of the defining issues of American Christian conservatives is a kind of uniquely American thing and there's a number of theories as to why this is one is that it is a testament to the American melting pot in a lot of other countries being very anti-abortion is considered a very Catholic thing with other types of Christian being more liberal on the issue and it was that way in America for quite a while as well but because America is this big diverse society in which a lot of different types of people all intermingle and influence one another a lot of conservative Catholics would say that their arguments on abortion ultimately persuaded America's Protestant evangelicals others would say that the whole roe v wade ruling which recognized abortion as a fundamental constitutional right was a lot more extreme dramatic than anything that ever happened in Europe for example which made some sort of pushback inevitable even some prominent liberal judges sometimes make this argument I thought well we wait was an easy case in the Supreme Court could have held that most extreme law unconstitutional and put down its pen instead the court wrote an opinion that made every abortion restriction in the country illegal in one fell swoop and that was not the way the court ordinarily operates and then there's the fact that American women were just having a lot of abortions in the 1970s and 80s compared to other Western countries like Britain or France and whatever the socio-economic reasons for why that was happening it did give the issue a lot of ongoing resonance in the u.s. that it didn't have in other places the second big issue was gay rights in the early 2000s courts around the United States began to rule that same-sex couples had the right to marry it was a very unpopular idea with the general public and especially evangelicals who as we said were very defensive about the traditional biblically ordained family structure President Bush in turn moved quickly to make opposition to gay marriage a big part of his political brand even backing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in all 50 states if judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage his hostility to gay marriage is often credited with helping him win a narrow re-election in 2004 at a time in which he was otherwise fairly unpopular and then the third leg of the stool was foreign policy a realm that had long served as a great rallying cry for conservatives of all stripes Ronald Reagan had said that the dominant geopolitical challenge facing the world was the growth of Soviet backed communist regimes he was hardly the first president to do of course but Reagan was famous for framing the Cold War in starkly moral terms which many evangelicals found quite attractive there is sin and evil in the world and we're enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil I ask you to resist the attempt since the USSR was officially atheist the spread of communism could be seen as something that was deeply anti-christian and anti-god as well as just a vision of the sort of totalitarian nightmare society that a powerful left-wing government could impose the USSR was long gone by the time George W Bush came along but a new totalitarian ideology was quickly regarded as the successor threat the Islamic extremism of terrorists like Osama bin Laden like communism Bin Ladin ism was a ideology that fantasized to boot a world without Christians and was thus one that American evangelicals felt great personal imperative to help stop and like Reagan Bush was not shy about framing America's post 9/11 war against Islamic fundamentalism in starkly moral terms including in one very infamous moment that he never quite lived down and this is a new kind of a new kind of evil and we all will love we understand and the American people are beginning to understand this is just this this this this crusade this war on terrorism the war on middle-eastern terrorism also provided President Bush with an opportunity to strengthen America's alliance with the nation of Israel this too was often framed in deeply moral terms that had particular resonance with evangelicals the Bible contains many references to the Jews as God's chosen people with a divine claim to a government in and deroun Jerusalem more controversially some evangelicals even believe that the existence of the State of Israel is a necessary precondition to the second coming of Christ this is the place where God and and and Satan I'm gonna on a square off because this is this is the turf or this is the playing field the playing field isn't in Ethiopia's not in Washington DC it's in Jerusalem that's the city either way continuing to defend and strengthen the American Israeli partnership became a powerful unifying issue to conservatives of all sorts as it remains today but that conservative unity also brings up an important point one of the key lessons of the Reagan and George W Bush presidencies is that evangelical Christians had the most influence when they were supporting positions that other more secular conservatives supported as well I mean I don't want to give the impression that evangelical Christians were like the only driving force in the modern American conservative movement certainly stuff like conservative talk radio and Fox News and magazines like National Review and websites like Breitbart we're very influential as well and they existed very much apart from the evangelical subculture even if they supported a lot of the same things but all of this overlap also begged an important question were the evangelicals actually changing the morals of America or were they simply providing a religious rationalization for a lot of things Americans wanted to do anyway which brings us to the present day [Applause] [Music] American attitudes have evolved a great deal since the age of Reagan and even the age of Bush by every conceivable measurement the country is a lot less religious with much more liberal attitudes towards things like marriage sex gender roles and LGBT rights not abortion though interestingly enough a common line you sometimes hear in conservative circles is that even though evangelicals have been very successful in politics they have been vastly less successful in every other realm of American life including education journalism and entertainment they have won many elections but lost the culture and this being the case I would say that a lot of evangelicals now have an increasingly minora terian view of themselves this would be the idea that evangelicals have basically given up the dream that their views represent something close to the mainstream of American popular opinion and instead once again conceptualized themselves as a small and unpopular minority that primarily needs government to protect them from a hostile majority culture this is why the concept of religious liberty has become such a popular slogan in the evangelical political movement this refers to the idea that even if American culture is broadly hostile to the evangelicals they should still be able to operate their schools and charities and businesses according to their religious beliefs one of the most famous recent episodes in this regard was the case of the Colorado Baker who didn't want to make a wedding cake for a gay couple if you remember that story protecting the rights of people like that Baker is the sort of thing that evangelicals now spend a lot of time worrying about and it is one of the reasons why there's so much focus on president Trump appointing good conservative judges abortion remains the other big moral issue that is still being actively fought this reflects the fact that American public opinion on this issue hasn't moved all that much since the 1970s accordingly the evangelical mantra of just one more judge on the US Supreme Court has remained popular throughout the Trump years yet that being said the Supreme Court already has a pretty solid majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents at this point and roe v wade still seems pretty far from being overturned anytime soon most credit that to the idea that American judges are very differential to the concept of precedent and roe v-- wade has been precedent in America for close to a half-century now just a few weeks ago in fact there was a major Supreme Court ruling that struck down mirror anti-abortion regulations that ruling was five to four but as the anti-abortion evangelical political commentator David French noted when you look closely at the ruling you will find that the size of the majority supporting the core of the abortion right is more like eight to one stricter abortion regulations may be within reach if the Republicans appoint one more judge but that's a pretty watered down goal compared to the 1980s in which outlawing legal abortion altogether seemed Within Reach but overall when we talk about the role played by evangelical Christians in American politics today we are less likely to talk about specific policy goals than just their incredibly fierce personal loyalty to President Trump himself at a time when the president is increasingly unpopular evangelical Christians are the faction of the electorate that is the most dogged lee loy 'el to him as I explained at the beginning of this video initially the argument that you often heard was that evangelical Christians were only big grudging supporters of Trump they knew he was not much of a Christian but they threw their support behind him anyway in this narrowly transactional way because they knew he had their back on the issues that mattered the most of them like abortion and religious liberty we're not electing a pastor in chief we're electing a commander in chief and we we can't expect our commander in chief to have the same qualities as our pastors and I think most of the rank-and-file evangelicals have figured that out on their own but on the other hand political pragmatism does not explain why white evangelicals are so overwhelmingly likely to call president Trump intelligent or honest or morally upstanding or why they tend to be such rock-solid supporters of aspects of his political agenda that have no obvious connection to the evangelical view of the world like his border security staff for his management of the kovat situation which gets to the big conclusion of this story for forty years America's evangelical Christians have tightly interwoven themselves with the Republican Party this has given them unprecedented power and influence but has also made it increasingly difficult to separate their religious identity from their political identity the question becomes to what extent are the political opinions of evangelical Christians motivated by their faith versus to what degree has their faith merely become an expression of their politics what do you think [Music]

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 1,321,429

Rating: 4.8836246 out of 5

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Id: zpLCIc5PvQw

Length: 32min 3sec (1923 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/IHaveSlysdexia]

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[u/foxbase]

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[u/badgerhax]

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