Chapter 6

GOING FOR THE JUGULAR

IN AUGUST 1980, ONLY A MONTH AFTER THE LONG Beach Pro-Family Conference, conservative Christian leaders gathered again, this time in Dallas at the national meeting of the Religious Roundtable. With American flags waving and shouts of “Hallelujah!” ringing, speakers warned of the nation’s moral decline and diminishing military might. Masterminded by televangelist James Robison, the event brought together Falwell, Schlafly, and the LaHayes, along with Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, and prominent conservatives including Republican senator Jesse Helms, Amway cofounder Richard DeVos, and Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry.¹

An evangelist, Robison was there to convert his audience to politics. “Not voting is a sin against Almighty God!” he pronounced. “I’m sick and tired of hearing about all the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet! It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet, out of the churches, and change America!” Robison wasn’t just calling for political participation; he was calling for partisan activism. Political salvation could be found in the Republican Party. After Robison had riled up the crowd, the guest of honor took his place behind the lectern: “I know that you can’t endorse me,” the Republican nominee for president quipped. “But I want you to know that I endorse you, and your program.” In Ronald Reagan, the Religious Right had found their leader.²

True, Reagan’s religious credentials left something to be desired. Although raised Presbyterian, his church attendance was sporadic. There was also the matter of his divorce. “Reagan was not the best Christian who ever walked the face of the earth,” acknowledged one leader of the Christian Right, “but we really didn’t have a choice.” His record as governor of California was also mixed. He had supported the ERA, legalized therapeutic abortion, and refused to support an anti-gay-rights referendum. But by 1980 he had become proficient in conservative talking points. He supported prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools, came out against abortion, and reversed course on the ERA, deciding that it denigrated stay-at-home mothers and would force women into combat. (He placed Beverly LaHaye on his campaign’s family policy advisor board.) What had drawn Reagan to the Republican Party were the same things that had drawn evangelicals: a mix of anticommunism, Christian nationalism, and nostalgia for a mythical American past. By the time he took the stage in Dallas, Reagan was fluent in the language of the Christian Right. Echoing Goldwater years earlier, he promised peace through strength. Rejecting Carter’s “despair and pessimism,” he declared that America could still become that “shining city upon a hill.”³

Reagan didn’t just speak the language of the Right, he looked the part. In contrast to Carter, Reagan emanated a firm, masculine strength. Fresh off his California ranch, he looked to be a real cowboy—and, thanks to his films, a war hero. With his ruddy face, easy manner, and staunch conservatism, he was perfectly cast for his role as hero of the Religious Right.⁴

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE 1980 ELECTION, Reagan made one last pitch to voters on national television. He drew a dim picture of the era, speaking of “riots and assassinations,” of Vietnam, and of the “drift and disaster in Washington.” It was time for Americans to choose a path forward. Some might want to give up on the American dream, but he offered a vision modeled on his friend John Wayne, “a symbol of our country itself.” Wayne had died the year before, and headlines had eulogized him as “The Last American Hero.” But Reagan rejected the epitaph. He knew Wayne well, “and no one would have been angrier at being called the ‘last American hero,’” Reagan asserted. “Duke Wayne did not believe that our country was ready for the dust bin of history,” and neither did he. The next day, Americans chose heroism. Wayne didn’t live to see his old friend elected president, but even in death he had played a role.⁵

Reagan was never a movie star of Wayne’s caliber, but the two were similar in many ways. Onscreen and off, both blended myth and reality. Both had played the war hero, and among admirers this fiction was often confused for fact. Both, too, symbolized an old-school rejection of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. A writer in American Cowboy magazine described Wayne as “emblematic of strong, silent manhood, of courage and honor in a world of timidity and moral indifference.” In a society “racing toward permissiveness,” Wayne stood for authority. In a 1971 interview with Playboy, Wayne had denounced this culture of permissiveness in no uncertain terms, and by permissiveness, Wayne made clear that he meant “simply following Dr. Spock’s system of raising children.” After fifteen or twenty years, the consequences of this “anything goes” attitude were everywhere apparent, not least in the behavior of a generation of “hippie dropouts.” Reagan agreed.⁶

Reagan specialized in playing the role of the stern, authoritarian father. Only a month before the Kent State shootings in the spring of 1970, his response to student unrest was blunt: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” He ran as a tough-on-crime candidate, and for conservatives, “tough on crime” generally connoted only certain types of crime: “street crime,” or the threat of black men. Domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse didn’t register. Domestic tranquility could be established through the imposition of law and order. It should come as no surprise that a country that embraced Wayne as its favorite movie star (he held the top spot as late as 1995) would also elect a man like Reagan president. White men in particular admired their swagger, their old-school masculine confidence, and their apparent willingness to exercise authority even if it required violence.⁷

To conservative evangelicals, Reagan was a godsend. In the face of Carter’s “wimp factor,” Reagan projected the rugged, masculine leadership they believed the country so desperately needed. (It was much easier to chalk up Carter’s failures to deficient masculinity than to blame US policy stretching back decades.) Reagan’s irrefutable masculinity also reassured conservatives unsettled by the gay rights movement. It wasn’t lost on conservative Christians that Carter’s own masculinity seemed lacking, even as “the homosexual movement reached its maximum level of influence” under his watch.⁸

In 1980, the election widely hailed as the moment the Christian Right came into its own, evangelical voters bypassed the candidate who shared their faith tradition in favor of the one whose image and rhetoric more closely aligned with their values and aspirations. Guided by preachers like Robison, Falwell, and LaHaye, 67 percent of white evangelical voters chose Reagan over Carter; just four years earlier, Carter had received 49 percent of the evangelical vote and 56 percent of the white Baptist vote. Although white evangelicals supported Reagan at higher rates than white nonevangelicals, they probably weren’t the deciding factor in the election; Carter’s widespread unpopularity, a stagnant economy, and the drama of the Iran hostage crisis likely would have ensured Reagan’s victory even without the mobilization of evangelical pastors and grassroots activists. The Christian Right may not have swung the election to Reagan, but it did succeed in securing the loyalty of evangelicals to the Republican Party. From Reagan on, no Democrat would again win the majority of white evangelical support, or threaten the same. Evangelicals’ loyalty to the Republican Party would continue to strengthen, and they would use their electoral clout to help define the Republican agenda for the generation to come.⁹

Reagan benefited from the southern strategy that his Republican predecessors had pursued. Since the 1950s, white southerners had been abandoning the Democratic Party, and Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Acts accelerated this process. Like Nixon, Reagan was adept at using racially coded rhetoric like states’ rights, “law and order,” and “forced busing” to appeal to white voters. Indeed, Reagan had launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, praising states’ rights just a few miles down the road from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, and he campaigned at Bob Jones University at a time when the school was a flashpoint for private Christian schools fighting against desegregation mandates. By the 1980s, then, the Democratic Party had become the party of liberals, African Americans, and feminists, and the Republican Party the party of conservatives, traditionalists, and segregationists.¹⁰

White evangelicals didn’t just participate in this realignment, they helped instigate it. Billy Graham aided and abetted the southern strategy, advising Republicans on how to make inroads with southern evangelicals who, like him, were birthright Democrats. Southern Baptist pastors, too, switched to the Republican Party earlier than white southerners generally. The Southern Baptist shift to the Republican Party coincided with a “conservative resurgence” within the denomination. Traditionally, Baptists had supported a separation of church and state and advocated a civil libertarianism when it came to social issues. Their power secure in the South, Southern Baptists had largely avoided the challenges of modernism in the 1920s, and the reactionary response modernism provoked; in the 1940s, they’d seen no reason to join the NAE. Having devoted less energy to delineating doctrinal boundaries, Southern Baptists allowed for a relatively wide range of views on theological and social issues. Thus the SBC was home to Billy Graham, W. A. Criswell, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, among others.¹¹

To be sure, many Southern Baptists backed the status quo, including both patriarchy and white supremacy. By the end of the 1960s, when explicit white supremacy was no longer tenable, gender became even more significant. Until that time, Southern Baptists held varying views on gender roles. Some believed the Bible prohibited women from preaching and teaching, while others supported women’s religious leadership. Beginning in the 1960s, however, fundamentalists began to battle for control of the SBC, and gender was at the heart of the struggle.¹²

By 1979, conservative Southern Baptists’ sense of cultural crisis was acute, and they set out to take over the denomination. Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, W. A. Criswell, and other like-minded pastors and laymen had hatched a plan that involved electing conservatives to the presidency of the SBC and controlling strategic committee appointments. That year, through carefully orchestrated designs, they succeeded in electing one of their own as president of the Houston convention. Moderates cried foul—political machinations of this sort were not the Baptist way—but conservatives were unapologetic; they were “going for the jugular.” One by one, conservatives gained control of the denomination’s seminaries, purging faculties of moderate voices. Moderates denounced this “power-crazed authoritarianism, a win-atany-cost ethic and a total disregard for personal values and religious freedom,” but to little avail.¹³

Accounts of the battles over the SBC commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender. Conservatives were alarmed by women’s liberation, abortion, and changing views on sexuality generally, but they also had concerns specific to the SBC. “Evangelical feminism” had been making inroads in Southern Baptist circles, and growing numbers of Baptist women had begun challenging male headship and claiming leadership positions; between 1975 and 1985, the number of women ordained in the SBC increased significantly. These women insisted on interpreting biblical texts contextually, attentive to the settings in which they were produced. Conservatives, however, insisted on a “populist hermeneutic,” a method privileging “the simplest, most direct interpretations of scripture.” For conservatives, this wasn’t just the right method, it was also the masculine one. They depicted biblical authors like Paul as uncowed by political correctness. Paul wasn’t afraid to prohibit female authority, and masculine men should do likewise. They accused liberals and moderates of waffling, of introducing needless complexity while they stood firm in their quick grasp of the obvious, literal truth of the Scriptures.¹⁴

The issue of inerrancy did rally conservatives, but when it turned out that large numbers of Southern Baptists—even denominational officials—lacked any real theological prowess and were in fact functionally atheological, concerns over inerrancy gave way to a newly politicized commitment to female submission and to related culture wars issues. It wasn’t just Baptist men who helped accomplish this shift. Influenced by Elisabeth Elliot’s writings and by their participation in Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, Baptist women themselves advanced conservative gender roles within the SBC.¹⁵

Al Mohler, who oversaw the purging of moderates from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offered a revealing glimpse into this process: “Mr. and Mrs. Baptist may not be able to understand or adjudicate the issue of biblical inerrancy when it comes down to nuances, and language, and terminology,” he acknowledged. “But if you believe abortion should be legal, that’s all they need to know. . . .” The same went for “homosexual marriage.” Inerrancy mattered because of its connection to cultural and political issues. It was in their efforts to bolster patriarchal authority that Southern Baptists united with evangelicals across the nation, and the alliances drew them into the larger evangelical world. Within a generation, Southern Baptists began to place their “evangelical” identity over their identity as Southern Baptists. Patriarchy was at the heart of this new sense of themselves.¹⁶

EVEN IF EVANGELICALS were not the decisive factor in Reagan’s victory, they believed they were, as did many pundits. Through extensive networks and public pageantry, evangelical leaders had rallied supporters behind Reagan and the Republican Party. Some, like Pat Boone and Jerry Falwell, had traveled the country stumping for Reagan. When Reagan won in a landslide, evangelicals were euphoric. Falwell effused that Reagan’s election was “the greatest day for the cause of conservatism and morality in my adult life.” And they were quick to claim credit: “The people who put Jimmy in, put Jimmy out,” declared Robison, with apparent glee. These were celebratory words, but also cautionary ones. With Reagan in the White House, they expected a return on their investment.¹⁷

At first, things looked promising. At his inauguration, Reagan paid homage to his evangelical supporters. His Bel Air pastor opened with prayer, and Reagan himself quoted the biblical passage Falwell had invoked while stumping for him. It was the same passage Eisenhower had quoted at his swearing-in: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” The message was clear: a new era of civil religion was nigh.¹⁸

Once in office, however, Reagan’s loyalty to the Religious Right wasn’t what its members had hoped for. They’d expected Reagan to do away with abortion, bring back prayer in schools, and usher in a spiritual and moral renewal. They also expected some plum assignments in the new administration. On all these counts they were disappointed. Reagan did not prioritize the domestic family values agenda he had championed during the campaign, abortion rights remained the law of the land, and there was little evidence of moral revival. When Reagan failed to back Bob Jones University in the IRS’s civil rights case against them, Bob Jones III denounced him as a “traitor to God’s people.” Falwell, too, was disenchanted. A year in, he griped that he had expected more “with one of our ‘own’ in the White House.”¹⁹

On issues of foreign policy, however, evangelicals would not be disappointed, and it was Reagan’s “repayment” on the military front that kept evangelicals from feeling they’d been had. To their delight, Reagan brought his cowboy conservatism to the global stage. Here his rugged masculinity appeared to serve him well. After all, as evangelicals saw it, the Cold War wasn’t really all that different from the Wild West. Violence, or the threat of violence, secured order. Rules might have to be broken, but the ends justified the means. What was needed was a strong leader, a man who could assert masculine power in the international arena.²⁰

Reagan didn’t merely project an image of toughness. As president, he translated that image into foreign policy achievements. His clear-eyed characterization of America’s enemies resonated with evangelicals’ conception of what was at stake in the Cold War, and his efforts to bolster American military power aligned with their yearning to restore American greatness in the post-Vietnam era. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of evangelical books made this case. In Listen, America! Falwell had lamented that the United States was “no longer the military might of the world,” no longer “committed to victory,” no longer “committed to greatness”; for the first time in two centuries, Americans’ survival as a free people was in doubt. In America at the Crossroads, John Price, too, had mourned the decline of US military power. In forgetting God, the nation had let its strength ebb away, and only when America “comes to its senses” and “repents of its sins and turns to God” would its military position be restored. Perhaps the most influential evangelical book on military rearmament was Hal Lindsey’s The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon, a sequel to his best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth that was timed to the 1980 election. For Lindsey, rearmament was not simply a pragmatic decision; it was a religious requirement. The Bible was telling the United States to build a powerful military force, to “become strong again.” The book spent twenty-one weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list.²¹

In this respect, evangelicals found they had an ally in the White House. Not content to sit on the sidelines, evangelical leaders worked to muster support for Reagan’s foreign policy agenda. Falwell and other televangelists were happy to expose the folly of détente, disarmament, and pacifism. During the election they had derided Carter’s agenda as “a blatant compromise with Communism,” and they were tired of what Falwell characterized as a “no fight and no win policy” stretching back decades. Reagan appreciated the televangelists’ support, and in 1983 he invited Falwell to the White House to strategize on how to counteract the domestic nuclear freeze movement.²²

In the early 1980s, a campaign to halt the production of nuclear weapons had been gaining momentum, and by 1982 it had become a leading issue for the political Left. Many Christians supported the idea of a nuclear freeze, including some evangelicals. Surprising many, Billy Graham had come out in the late 1970s in favor of SALT II, an agreement to limit the development of missile programs, fearing that the destructive power of nuclear weapons contradicted the Christian faith. Christianity Today, too, endorsed Mark Hatfield’s plan for “a complete freeze on the development, testing, and deployment of strategic missile systems.” Many leaders of the Christian Right, however, thought otherwise. Falwell promised Reagan he would help get his message out, “in laymen’s language,” and he did so by taking out full-page ads in major newspapers deriding “freezeniks,” “ultralibs,” and “unilateral disarmers” who were undermining Reagan’s efforts to rebuild the nation’s military strength. “We cannot afford to be number two in defense!” he warned.²³

Televangelists also came to Reagan’s aid in selling the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, as a moral imperative. Two weeks after Reagan called for the space-based nuclear defense system, he appeared before the National Association of Evangelicals. Again he left no doubt that he was on their side, rattling off a list of conservative talking points and reciting a popular but spurious Tocqueville quote: “If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Evangelicals, he added, were the ones “keeping America great by keeping her good.” But it was Reagan’s discussion of foreign policy that made this speech memorable. He spoke of the Soviet Union as “an evil empire,” and cautioned against reducing the arms race to “a giant misunderstanding,” thereby ignoring the very real struggle between good and evil. Quoting C. S. Lewis, he warned of “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice,” men who spoke “in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace.” History had revealed that “wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.” Reagan then urged evangelicals “to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.”²⁴

Although evangelicals remained divided over whether to pass a resolution on the nuclear freeze, the NAE was receptive to Reagan’s larger call, and they instituted a “Peace, Freedom, and Security Studies” program to counter the influence of mainline churches. Evangelicals found many reasons to support American military might. On a pragmatic level, they believed a strong military would ward off a godless communist takeover. When it came to risks of nuclear annihilation, evangelical theology’s emphasis on eternal life for the faithful helped mitigate such earthly terrors. In end-times scenarios they believed God would protect them; a nuclear holocaust might even be part of God’s plan. But a strong military and an aggressive foreign policy also aligned with evangelicals’ view of masculine power. Representatives of the Christian Right were not above insinuating a deficit of manliness among those who opposed the president’s policies. “Freezeniks” were sissies who lacked the courage to stand up to the communist threat.²⁵

PERHAPS NO EPISODE better reveals the connections between the Reagan administration and the leadership of the Christian Right than the Nicaraguan Contra War. In the summer of 1979, the Sandinistas, a revolutionary leftist group, had overthrown the dictatorial Somoza regime. The United States suspected the Sandinistas were supported by the Soviets and the Cubans, and as president, Reagan promised military aid to the counterrevolutionary Contras. From 1981 until 1988, the war between the Sandinistas and US-backed Contras devastated the Central American country. Both sides committed brutal atrocities, and tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died. The war was not primarily a religious war, but in the United States it was framed as such.

In Nicaragua, evangelical Protestants and Catholics alike were divided. Some evangelicals supported the Sandinistas, though not uncritically; like Catholics who embraced liberation theology, they saw socialism as a biblical response to poverty and oppression. But many others feared communist encroachment and opposed the Sandinistas’ revolutionary efforts. Many of these conservatives joined together in the National Council of Evangelical Pastors of Nicaragua (CNPEN), an organization that developed close ties with conservative evangelical groups in the United States, including the NAE.²⁶

In America, conservative Christian organizations mobilized on behalf of the Contras. Framing the conflict as a matter of religious liberty and the global persecution of Christians, organizations like the Institute for Religion and Democracy accused the Sandinistas of committing atrocities against conservative evangelicals and Catholics. Supporters of the Sandinistas had their own Christian allies in America, with progressive evangelicals and Catholics blaming the conflict not on Soviet interference, but on “poverty, oppression and injustice.” After a trip to Nicaragua, Jim Wallis, the most prominent spokesperson for the evangelical Left, wrote a scathing report in Sojourners accusing the Contras of horrific acts of violence.²⁷

Such opposition proved inconvenient when it came to the Reagan administration’s attempt to secure congressional support to intervene on the Contras’ behalf. When Congress refused to comply, instead prohibiting the use of any funds “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua,” Reagan turned to his evangelical allies for help in winning over the public. Inviting religious groups to special White House foreign policy seminars, administration officials peddled stories of the horrors perpetrated by Marxist guerrillas, framing the conflict as one between revolutionaries and Christians and urging religious organizations to assist them through lobbying and letter writing. In 1983, the Office of Public Liaison started holding weekly briefings on US–Central American relations and invited religious leaders to attend, and they prepared a series of White House Digests on the topic and sent out mailings to religious groups. Conservative evangelical organizations were only too happy to assist, offering their burgeoning media networks to promote the administration’s agenda. The NAE advocated on behalf of the administration, and Christian news services that focused on global religious persecution provided regular updates on the oppression of evangelicals who opposed the Sandinistas.²⁸

Religious disagreement intensified the congressional debates over Nicaragua. In 1985 and in 1986, the Reagan administration again requested funding. To shore up support, The White House invited figures including Falwell, Robertson, and LaHaye to receive special briefings from Oliver North, a highly decorated marine and a convert to evangelicalism who served as the NSC’s deputy director for political-military affairs. Only later would it be revealed that this was not the only action North was taking on behalf of the Contras.

After finally succeeding in securing congressional approval to provide humanitarian aid to the Contras, the administration stepped up lobbying efforts to secure military funding as well. In early 1986, the White House provided the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, Falwell’s own television ministry, and other Christian television outlets with a five-minute video of Reagan arguing for support for the Contras. Reagan made his case in stark terms. This was an urgent battle for democracy, and it was “nothing less than a sin to see Central America fall to darkness.” Reagan also recorded an audio message distributed to more than 1500 Christian radio stations that included a number for listeners to call for information on contacting their elected representatives. The administration’s efforts succeeded; Congress approved a $100 million spending measure in support of the Contras.²⁹

Even as the White House was tapping evangelical networks to drum up support for a military intervention in Nicaragua, some members of the administration were pursuing more clandestine avenues as well. In 1984, Iran had secretly requested weapons from the United States to use in its war with Iraq. Despite an arms embargo, Reagan was desperate to secure the release of seven American hostages held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. With Reagan’s support, the administration arranged for the shipment of more than 1500 missiles to Iran. Three hostages were released (but three more taken), and a portion of the payment for the arms sales was then diverted to support the Contras in Nicaragua. The NSC staff member responsible for this transaction was Oliver North. Thanks in part to an improperly entered bank account number, the entire scheme came to light, and in May 1987 North was called to testify before Congress.

Lt. Col. Oliver North testifying before the House Select Committee, July 7, 1987. AP PHOTO / SCOTT APPLEWHITE.

In six days of televised testimony, North affirmed that he had acted to advance the president’s foreign policy, but he refused to implicate Reagan directly. “This is a dangerous world,” North attested, and covert operations were necessary to protect the country. He confessed to lying to Congress and shredding documents, but this was all for the greater good. Moreover, as a good lieutenant colonel, he was “not in the habit” of questioning his superiors, least of all his commander in chief:

This lieutenant colonel is not going to challenge a decision of the Commander in Chief for whom I still work, and I am proud to work for that Commander in Chief, and if the Commander in Chief tells this lieutenant colonel to go stand in the corner and sit on his head, I will do so. And if the Commander in Chief decides to dismiss me from the NSC staff, this lieutenant colonel will proudly salute and say “thank you for the opportunity to have served,” and go, and I am not going to criticize his decision no matter how he relieves me, sir.

North knew how to submit to his proper authorities. More importantly, he believed that he had the highest authority on his side.³⁰

OLIVER NORTH ENDED UP being indicted on sixteen felony counts, including lying to Congress and destroying documents. Found guilty on three counts, he received a three-year suspended sentence. As commander in chief, Reagan was never directly implicated in the arms-for-hostages deal, and he emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed.

In 1990, North’s convictions were reversed on a technicality. The following year, North was a featured speaker at the Southern Baptist Convention, the first where moderates were not expected to challenge the conservative majority. Oliver North had become a hero of the Christian Right. The affinities were clear. Conservatives in the SBC had skirted conventions and eschewed niceties in order to wrest control of the denomination, just as North had skirted the rule of law in order to pursue a greater good. For both, the ends justified the means. But it wasn’t just tactics that united fellow renegades. Like North, conservative evangelicals defined the greater good in terms of Christian nationalism. It was this conflation of God and country that heroic Christian men would advance zealously, and by any means necessary, with their resurgent religious and political power.