Seemingly every day, a new poll finds white evangelicals—by far the largest subset of American Protestants—espousing views that would appear difficult to reconcile with the golden rule. For example, evangelicals are more likely than members of other religious groups to favor drastic cuts to foreign aid and domestic social welfare programs. They are less likely than other believers—or nonbelievers, for that matter—to say that the United States has a duty to accept refugees displaced by violence or natural disasters in their home countries. They are more likely than others to favor sharp reductions in legal immigration, as well as the deportation of undocumented immigrants, including children, who have entered the United States illegally. They are less likely than others to view systemic racism as a serious obstacle to the socioeconomic advancement of racial minorities. They are more likely than others to favor harshly punitive approaches to criminal justice, including the death penalty. The list goes on and on.1
These findings were fairly well established by the time of the 2016 presidential election. Still, the news that most evangelicals cast their ballots for Donald Trump caught many commentators off guard. In part this was because what was known of Trump’s personal life was sharply at odds with evangelical teachings. But it was also because Trump, in contrast to previous Republican nominees, made no effort to square his conservative policy positions with the Christian ethic of love and compassion. In fact, his chief calling card was his promise to show no mercy to those on the margins of American society.2 And yet, evangelicals, far from balking at Trump’s proudly amoral agenda, awarded him more than 80 percent of their votes. Significantly, Trump also fared reasonably well with white mainline Protestants, traditionally the more liberal branch of American Protestantism, capturing over 50 percent of their votes.3 Perhaps most surprising of all, devout white Protestants—those who reported attending religious services on a weekly basis—were the most enthusiastic Trump supporters of all.4
The news of Trump’s strong showing with white Protestant churchgoers soon sparked a broader debate concerning the relationship between religiosity and liberal democracy. For many commentators on the Left (as well as a few on the Right), the 2016 election returns confirmed a long-held suspicion that religious citizens—or at least white Protestant ones—are less than fully committed to the egalitarian norms of toleration and mutual respect that are often said to undergird the American constitutional system. How else to explain devout evangelicals’ enthusiastic support for a proudly irreligious candidate whose chief campaign strategy was to stoke irrational fears of immigrants, refugees, and non-Christians?5 But not everyone agreed with this line of analysis. Other commentators, including many who were deeply troubled by Trump’s victory, looked to history to show that Protestant Christianity was not an inherently reactionary force. In earlier eras, these writers pointed out, religious ideas and institutions had often functioned as engines of social reform, providing much of the grassroots energy behind the movements to abolish slavery, enfranchise women, prohibit child labor, establish a rudimentary social welfare state, and enact the transformative civil rights laws of the 1960s. Twenty-first-century Protestants may have been hoodwinked into supporting a candidate whose views were at odds with core Christian teachings. But to claim that this single incident was illustrative of Protestant religiosity’s broader impact on American political development was simply wrong .6
A glance at the historical record suggests that the second group of writers had a point: whatever else may be said about the relationship between Christianity and liberalism, it must be acknowledged that, at least in the American case, advocates of egalitarian reforms have often employed religious ideas and symbolism to great effect (as have their opponents). But to highlight the religious reform movements of the past is to raise a more fundamental question: what happened to this more tolerant and empathetic faith tradition? How, in other words, did the connection between Protestant religiosity and concern for the marginalized become so attenuated as to allow a candidate like Donald Trump to win the churchgoing vote in a landslide?
The most common way of answering this question is to point to the relatively recent rise of evangelicalism as the dominant strand of American Protestantism. For most of the nation’s history, the bulk of American Protestants were not evangelicals but rather mainline Protestants—a category that includes the Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, and some branches of the Baptist and Lutheran faiths. During the first half of the twentieth century, most of these denominations experienced strong growth, even as their leaders adopted left-of-center positions on issues such as child labor and civil rights. This changed during the late 1960s and 1970s, when the mainline churches began suffering serious declines in membership and giving, and when evangelical churches and denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), began experiencing strong growth. By the end of the 1970s the balance of power in American Protestantism had shifted to the theologically conservative evangelical churches, though it was initially unclear how (or whether) this would affect the political realm. But then came the presidential election of 1980, when a series of large and well-funded conservative religious groups, led by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, entered the political arena in support of former California governor Ronald Reagan. The new groups, which were dominated by evangelical and fundamentalist clergymen, adopted hardline conservative positions not only on issues such as abortion and school prayer, but also on such seemingly secular subjects as welfare, defense spending, and taxes. And while no one could have predicted at the time of Reagan’s presidential victory that evangelical elites would one day enter into a strategic alliance with a playboy real-estate tycoon, it was then that evangelicalism, a faith tradition based on theological conservatism, became firmly wedded to the newly conservative political agenda of the Reagan-era Republican party.
Answers to why this shift occurred are more varied, but one popular theory holds that the politicization of evangelical religiosity was fueled by a sense that believers were losing, or had already lost, control of the wider culture. In some versions of the story, the sexual revolution—including the advent of legalized abortion and the movements for women’s and gay and lesbian rights—takes center stage as the event that launched the Religious Right.7 In other versions it is the nation’s growing religious and ethnic diversity, together with the federal government’s increasingly aggressive actions in defense of African American civil rights (which often entailed greater oversight of religious entities, such as private schools).8 Still other commentators stress the entrepreneurial role of the conservative business community, which sensed that evangelicals’ alienation might serve as the basis for a new and powerful political coalition based on shared enmity toward the modern Democratic party.9 Whatever the immediate trigger, the underlying cause in most accounts is a growing sense of alienation, together with the conviction that aggressive political action was needed to prevent further erosion of traditional Protestant (or in some versions Judeo-Christian) values and prerogatives.
Without question, each of these narratives contains a grain of truth. Yet upon closer inspection, a focus on cultural alienation alone cannot fully account for the increasingly strident conservatism exhibited by white Protestants over the past half-century. The most serious problem with the conventional story is that it cannot explain the long history of Protestant social activism that preceded the Reagan Revolution. After all, during the 1910s, the 1930s, and the early 1960s—also periods of increasing diversity and unprecedented social change—millions of white middle-class Protestants channeled their anxieties into progressive reforms, helping to abolish child labor, establish reasonable workplace regulations, construct the social safety net, and enact civil rights laws that transferred resources and political authority to minority groups. Nor can strategic outreach from conservative businessmen or political operatives fully explain the shifting political valence of Protestant religiosity. For while it is true that conservative executives and libertarian activists succeeded in forging close ties with leading evangelicals during the 1970s and early 1980s, the more interesting question is why previous efforts to cement an evangelical-business alliance met with virtually no success. As we shall see, postwar conservatives spent a small fortune attempting to foment religious opposition to the New Deal–era welfare state—but to no avail. Why did such efforts suddenly gain traction in the 1970s and 1980s?
A final hole in the conventional story stems from the questionable assumption that theological conservatism and political conservatism are natural allies. To be sure, the theologically conservative wing of American Protestantism has always featured its share of outspoken political conservatives—from the early twentieth-century revivalist Billy Sunday to mid-century radio preachers like Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis. And yet, as late as the mid-1970s many of the most powerful actors in the evangelical movement placed themselves either in the center or on the left of the political spectrum. If leading evangelical thinkers like Carl Henry and Francis Schaeffer were disturbed by the sexual revolution, they were also disturbed by environmental pollution, economic inequality, and Americans’ often reflexive support for militaristic approaches to foreign policy (as were many of the nation’s best-known evangelical politicians, including Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield and Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson). What explains the disappearance of this centrist strand of evangelicalism in the years around 1980?
To sum up the problem: if Protestant religiosity was for many decades associated with moderately progressive policy views on issues such as race relations and economic redistribution (as will be demonstrated in much more detail below), then accounts that begin the story of the Religious Right in the 1970s are necessarily incomplete. In order to explain how devout white Protestants ended up on the far right of the political spectrum, we must first identify the forces that in an earlier era pulled so many of them toward the center left. And we must examine why those forces ceased to operate in the years around 1970. Identifying these moderating forces, and explaining why they collapsed, are the central tasks of this book.
In the pages that follow I develop a theoretical framework capable of explaining both the rise of white Protestant social concern at the end of the nineteenth century and its sudden decline at the end of the twentieth. The theory proceeds from two simple premises, neither of which has any claim to originality. The first, which will come as no surprise to readers of James Madison (or John Calvin), is that religious believers are on average much like similarly situated secular citizens when it comes to their behavior in the political realm. Like their secular neighbors, believers routinely base their political decisions on self-interest or ingrained prejudice rather than careful and disinterested study of sacred texts or deliberation about the will of a higher power. Nor are believers likely to hold views about the proper ordering of society that are radically different from those of nonbelievers who are similarly positioned in terms of race, class, gender, and other well-known predictors of political behavior.10 In short, believers are typically no more likely than anyone else to engage in costly or self-denying forms of political behavior, such as supporting programs that, in the name of justice or fairness, transfer resources or political authority to other citizens or groups within society.
Of course, it is also true that American history is replete with episodes in which large numbers of believers have indeed acted in ways that neither self-interest nor in-group prejudice can readily explain. This leads to my second premise, which is that whenever members of a particular faith do engage in apparently empathetic or otherwise costly forms of political behavior, it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so. Stated otherwise, religious convictions are more likely to shape individual behavior when the believer is enmeshed in a congregation or other body that is capable of interpreting and (at least to some degree) enforcing the doctrines in question.11 There is little reason to expect that, absent religious authority, believers would behave differently from similarly situated secular citizens.12
Both premises require some elaboration. Note that I have limited my claim about political behavior to the modern era. In earlier periods—early Puritan New England, for example—when belief in a future state of rewards and punishments was a more pervasive presence in the mental lives of average citizens, it is likely that costly, religiously motivated forms of behavior were more common (though even here it can be difficult to sort out which behaviors flowed from genuine religious conviction as opposed to group pressures and legal sanctions). And even in the modern era one can find exceptional cases of believers engaging in striking acts of self-sacrifice without the impetus of external group-related incentives (think of the more extreme present-day opponents of abortion and nuclear proliferation, for example). My claim is not that such behavior is impossible but that it is exceedingly rare. At least in the United States, and limiting the discussion to white Protestants, the number of believers who adopt political views that are radically at variance with those of similarly situated nonbelievers, or who routinely sacrifice significant quantities of time, energy, or money on behalf of their stated religious convictions, appears to be quite small.
How, then, do religious institutions compel empathetic or otherwise costly forms of political behavior? They do so in two ways. First, authoritative religious institutions typically provide the believer with a set of what might be termed mediating doctrines—rules of conduct that connect the often abstract commands of the sacred texts to the business of everyday life. The Christian who remains aloof from organized religion may very well believe that the golden rule (for example) is a legitimate and binding tenet of the faith, but the abstract nature of the command will typically allow her to avoid applying it too rigorously in situations that seem to require inordinate sacrifices. Confronted with a friend or neighbor (let alone a stranger) in dire financial need, she may well succeed in convincing herself that it is in the friend’s best interest not to offer assistance, perhaps because doing so would cause the friend to become dependent on the largesse of others, or because the money is urgently needed for some other purpose. Authoritative mediating doctrines make this sort of self-serving rationalization more difficult by telling the believer precisely what the general tenets of the faith demand in a range of specific situations. Some believers may still manage to rationalize selfish or prejudicial conduct as consistent with the doctrines of their faith tradition, or they may decide that a particular mediating doctrine results from a misreading of the sacred texts, but in either case they must be willing to accept the consequences of being labeled an iconoclast.13
The second way in which religious institutions (sometimes) compel altruistic or otherwise costly forms of behavior is by imposing significant costs on those who would otherwise pay lip service to religious teachings. These negative incentives may take different forms. Some religious sects rigorously police the conduct of their members, penalizing those who fail to adhere to the tenets of the faith. Others make such exacting and well-known demands of their members (in terms of time, money, or alienation from secular society, for example) that potential “free riders” are discouraged from joining in the first place.14 Whatever form institutional incentives may take, their end result (in the case of strong institutions) is to discourage individual believers from backsliding, freeriding on the efforts of others, or otherwise failing to abide by religious edicts in their day-to-day conduct.
The question, of course, is why anyone would willingly join a religious body that makes such strong demands of its members. The answer, typically, is that the group offers some benefit that can only be obtained by submitting to its authority.15 Examples range from the purely spiritual (such as a more intense or satisfying religious experience) to the largely material (such as the opportunity to perform in the choir). Speaking historically, however, the most compelling selective benefits associated with membership in an American Protestant congregation were often socioeconomic in nature. As the sociologist Max Weber pointed out more than a century ago, sects like the Baptists and Methodists imposed innumerable restrictions on their members’ personal lives, but they also gave them something very valuable in return: access to the middle and upper echelons of American society.
Weber’s argument proceeded from two firsthand observations concerning the nature of religious and group life in the United States. First, he noted that American Protestant congregations were typically organized in the manner of sects rather than churches. Whereas a church, as Weber defined it, assumes the responsibility of ministering to every person, no matter how irreligious, within a given jurisdiction (e.g., a parish, town, or nation), a sect is “a free community of individuals” who are admitted to “membership on purely religious grounds.” Sect members must submit to rigorous inspection of their beliefs and past conduct, and those admitted to fellowship are expected continually to prove their worth (and confess their failings) to the community upon pain of excommunication. It was for this reason, Weber observed, that American Protestant congregations were typically kept small enough so that their members could “know each other personally.”16 Only in this way could they engage in the mutual scrutiny of conduct and character that provided “the exclusive foundation for the social cohesion of the organization.”17
Weber’s second observation was that membership in a sectlike religious group conferred a very specific real-world benefit that few upwardly mobile Americans could afford to go without. In short, it publicly testified to a person’s character. In a highly mobile society where citizens routinely relocated to new cities and even changed occupations, ascertaining whether an individual was likely to prove reliable in a business or social transaction was no simple matter. But if the new doctor, banker, or eligible bachelor in town carried a letter of membership from a reputable Protestant congregation, one could be reasonably certain the man was at least not a charlatan. Sect membership thus served as an invaluable stepping-stone to the middle and upper classes. Those who could claim it were well positioned to improve their lot in life, while those who lacked it were relegated to the margins of polite society. Indeed, Weber observed that citizens excluded from church (sect) membership often fell “victim to a . . . social ostracism” so severe as to be effectively “deprived of social contacts.”18
Weber offered several memorable anecdotes from his 1904 American sojourn to illustrate the social—and, indeed, monetary—value of Protestant sect membership. He met a German American doctor who had once asked a patient to describe his symptoms, only to be told: “I am from the Second Baptist Church in X Street.” The doctor was puzzled by the disclosure of this seemingly irrelevant information until he realized that the patient was conveying an implicit message “which was not without interest for the doctor”—namely, “ ‘Don’t worry about your fee!’ ”19 During a visit to Oklahoma he encountered a manufacturer of iron tombstone lettering who claimed to be indifferent to the niceties of theology (“as far as I’m concerned, everyone can believe what he likes”) but who refused to do business with any man who was not a member in good standing of a local church.20 Finally, he provided a vivid account of an outdoor baptism witnessed while visiting relatives in North Carolina. Puzzled as to why an “intelligent-looking young man” would consent to being dunked, fully clothed, into the “icy water of a mountain stream,” he inquired into the man’s background, ultimately discovering that he was new in town, and needed a loan to open a bank. Further examination
revealed that admission into the Baptist church was so important not so much on account of the potential Baptist clientele but rather to attract non-Baptist clients. This was because the thorough scrutiny of the candidate’s moral and business conduct that preceded admission . . . was regarded as by far the most rigorous and reliable of its kind. The slightest unpunctuality in the payment of a debt, careless expenditure, frequenting the tavern—in short, anything that cast a shadow on the business qualification of the man in question—would lead to his being rejected by the local church community. Once he has been voted in, the sect will accompany him for the rest of his life in everything he does. If he moves to a different town, it will provide him with the testimonial without which he will not be accepted in the local church of his “denomination.”21
To be sure, Weber acknowledged that both the rigors of church discipline and the significance of church membership as a professional credential had declined somewhat by the early twentieth century. In the nation’s larger cities, fashionable congregations had expanded to such a size that careful oversight of members’ personal lives was no longer possible (though individuals whose sins had become public knowledge were still regularly, if quietly, purged from church membership rolls).22 Hence, while church (sect) membership remained a fairly reliable proxy for good character, it was now often supplemented by membership in nominally secular organizations that (perhaps because they were typically populated by devout Protestants) exhibited all the classic features of religious sects, including rigorous screening of applicants and the requirement that members constantly “prove themselves” by sacrificing time, energy, and money to advance group aims. (As we shall see, Weber probably overestimated the extent to which nominally secular membership groups had taken over the traditional character-vouching function of the Protestant congregation; in fact, both types of membership would remain essential to socioeconomic advancement through the middle decades of the twentieth century, and many nominally secular groups were closely linked to religious bodies.)23
Though Weber mostly limited his discussion to the character-vouching function of church and group membership, his basic point can be extended to other types of selective benefits that facilitate socioeconomic advancement. Church membership may permit access to elite social networks, for example, or it may publicly testify to the fact that a person has already reached the upper echelons of society. Both of these dynamics seem to have been at work in the mid-twentieth-century United States, since sociologists routinely observed that upwardly mobile white Protestants were more likely than other citizens to abandon “low status” churches in favor of more prestigious denominations (typically the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, or Unitarians).24 Membership in a prestigious denomination was valuable not so much because it meant that a person had passed a rigorous character test—by this point, the most prestigious Protestant denominations had largely abandoned efforts to police the personal conduct of their members—but because, like the country club, it both signaled admission to “the establishment” and offered opportunities for further socioeconomic advancement. (The same studies showed that CEOs and highly paid professionals were overwhelmingly clustered in these four denominations.)25
Whether derived from Weber’s sect dynamic in its classic form or from the related but distinct desire to confirm (or signal) one’s elevated position in the social order, the socioeconomic “pull” of mainline church membership conferred a somewhat nebulous but nonetheless real form of authority on church officials. Citizens who sought the socioeconomic benefits of Presbyterian church membership (for example) naturally found it advisable to immerse themselves in the organizational life of the denomination, which necessarily entailed subjecting oneself to a broader religious culture that emphasized the importance of aiding those on the margins of society. As with any democratically governed entity, the policy commitments of the mainline denominations were open to challenge and debate. But to openly criticize, say, denominational leaders’ support for foreign aid programs was not simply to make a political point; it was to reject one of the longstanding commitments that gave Presbyterianism its substance as a social identity.
Applying this insight to the case of mainline Protestants more generally, we shall see that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, most non-Southern Protestants not only professed to believe that Christian principles, properly understood, favored government efforts to aid the downtrodden; they were also embedded in religious networks that were capable, at least on occasion, of focusing attention on specific social problems and incentivizing the faithful to take responsibility for correcting them.
So what changed in the 1960s and 1970s? The answer, obviously, is “quite a lot.” But the most important change, I shall argue, was the rapid erosion of religious authority within the mainline Protestant churches, denominations, and ecumenical bodies—a development that was at least partially independent from the contemporaneous social upheavals that continue to define these decades in the popular mind. If white Protestants were more inclined to adopt far right policy positions in 1980 than in 1950, it was not only because of alarm at the rise of feminism, legalized abortion, and no-fault divorce. It was also because the institutions and social dynamics that had traditionally channeled believers’ anxieties into egalitarian reform movements had largely collapsed.
Employing a combination of archival evidence and public opinion data, The End of Empathy traces this story across three historical epochs. Part I (“The Age of Stewardship”) examines the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, when a combination of theological conviction and socioeconomic incentives led millions of Protestant believers to view the creation of a more just society as a divine imperative. Part II (“Why the Center Held”) highlights the role of mainline Protestant institutions both in constructing the mid-century welfare state and in defending it against attacks from well-funded interest groups and politicians on the Right. Part III (“From Revelation to Rationalization”) documents how the collapse of mainline religious authority in the late 1960s both exacerbated the nation’s ideological divisions and paved the way for the rise of a new strand of Protestantism that offered middle-class white believers the assurance of salvation while simultaneously liberating them from the biblical injunction to care for the widow and the orphan.
The central theme linking the three sections—the independent variable, so to speak—is the evolving nature of Protestant religious authority. In brief, citizens from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1960s faced strong incentives to join and become active in churches and membership groups affiliated with the large mainline Protestant denominations. The mainline churches and membership groups, in turn, instilled in their members a profound sense of religious duty toward the less fortunate. That average churchgoers took these lessons to heart was due, initially, to the sect dynamic chronicled by Max Weber. But even after American churches began to shed many of their sectlike characteristics, the enduring importance of membership as a marker of social respectability, together with the access it provided to elite social networks, vested religious elites with considerable sway over their upwardly mobile parishioners. At the same time, the religion boom of the late 1940s and early 1950s—and the financial windfall it produced—allowed mainline leaders to expand their institutional reach by, for example, constructing an expansive network of state and local church councils. That Northern white Protestants remained generally supportive of Democratic social welfare and civil rights programs, even as they tended to cast their presidential ballots for moderate Republicans, testifies to the influence of the churches’ educational efforts on behalf of the postwar welfare state.
This state of affairs endured through the early 1960s, when two relatively new social dynamics began to undercut the authority of the mainline churches and ecumenical groups. First, developments in higher education and the labor market greatly reduced the social and economic significance of church membership (as well as other forms of group membership), thus sounding the death knell for what Weber called the “sect spirit.” As college enrollments skyrocketed, as more and more students pursued degrees in the sciences and engineering, and as massive corporations employed an ever larger percentage of the labor force, informal social networks became much less important as stepping-stones to the middle and upper classes.26 Having secured jobs with large corporations on the basis of their educational qualifications and technical expertise, white suburbanites had little reason to fear that leaving—or even failing to seek out—the local Presbyterian or Episcopal church would seriously diminish their social standing or economic prospects. By the same token, those who remained in the mainline flock had few incentives to heed their purported leaders’ advice on the burning questions of the day.
Second, the postwar period witnessed an unprecedented surge in residential mobility. The great winner in the relocation sweepstakes—thanks to a government-financed boom in the defense, aviation, and technology sectors—was the western Sunbelt, a region with comparatively low levels of religious commitment and an unusually weak religious infrastructure. California’s ratio of mainline Protestant churches to Protestant residents was roughly half that of the Midwestern states in the late 1930s, and it fell even further behind as a result of the postwar relocation boom. The millions of white middle-class Americans who moved westward in the postwar years thus found themselves in an environment where religious authority was stretched unusually thin, and a significant number of them drifted away from organized religion as a result. Others were drawn to politically conservative religious entrepreneurs whose calls for tax cuts and increased defense spending dovetailed nicely with the material interests of the state’s burgeoning population of young suburban professionals.
By the late 1960s the mainline denominations were in crisis: attendance was down, budgets were stretched thin, and ecumenical bodies were laying off hundreds of employees. Popular and academic commentators blamed it all on the churches’ increasingly “radical” stances on civil rights, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, and economic justice.27 As we shall see, however, this familiar story gets the causal relationship between the decline of mainline Protestantism and the conservative political backlash of the late 1960s and early 1970s exactly backward. The mainline churches did not suddenly discover politics in the late 1960s; nor, with the notable exception of gender equality, did they move appreciably to the left over the course of the decade. What happened, rather, was that the collapse of religious authority over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s liberated large numbers of upwardly mobile white Protestants from the normative commitments that had bound their forebears. Now free to follow their own inclinations and interests—not only in their personal lives, but also in their thinking about politics and society—many of them discovered a sudden aversion to talk of entrenched inequality and economic redistribution. Their objection was not to clerical political activism per se, but rather to the “prophetic” policy vision the mainline denominations had faithfully espoused since the turn of the twentieth century.
Needless to say, this history casts the rise of the Religious Right in a new light. In particular, it suggests that evangelicalism rose to prominence at least in part because it was well suited to an environment in which religious authority in the traditional sense had all but ceased to exist. In the new age of personal autonomy, the leaders of the Religious Right flourished by reshaping the Christian message to comport with the prejudices and material self-interest of their target demographic. Focused on personal salvation and stripped of any concern with social justice, post-1970s evangelicalism struck a chord with white middle-class Protestants who now had little reason to concern themselves with the plight of the less fortunate. Contrary to popular belief, its chief spokespersons, including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, possessed neither the intrinsic religious authority nor the institutional structures necessary to shape their supporters’ views on important questions of public policy. Instead, they rose to national prominence by being among the first religious figures to endorse the conservative political backlash of the late 1970s. Realizing that the white electorate as a whole was tracking rightward on issues ranging from civil rights to taxes and abortion, they placed early bets on the conservative insurgency and were rewarded with brief but successful careers as Republican power brokers.
At the same time, this book’s thesis challenges many cherished assumptions of the secular Left, including the widespread belief that religious authority is the eternal enemy of movements for human dignity and equality. In fact, for much of the twentieth century religious authority was among the forces most responsible for building white middle-class support for social welfare and civil rights programs. When it suddenly collapsed in the closing decades of the century, the end result was not the flowering of a more enlightened or empathetic society (as much popular commentary might lead one to expect), but rather the rise of popular ideologies that dismissed almost all state-sponsored efforts to aid the downtrodden as wasteful, counterproductive, or sinful. In the case of well-off citizens, this novel Weltanschauung was obviously self-serving; for those closer to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, less rational motives were probably at work. Either way, the end result would not have surprised the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who once observed that the erosion of religious authority had a tendency to unleash “the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price.”28 Left entirely to their own devices, Bonhoeffer knew, most citizens will prefer ethical and religious perspectives that conform to their preexisting interests and prejudices rather than challenging them.
Before proceeding to the main argument of the book, it may be helpful to specify in advance the terms that will be used to describe the various religious groups that appear in the following pages. The careful reader will note that I have to this point been somewhat haphazard in this regard, often using such terms as evangelical, white Protestant, and religious voters more or less interchangeably. Going forward, I will attempt to use these and other terms only in ways that contemporaneous historical actors would have understood. For example, when discussing theologically or politically conservative Protestants in the early 1900s, I will use the term fundamentalist—the term that the thinkers and groups in question coined to distinguish themselves from liberal or modernist Protestants, who had abandoned the principle of biblical inerrancy, as well as some traditional doctrinal tenets of the faith. I will use the term evangelical to refer to the ecumenical-minded conservative Protestants who, beginning in the 1940s, began to distance themselves from the fundamentalists (whose rigid separatism and tendentious eschatological theories they deemed counterproductive to the ultimate goal of saving souls). It was at this point—and not before—that the term evangelical became attached to a concrete group of believers, namely, the churches and denominations that came together under the umbrella of the National Association of Evangelicals (founded in 1942), as well those that clustered around Billy Graham and his various enterprises, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
My only conscious exception to this approach involves the term mainline—a label I will use to denote the large Protestant denominations (including the Methodists, Northern Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists) that in 1908 came together under the banner of the Federal Council of Churches. Although this term did not come into widespread usage until the 1960s, it is nonetheless helpful to have some way of referring to the vast majority of American Protestants who were members in good standing of these denominations, and who either subscribed to or acquiesced in the positions adopted by denominational leaders.29 (If no contemporaneous term exists, it is likely because these denominations claimed an overwhelming percentage of the Protestant population as members; only groups that were attempting to separate from the main body of American Protestantism had reason to adopt qualifying labels like “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.”)30
A brief word concerning methodology is also in order. Although this book relies extensively on archival research to support its main arguments, it is not in any sense a comprehensive history of American Protestantism in the twentieth century. Nor should the reader expect a broad history of the rise and fall of the post–New Deal liberal order. Rather, my aim—and what I hope is my unique contribution—is to complement the many existing studies on these subjects by showing how a very specific set of Protestant religious ideas and institutions contributed to the construction and maintenance of the American social welfare state, and how their collapse rendered the welfare state suddenly vulnerable to attacks from the Right.
To this end I draw extensively on two types of archival sources: (1) the records of national religious bodies, such as the National Council of Churches and the large mainline denominations; and (2) the records of local religious bodies, such as state and local church councils, that worked to build popular support for the policy priorities of national religious leaders. Armed with this evidence, I revisit several well-known historical episodes, showing how the support of religious leaders and lay people—at both the national and local levels—either contributed to significant liberal policy achievements, such as the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or else helped foil the efforts of conservative activists to mobilize popular opposition to these programs. Finally, in some of the later chapters, including the chapters on the Civil Rights Act and the rise of the Religious Right, I rely on public opinion data to supplement evidence from these archival sources. The end result, I hope, is a comprehensive picture, not of the rise and decline of the Protestant mainline, nor of the rise and decline of twentieth-century liberalism, but rather of the most important points at which these two stories intersect.