HOW SOCIAL CONSERVATISM CAN WIN

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

I first became involved in the religious conservative movement in 1983 when I made a personal decision for Christ. At the time, I was the executive director of the College Republican National Committee working to organize students on the college campuses for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. After my faith experience, I felt a burden to organize as many Christian young people as I could to become involved in the pro-family movement and to work for Reagan’s reelection. Those of us who were inspired by Reagan and felt the generational pull of the conservative agenda were, figuratively, the mirror image of the hippies, the Yippies, the Students for a Democratic Society, and other radical groups who protested the Vietnam War and drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968. One publication called us the “Red Dawn generation,” after the movie that portrayed young patriots opposing a fictional Soviet invasion of the United States. The film developed a cult following among campus conservatives.

Reagan won his strongest level of support among any age group in the electorate from eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, meaning the oldest man ever to occupy the Oval Office did best among the youngest voting cohort. This phenomenon befuddled many political analysts. But for those of us who came of political age in the late 1970s and ’80s, it was an issue of whether America’s best days would still be ahead or were behind us. Our commitment to Reagan and conservatism arose out of the searing experience of the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter, stagflation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran, and our country doubting its exceptional role in the world after Vietnam. This was particularly true among evangelical youth, who identified with Reagan because of his faith and his pro-life stance.

In September 1989, I was invited by Pat Robertson to attend a meeting of evangelical leaders held in Atlanta to chart the course of the movement after Reagan. I had met Pat at the inauguration of George H. W. Bush, and we were coincidentally seated next to each other at a dinner, where we had a spirited conversation about his recent presidential campaign, what he planned to do next, and the future of the pro-family cause. As a graduate student at Emory University working on my dissertation, I was a little surprised to be included in a meeting with such evangelical luminaries as D. James Kennedy and Tim and Beverly LaHaye. At the conclusion of the meeting, Robertson introduced me as the executive director of an organization that as yet had no name, which became the Christian Coalition. This meeting occurred two months after Jerry Falwell’s closing of the Moral Majority, which he announced at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Las Vegas.

Many predicted that the religious right was dead. They could not have been more wrong. Within a few years the Christian Coalition had over two million members and activists in over three thousand local chapters. In 1994, the Christian Coalition distributed over forty million pieces of voter education literature and helped turn out a record number of evangelical voters, a net gain of nine million votes over the 1990 baseline. This contributed to the election of the first Republican majority in the House and the Senate at the same time in forty years.

Clearly, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the premature reports of our death were greatly exaggerated. This remains true today. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 2012 election results and the recent Supreme Court opinions on marriage, there are some who are repeating this error and suggesting that evangelicalism is a movement in decline. But as we shall see, the opinion elites always underestimate both the persistence and resilience of people of faith engaged in civic affairs.

It is difficult to overstate what a significant religious, cultural, and political development the rise of the religious conservative movement really was in American history. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter became the first candidate from the Deep South elected to the presidency since before the Civil War, he won two-thirds of the evangelical vote. Four years later, Ronald Reagan won 64 percent of the evangelical vote. This constituted an astonishing seismic shift in the party loyalty of a constituency that represented at least one out of every five voters. Carter went from carrying every state in the South except Virginia in 1976 to losing every state in the South except his home state of Georgia in 1980. This was due primarily to the dramatic change in the voting pattern of evangelicals. The Reagan coalition, which has proved to be among the most durable in American political history, is inconceivable and could not have succeeded without these voters.

Political engagement was not something evangelicals sought. From the time of the Scopes Trial in 1925, the so-called Monkey Trial, when a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was convicted in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating Tennessee state law and teaching the theory of evolution in a science class, then saw his conviction overturned by an appellate court, until the mid-1970s, evangelicals lived in a kind of self-imposed political exile in their own country. As historian Edward Larson has documented, after the Scopes trial, fundamentalism became a term of aspersion in American culture, leading evangelicals to build a separate and distinct subculture of schools, colleges, seminaries, publications, and media outlets.¹ They largely withdrew from politics on a national level, a retreat that lasted for two generations and spanned two world wars, one hot, and the other cold. They reeled from their defeat in the debate over evolution. They smarted from the crude caricature drawn of them by harsh critics like H. L. Mencken, who denounced them as boobs and yokels and morons and accused them of polluting their society with what he called, and I quote, “theological bilge.” They were buffeted by the twin forces of modernity and ascendant liberal theology. These evangelicals and fundamentalists, who from their rise during the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s and 1840s, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, played a central and pivotal role in American culture, education, and civic life, undertook a systematic and deliberate retreat from public life.

The failure and ultimate repeal of Prohibition, eight years after the Scopes Trial, seemed to signal their final humiliation. And for the next forty years, even though they were over forty million strong, they existed as a nation within a nation, a society within a society, and a people within a people, turning inward, building their own educational, cultural, and church-related institutions. Their isolation was so complete that it didn’t come to an end even when the Supreme Court declared the New York Regents’ prayer unconstitutional in the Engel v. Vitale case in 1963. It didn’t end with the Roe v. Wade decision a decade later.

If one looks at the history of Roe, what is most striking, especially given what happened later, is the relative quiescence of the evangelical community at the time the Supreme Court rendered its decision. Certainly most evangelicals disagreed with the decision, but at the time abortion was not viewed as a political issue. In 1967, when then-governor Ronald Reagan signed California’s Therapeutic Abortion Act, which became a model for other states seeking to liberalize their abortion laws prior to Roe, the issue had little resonance in evangelical churches. Most viewed abortion as a personal issue outside the realm of politics. Moreover, evangelicals had no grassroots organizations to oppose abortion on demand because they had been allowed to wither away in the previous forty years. Thus, the primary opposition to Roe v. Wade and the chief impetus for a human life constitutional amendment protecting unborn children came from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ironically, what ended their political exile was their disappointment with one of their own, Jimmy Carter, the most explicitly evangelical president since Woodrow Wilson and a devout Southern Baptist. Carter taught Sunday school each week at a Baptist church in Plains, Georgia. He was the first president in modern times to say he was “born again,” a phrase that many Americans, and even more journalists, were unfamiliar with at the time. The virtually unknown Carter’s victory in the 1976 Democratic primaries over more prominent and established candidates like Hubert Humphrey and Henry “Scoop” Jackson and in the general election over Gerald Ford is the stuff of legend. In the post-Watergate period, Carter’s religious faith, his emphasis on piety and moral character, and his promise to “never tell the American people a lie,” a promise made more compelling by his faith journey, were critical to his appeal as a candidate. So striking was Carter’s unabashed evangelicalism after decades of candidates treating their faith as a private issue that after his election, Newsweek put Carter on the cover and declared that 1976 was “the year of the evangelical.”

Given Ford’s defeat of Reagan at the Republican Convention in Kansas City in 1976 and his pro-choice views, evangelical leaders such as Lou Sheldon with the Traditional Values Coalition and Pat Robertson either met with Carter, expressed some sympathy for his candidacy, or openly supported him. It didn’t take long for them to be disappointed, and their disappointment reached a peak in 1978 when the Treasury Department proposed regulations requiring Christian schools across the United States to demonstrate that they were not functioning as segregated academies seeking to sidestep court-ordered desegregation—or lose their tax-exempt status. These regulations were a dagger aimed at the heart of Christian education in the country and evangelical ministries and churches expressed outrage. Over one hundred thousand letters descended on the White House and the Treasury Department, which quickly withdrew the regulations to try to contain the political damage. Evangelicals viewed the episode as an act of open hostility against their churches and schools by the administration of a coreligionist, a betrayal (added to a long list of others) they could not ignore. Though Carter undertook some feeble and belated attempts to mend fences, evangelical leaders began to search for a new political leader.

They found one in the unlikely person of Ronald Reagan, a former liberal Democrat, a former union president, a former B-grade actor who rarely attended church services, and the first divorced man ever to win a major party nomination. When asked if he was born again, Reagan said that they did not use the term in his church. But make no mistake: Ronald Reagan was a genuinely historic figure for evangelical Christians. First, he was a man of deep faith in God, a faith first inculcated in him by his mother, who took him to church and gave him devotional books to read, providing solace and comfort in the home of an alcoholic father who engaged in binge drinking, disappeared frequently, and lost jobs because of his drinking.

Reagan also believed that he had a mission and purpose in life: to defeat Soviet communism. And he held the strongly pro-life, pro-family, and traditionalist views that became the touchstone of the religious conservative movement. After formally accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1980, Reagan addressed the Religious Roundtable gathering in Dallas, telling thousands of evangelicals cheering him (and millions more watching on television), “I know that you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you and the work that you’re doing for a better America.”

This event marked the formal marriage ceremony of the evangelical, pro-family, religious conservative movement and the modern Republican Party under Reagan. And there have really been only two significant demographic transformations in our politics in the last century that rival this movement of evangelicals from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. The first was the movement of African Americans from the party of Lincoln to the party of FDR, which took place between 1932 and 1940. Even in 1932, Herbert Hoover carried a majority of the African American vote against FDR, and as late as 1960, Richard Nixon ran for president as a card-carrying member of the NAACP and battled John F. Kennedy for the black vote. Kennedy carried the state of Georgia by a larger margin than he carried his home state of Massachusetts. That is how well the Democratic coalition once performed among white voters in the South. The movement of African Americans from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, from the party of Lincoln to the party of Franklin Roosevelt, is a legacy that lives with us to this day in the person and presidency of Barack Obama. Obama won 98 percent of the black vote in 2008 and slightly less in 2012.

The second major shift was the movement of ethnic Catholic union households into the Democratic Party. The political scientist V. O. Key has demonstrated that this movement really began in 1928, with the nomination of the first Catholic major party nominee in U.S. history, New York governor Alfred E. Smith, who ran against Prohibition and lost in a landslide. But just as Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 would later signal the emergence of a Republican South, so did Smith’s defeat in 1928 presage the later victory of FDR and the rise of a huge Catholic union household vote. It was not uncommon for decades thereafter to go into the home of a middle-class Roman Catholic family and find two portraits hanging over the mantel: Jesus Christ and FDR. Later, FDR’s portrait would be replaced by that of their fellow Catholic, Kennedy. These blue-collar Catholic voters would remain fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party until 1980, when in Catholic and union states like Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois they voted for Reagan and political scientists began to label them “Reagan Democrats.” (As with their transition to the Democrats, which began with Smith but reached full fruition with FDR, their drift to the GOP began in 1972 in the Nixon landslide.)

Roughly half of the evangelicals in the U.S. reside south of the Mason-Dixon Line, so as they began to move into the Republican Party between 1976 and 1980, they helped move the South from being a solid-blue region to deep red. This represented a total change from the South’s affinity for Democrats, which continued from the formative years of the party under Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson until well into the 1960s. In 1946 when the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, there were 105 members of the House from the eleven states of the old Confederacy: 103 were Democrats, while only 2 were Republicans. After the 2010 off-year Republican landslide, there were 152 members of the House from the eleven states of the old South and only 47 of them were Democrats. In the Senate, there were 22 senators from those eleven states, and 20 were Republicans. This same pattern has now been repeated in state legislatures throughout the South. Following the 2010 elections, for the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans gained control of both chambers of the legislatures in North Carolina and Arkansas, two of the final holdouts of Democratic control.

For most of the 1980s evangelicals focused on a cluster of three primary issues. First, a constitutional amendment legalizing voluntary prayer in public school. Second, a human life amendment that would have declared unborn children persons under the Constitution and afforded them legal protection. Third, the nomination of conservatives and strict constructionists to the federal courts, and especially to the U.S. Supreme Court, since evangelicals, faithful Catholics, and other religious conservatives felt that the Supreme Court had been hostile to their beliefs and religious freedom. But the human life amendment never had sufficient votes to pass in the House or the Senate during the 1980s. The school prayer amendment passed in the House but narrowly failed in the Senate during Reagan’s presidency, in spite of bipartisan support. Reagan’s efforts to move the Supreme Court in a more conservative direction were frustrated by the confirmation of Sandra Day O’Connor (who turned out to be much more moderate than either Reagan or evangelicals anticipated) and the defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987. David Souter’s confirmation in 1990 added another justice to the high court who proved far less conservative than promised. As a result of these appointments, the court was two votes shy of a pro-life majority when it revisited the abortion issue in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision in 1992, upholding Pennsylvania’s restrictions on abortion while also upholding Roe. This decision became a painful symbol of the frustration and disappointment evangelicals felt toward the Republicans, throwing a wet blanket on their intensity and enthusiasm in the three-way contest between Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot.

With the election of Bill Clinton and the shuttering of the Moral Majority, many pundits declared that the religious right was dead. But it wasn’t dead; its members just had to retool and revise their playbook. Part of that playbook was to broaden their agenda and expand their basket of issues. In 1993 I wrote an essay for Policy Review, the flagship publication of the Heritage Foundation, entitled “Casting a Wider Net.” That article argued that because the Bible contains principles and instruction on every area of life, evangelicals needed to work on a wider array of issues, not just school prayer and abortion. To gain credibility and become more relevant to the lives of not only secular voters but many voters of faith, they needed to work on spending, taxes, welfare reform, education reform, and foreign policy, bringing time-honored Judeo-Christian values to bear on all areas of public policy.

The second innovation was bold incrementalism. Evangelicals began to realize after fifteen years of civic engagement that they were not going to change the culture by throwing a single Hail Mary pass, electing a president and members of Congress, confirming a handful of new Supreme Court justices, overturning Roe, passing a school prayer amendment to the Constitution, and ushering in the millennium. This was a sobering but important lesson in the political education of evangelicals. Religious conservatives learned it just as others who preceded them into the civic arena did. Feminists found out the hard way with the Equal Rights Amendment that the framers made it extremely difficult to amend the Constitution. Certainly the Constitution is a living document, but it is not designed to change dramatically without broad, bipartisan support. The labor unions earlier found that the Constitution was not malleable to their purposes when they attempted to outlaw child labor by amendment. Child labor eventually became verboten by law and economic custom, but not by amending the founding document.

Social reform movements, it turns out, are highly adaptive organisms. So like hamsters trying to get a food pellet, the pro-life community simply tried a different path. Frustrated in their attempt to pass a human life amendment, pro-lifers sought another means to restrict abortion and protect life. The National Right to Life Committee, using model legislation that had passed in Ohio, proposed a federal ban on a procedure known as “partial-birth abortion,” a rare and gruesome procedure in which a child is partially delivered and then dismembered. There was bipartisan support for the measure, with even liberals like the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calling partial-birth abortion “infanticide.”

Republicans in Congress passed the partial-birth abortion ban three times before it became law when signed by George W. Bush (Bill Clinton had vetoed it twice and the Supreme Court had earlier overturned an Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated Roe). This was the first federal ban on an abortion procedure since Roe became law in 1973. Meanwhile, working with Representatives Frank Wolf of Virginia and Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, the Christian Coalition made its number one legislative priority the passage of a $500 per child tax credit, arguing that the tax burden on middle-class families with children had become excessive and deleterious to the family. We argued that the intact, two-parent family was the most successful Department of Health, Education, and Welfare ever conceived. Why, then, take 40 percent of such families’ income and send it to Washington? Why not allow more of their money to stay in their pockets and in their homes so that they could use it as they saw fit, for the education and the nurture and the health care of their children? We also proposed eliminating the “marriage penalty,” which forced married couples to pay higher taxes when filing a joint return than a couple living together and filing separately.

This $500-per-child tax credit and reducing or eliminating the marriage tax became mainstays of Republican fiscal policy. They became key provisions in the Republican budget alternative in 1993, under then-ranking Republican budget committee member John Kasich, and were included in the Contract with America. These tax provisions united social and economic conservatives, bringing them together in common cause to both cut taxes and strengthen the family, foreshadowing the Tea Party movement’s ability to bring them together to reduce runaway spending and massive deficits. The child tax credit became law when Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1996 after previously vetoing the GOP-passed budget and shutting down the government. George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 proposing a tax plan that doubled the child tax credit to $1,000. And even as Barack Obama campaigned to repeal the Bush tax cuts, he always exempted the child tax credit and the amelioration of the marriage penalty as targets of his ire. In the so-called fiscal cliff negotiations between the Obama White House and Republicans in Congress, the child tax credit and marriage tax reduction were sacrosanct.

Similarly, the Christian Coalition and other pro-family groups lobbied for welfare reform, not based so much on fiscal grounds but making a moral argument that by subsidizing illegitimacy and penalizing marriage and work, welfare policy had cruelly consigned millions to poverty. Rick Santorum echoed this theme recently during his 2012 presidential campaign when he frequently cited a 2009 Brookings Institute study that found that if you didn’t graduate from high school, didn’t have a full-time job, and bore children out of wedlock, you had a 76 percent chance of being in poverty. But if you got a high school diploma, if you got a job and kept it—any job, no matter what it paid—and if you got married and stayed married, bearing children within the institution of marriage, you had just a 2 percent chance of being in poverty.²

During the 1990s, working with Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Santorum, pro-family conservatives adopted policy changes that helped move two million Americans from welfare to work, from government dependency to dignity and self-reliance. This policy agenda, focused on a better society built on stronger marriages and families, is the future of the religious conservative movement. The pro-family movement is more effective and sophisticated than ever. If one looks at the Tea Party movement, which flowered seemingly out of nowhere in 2009 in response to government overreach under Obama, it has steadfastly focused on fiscal and spending issues. But according to studies conducted by both the Pew Research Organization and the Public Religion Research Institute, 60 percent of Tea Party members are self-identified evangelicals, half of U.S. evangelicals consider themselves part of the Tea Party, and three-quarters of Tea Party members and supporters are social conservatives. They’re pro-life, they’re pro-marriage, and they’re for religious freedom and liberty, and there’s a remarkable overlap between social conservative voters and Tea Party voters. In the 2010 elections, according to a postelection survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, 41 percent of all voters who went to the polls in 2010 self-identified as Tea Party members and 31 percent of all voters identified themselves as born-again evangelicals or conservative Christians. Again, one can see a major overlap between the two constituencies.

Anyone who has attended a Tea Party rally or been at a Tea Party event knows the decided religious and spiritual flavor of their rallies and events. A popular Tea Party anthem is a song called “I Am America” in which Krista Branch sings, “I’ve got some good news. We’re taking names and we’re waiting now for judgment day.” Some might quarrel with the theology behind the lyrics, but the music video features a girl holding up a sign that says, II CHRONICLES 7:14. This is a verse from the Old Testament that has tremendous significance and meaning in the evangelical community because it speaks to the need for personal as well as national repentance and humility. When Reagan took the oath of office as president on January 20, 1981, he put his hand on a Bible that had belonged to his mother and was open to this verse.

This is not to imply that the Tea Party and the religious conservative movement are one and the same, nor is it to suggest that they’re synonymous, but it does demonstrate that evangelicals, often caricatured as caring only about school prayer, marriage, and abortion, are in fact engaged in a much wider array of issues. As a result, they have never been more effective or turned out to the polls in larger numbers. In 2012 they were 27 percent of the electorate and cast 81 percent of their ballots for Mitt Romney, who as a Mormon did not even share their theology.³ They are a permanent fixture in American politics, and they are not likely to go away anytime soon. If past is prologue, they will stubbornly resist any attempt to stigmatize them or drive them from public life.

The final change in the religious conservative movement is the transition from a largely church-based movement led by pastors and religious leaders to a grassroots public policy movement led largely by political operatives, conservative community organizers, and elected officials. When Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, he held “I Love America” rallies that took place mostly in evangelical churches. State and local Moral Majority leaders were usually independent Baptist or Southern Baptist pastors. This was natural and logical at the time because the evangelical church served as an incubator of the movement. In the intervening three decades, an entire generation of evangelical public policy advocates and political organizers have been credentialed. The president of the Family Research Council is Tony Perkins, who previously served as a highly effective and respected state legislator in Louisiana. His predecessor was Gary Bauer, who served as chief domestic policy adviser in the Reagan White House. The president of the Susan B. Anthony List is Marjorie Dannenfelser, a former Capitol Hill staffer and public policy activist. The executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which I founded in 2009 to mobilize evangelicals for effective civic action, is Gary Marx, who served as a senior operative in the Bush-Cheney campaigns. As a result of this, the pro-family and religious conservative movement has gone from being on the margins of our political system, with its nose pressed against the glass of the culture, to being in the mainstream, fully integrated with the most advanced and sophisticated voter registration and get-out-the-vote technology available. At Faith and Freedom Coalition, for example, we have built a faith-based voter database by marrying consumer databases with demographic information, micro-targeting data, and voter files of over thirty million evangelical and faithful Catholic voters. These citizens can be contacted by mail, phone, e-mail, text message, and social networking technology like Twitter and Facebook to work on public policy, to press for legislation, and to encourage them to vote. This represents roughly a tenfold increase in the voter universes that we had at our disposal at the peak of the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS

What binds faith-based conservatives with others in the conservative movement such as libertarians, despite differences on some important issues? Ultimately, it is the founding principles as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The genius of the Founders was that they predicated the entire organizing principle of our government around the concept that men are sinners and we live in a fallen world. This became the premise for the strict limits on the national government, the separation of powers, and the Tenth Amendment reserving all but enumerated powers to the states. Madison famously said in Federalist # 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Men are not angels. Given unlimited power, they are certain to abuse it. This is a biblical principle that underlies our form of government. While economic conservatives and libertarians may favor limited government based on more secular beliefs, such as Austrian economics and the like, faith-based conservatives share their fears (albeit for different reasons) of a big government that taxes too much, spends too much, and regulates too much. Evangelicals and faithful Catholics understand that freedom is indivisible, and that restrictions on economic freedom will eventually restrict one’s religious freedom.

The genius of the Founders was really twofold. First, to limit the federal government to specific, enumerated purposes. For example, in the minds of the framers, the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause was not unlimited. Under ObamaCare, the federal government argued it had the power to force citizens to engage in commerce by purchasing health insurance. Even the Supreme Court rejected that argument, concluding the only possible constitutional ground was the government’s taxing power. The hostility toward the faith community found in ObamaCare’s mandate on religious charities, colleges, and hospitals to provide health-care services that assault their conscience and violate their religious beliefs is further proof that both economic and religious conservatives oppose a government that is too big, too controlling, and restricts their freedom.

This truism was demonstrated yet again by the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on marriage. In a single act of judicial fiat, the high court rejected ten thousand years of collective wisdom of Western civilization, the laws and customs of thirty-eight states, and a federal law (the Defense of Marriage Act) passed by a bipartisan margin large enough to pass a constitutional amendment, signed into law by a Democratic president, and declared the defense of traditional marriage a form of bigotry. Like the Massachusetts General Court decision a decade ago that found in the state constitution a right of same-sex couples to marry that had eluded legislators and governors of both parties in the two centuries since John Adams drafted it, the Supreme Court legislated from the bench and short-circuited the democratic process. While it did not order every state to adopt the most liberal marriage laws in the Western world—as it did with abortion law in Roe—the high court laid the predicate for such action in the future. This is why social conservatism is best understood as a largely defensive movement, seeking to defend the time-honored institutions of marriage, family, and the church from the infringements on their liberty by the government.

The Founders wanted to devolve that power back to states, to communities, and, most important, to mediating institutions like religious organizations, charities, voluntary associations, and the family. They also wanted to take whatever power there was at the federal level and disperse it among three branches that all constantly fought with one another. These were all ingenious ways to limit. But we can never lose sight of the fact that this limitation was based on the Founders’ very clear notion that if one does not restrain the power of government, men will abuse all power that is centralized. This is why George Washington argued in his Farewell Address that freedom and prosperity are impossible without the twin pillars of religion and morality.

Social and economic conservatives also understand that a looming fiscal disaster awaits us. The ticking time bomb of entitlement obligations will explode within a decade. The government has been borrowing and spending, taxing and spending, printing money and spending, and slowly bankrupting the country. The music is about to stop. Kevin Williamson and Niall Ferguson have recently argued that unsustainable government spending is the next bubble. For the first time since Social Security began in 1935 we are paying out more in benefits than we collect in payroll taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security and Medicare will both be unable to pay their obligations by roughly 2030.

Some years ago an organization polled young people in their twenties and asked them whether they believed there was life on Mars and whether they expected ever to collect a Social Security check. A higher percentage of Americans under the age of thirty believed there was life on Mars than believed they would ever collect Social Security benefits. At the time that Social Security was passed in 1935, the average life expectancy for an American male was sixty-three, and beneficiaries did not begin receiving benefits until age sixty-five. Today, the average life expectancy of an American male is roughly seventy-nine, and the life expectancy for the average American female is eighty-three. Actuarially, the numbers do not add up. Fifty years ago there were sixteen workers for every retiree; today there are approximately three workers for every retiree, and by 2050 there will be approximately two workers for every retiree. To keep Social Security from going bankrupt, the government would have to double the payroll tax or cut benefits in half.

George W. Bush argued we should reform Social Security or it would not be there for future generations. There has not been a president since Social Security was created in 1935 who spent more political capital than George W. Bush did to try to save the system. He did eighty-two Social Security events all over this country but could not get the votes of the three Democrats he needed to move the bill in the U.S. Senate.

In the end, the Soviet system proved intellectually and morally bankrupt. In many ways it collapsed under its own weight. Margaret Thatcher famously said that Ronald Reagan gave it a push, and so he did. Entitlement spending is also unsustainable, but social conservatives and their economic conservative allies need to give it a push. They need to point out that it undermines the family by transferring from children and loved ones to the federal government the responsibility for caring for one’s parents in their golden years. Government cannot replace with entitlement spending the individual’s responsibility to prepare for retirement or the social responsibility of children to assist in the care of their parents, just as their parents cared for them.

We can assert these basic constitutional and Judeo-Christian principles and still make common cause with other conservatives. I support the separation of church and state to protect the church from the state, not protect the state from the church. The idea of a disestablishment of religion was not invented by liberals, and it certainly wasn’t invented by the ACLU. The idea of the disestablishment of the church was an evangelical idea, and specifically a Baptist idea, especially in Virginia during the colonial period when Anabaptists were forced to pay taxes to support Anglican meetinghouses that they did not attend and whose theology they did not share.

The rule of law presupposes a moral code of conduct based on societal consensus. The question is not whether there will be laws, for as long as there is civilization there will be laws that constrain and restrict human activity. The only real question is, “Based on what moral code?” Is marriage between a man and a woman, as we’ve believed throughout the history of Western civilization, or does it have a different definition? When it comes to bearing and raising children, who has the primary responsibility: is it the government and the school, or is it parents? These issues are resolved through the democratic process and ultimately a moral code prevails. This is why it is naive in the extreme to expect social issues to disappear from the political discourse; because they involve law and the common lexicon of right and wrong, they will always be part of the debate. Better for conservatives to understand this and develop a language for dealing with social issues than to stick their heads in the sand and try to wish them away.

In February 2009, after Obama’s inauguration as president, Newsweek declared in a cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.” The punditry expected a conservative crack-up and the onset of a liberal renaissance more expansive and ambitious than either the New Deal or the Great Society. Within eighteen months after that cover story, Newsweek was bankrupt and Republicans gained sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest landslide in an off-year election since 1922, largely because of a surge of evangelical and Tea Party voters.

This is not to suggest conservative triumphalism. The 2012 elections demonstrated there is still resilient support in the U.S. electorate for Obama and his agenda. But exit polls also made clear that Obama’s reelection was not an unqualified endorsement of his agenda. By a healthy margin voters said the government was too big and doing too much, not too small and doing too little. And ObamaCare remains the most deeply unpopular entitlement program in history, with roughly half the electorate opposing it or calling for its partial or full repeal, while support for ObamaCare hovers between 35 and 40 percent of the electorate. Meanwhile, a majority of the American people now identify themselves as pro-life, according to recent polls by Gallup and other public opinion organizations.

Social conservatives have been declared dead on more than one occasion since they burst onto the political scene a little over three decades ago. Those critics who underestimated them failed to understand the persistence and passion of their citizenship. They love their country, they love God, and they believe they have just as much a right to make their voices heard in the political process as anyone else, not in order to establish heaven on earth, but to pass sound public policy and establish the common good. Those are both eminently desirable goals. They are here to stay, and they are likely to continue to shape our politics and the future of America as much in the future as in the recent past, or more, and the country will be better off for them.