Religion in 20th Century American Politics, A Rough Overview

It is very easy to forget, in the present North American political climate, that religious interests were well represented on both sides of the political divide down to the latter half of the 20th century. As I described towards the end of January, the sort of politics practiced both on the left and right have a thoroughly religious pedigree that goes back at least as far as Henry VIII's nationalization of the English Church in the 15th century. The political outlook identified as liberal and progressive was usually represented by liberal-minded Presbyterians, while the outlook corresponding to a conservative agenda was royalist and Anglo-Catholic.

Sometime in the course of the latter half of 20th century, the Evangelical descendants of the Presbyterians abandoned their patrimony, leaving it to the social Gospel of mainline congregations, whose numbers are in a state of rapid decline. The consequence has been that the political left is largely occupied by groups organized around explicitly secular principles. No doubt a good number of very pious believers identify with left-leaning  social principles; but it is hardly possible among whites to organize around an explicitly religious message. A slightly different story has to be told about African-American communities, where voting Democrat and going to church are still publicly compatible.

The near-complete abandonment of the political left by religious organizations has had a profoundly distorting effect on the narrating of American history. Current preoccupations with the confessional basis of the American Constitution very obviously emerge from the contemporary religious circumstances (see here and here). Though a more striking example is provided by the one-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (d. 1925), eulogized as 'The Great Commoner'. Throughout his life, Bryan had been a tireless crusader on behalf of the economically disadvantaged, the scourge of big banks and big business. His politics were anti-elitist and anti-imperial, in an age when privilege and empire were ubiquitous.

But in the 1960s, Bryan's memory was pilloried in a theatrical rendition of the famous 1925 Scopes Trail, Inherit the Wind. The original purpose of the trial had been to test the constitutionality of a law banning the teaching of evolution in high school classrooms. The Great Commoner rode into Dayton, Tennessee determined to defend the word of the Lord and the dignity of all humanity against the pernicious doctrine of the survival of the fittest. In Bryan's mind, biblical creationism allied itself with liberal social policies. Later generations would look back at the Scopes Trial, concluding that Bryan's defense of creationism at the trial was an inexplicable departure from an otherwise sterling progressive record.

So what happened to the religious left? When did former liberals begin to condemn liberalism as the province of libertarians and libertines? Prior to the 20th century, religious pluralism in the United States largely meant divisions between different Protestant denominations--Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc. Catholics were also present in large numbers after 1830, but were marginalized from public life, a stigma still felt during the 1961 election of John. F. Kennedy. Confessing communities divided along "orthodox" and "progressive' lines, but there was a broad political consensus within communities.

Iin the second half of the 20th century, old denominational loyalties began to break down. Roughly around the beginning of the 1970s, inter-denominational movements gave birth to inter-denominational institutions like the Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and the Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. The movement towards ecumenism continues apace today as social conservatives look beyond denominational distinctions, and even beyond religious distinctions, for like-minded coreligionists who share their fundamental values among immigrant communities.

What had happened was the new ecumenism collided with the conservative politics of 'The Great Communicator' Ronald Reagan. It organized itself on the political right, bringing along conservative Catholic and Jewish groups. The religious alignment with political conservatism in the 1970s and 80s was in many ways self-consciously antithetical to Dr. Martin Luther King's Civil Rights movement and also Jimmy Carter's very public attempts to cultivate a much more liberal vision for Christian political engagement. Honouring Reagan a couple of years before his death in 2004, Falwell said, 'He was as pro-life, pro-family, pro-national defense and pro-Israel--as we were.'

The movement towards an ever-more inclusive ecumenical fellowship was thus matched by a corollary movement towards political exclusivity. The strength of greater numbers appears to have inspired thoughts of claiming more worldly forms of power. The contemporary political context has been described in terms of a cultural war for the soul of America. The language is revealing, as it changes one's idea of what the political process is, from a contest between interested parties more or less restrained by the rule of law, into a struggle of bare political will.

A lamentable irony, the language conflict is embraced on the religious right. For the contrasting idea of mutual submission to the rule of law is the combined Greco-Roman and Hebrew patrimony of the successor nations to that international order known as Western Christendom.