Chapter 8

WAR FOR THE SOUL

FOR EVANGELICALS, THE 1980S HAD TURNED OUT TO be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, evangelicals relished their newfound political power and worked to make the most of it. In addition to their public advocacy and presidential photo ops, they extended their influence behind the scenes. In the wake of the 1980 White House Conference, James Dobson had established the Family Research Council, a conservative policy research organization to support “pro-family” policies. With Reagan in the White House, Dobson became a “regular consultant” to the president. (Dobson even recorded one of his Focus on the Family radio broadcasts with Reagan in the Oval Office, and Reagan had appointed him cochair of Citizens for Tax Reform and to the National Advisory Committee to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.) In 1980, Tim LaHaye had set aside his pastoral ministry for a full-time career in political activism. The next year he founded his secretive Council for National Policy. Leaked membership directories reveal the thickening web of conservative alliances: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly LaHaye, R. J. Rushdoony, Howard Phillips, Gary North, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, Tony Perkins, Bill Bright, Ken Starr, Michael Farris, Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, Trent Lott, Richard DeVos, Elsa Prince, Erik Prince, Wayne LaPierre, Richard Viguerie, Grover Norquist, Gary Bauer, Paul Weyrich, and Oliver North. LaHaye also established the American Coalition for Traditional Values, organizing hundreds of conservative Christian pastors and churches for the promotion of patriotism and moral values, and the Coalition for Religious Freedom to lobby for religious rights. In 1986, Falwell, LaHaye, Kennedy, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Bill Bright joined with other leaders of the Christian Right to form the Religious Coalition for a Moral Defense Policy.¹

On the other hand, in some ways evangelicals’ political success threatened to undo them. In 1984, Reagan was reelected in a landslide, winning 60 percent of the popular vote. (At the 1984 Republican National Convention, a video recounting Reagan’s first-term achievements opened with a series of clips from John Wayne films, lest anyone forget what Reagan represented.) Around 75 percent of white evangelicals voted for Reagan, but thanks to a rebounding economy, their support wasn’t critical to his reelection. In some ways, Reagan’s decisive victory took the wind out of evangelical sails. Conservative evangelicals had learned to trade on a sense of embattlement. When liberals, communists, feminists, or secular humanists seemed to be winning, supporters dug deep into their pockets. With Reagan in the White House, the sense of urgency diminished. Together with the tarnished image wrought by the televangelist sex scandals, this led to a precipitous decline in donations, notwithstanding the temporary boost North provided.²

In response, leaders of the Religious Right began to sound increasingly shrill. Falwell sparked controversy by characterizing AIDS as “the wrath of God upon homosexuals” and recommending that those with AIDS be quarantined. He also forged connections with some of Reagan’s most controversial overseas allies, including South Africa’s apartheid regime, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines, and the brutal right-wing dictatorship in El Salvador. LaHaye, meanwhile, tried to claim credit for Reagan’s reelection, but his victory lap was derailed when it was revealed that Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, a South Korean cult whose followers were popularly called Moonies, was one of LaHaye’s largest donors. After the 1986 midterms, LaHaye closed down his American Coalition for Traditional Values. Falwell’s Moral Majority disbanded in 1989. By the end of Reagan’s second term, in the absence of a common enemy, the power of the Christian Right appeared to be ebbing away.³

THE MOST URGENT ORDER OF BUSINESS was to elect a new president, but there was no clear heir apparent, despite the fact that one of their own had thrown his hat into the ring. Sometime in the mid-1980s, God had told Pat Robertson to run for president, according to Pat Robertson. In 1987 he announced his candidacy, but his campaign got off to a rough start when journalists uncovered the fact that he had been lying about his wedding date to disguise the fact that his wife had been seven months pregnant when they tied the knot. The media also discovered that, contrary to his claims, he’d never seen combat—his father, a United States senator, had apparently pulled strings to keep him out of harm’s way. These two significant issues aside, Robertson seemed to check all the boxes.⁴

Campaigning to “Restore the Greatness of America Through Moral Strength,” Robertson placed foreign policy front and center. He opposed arms control, denounced “Godless communism,” called for “the defeat of Marxist regimes in the Third World,” and vowed to “never negotiate with Communists or terrorists.” Robertson didn’t just talk the talk when it came to foreign policy. During the Reagan administration, he had expanded his evangelistic empire into Central America, and he came to support brutal right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala; CBN also became “the largest private donor to the Nicaraguan contra camps in Honduras” and a powerful advocate for aid to the Contras in Washington. On the campaign trail Robertson extolled the virtues of Christian America and railed against what he saw as an assault on Christian faith and values.⁵

Robertson’s CBN had an estimated annual viewership of 16 million and collected $2.4 million in contributions in 1986, and he hoped to translate this into political support, into an “invisible army.” Due to the improbability of his campaign, opponents and journalists used the term derisively, but Robertson embraced it. His army consisted primarily of charismatics, Pentecostals, and “spirit-filled” Christians, a subset of white evangelicalism, but he failed to win the support of most evangelicals. Falwell, LaHaye, Kennedy, Robison, and Dobson all declined to endorse him. This may have been due in part to professional rivalries, but it had also never seemed that Robertson had much of a chance of winning. For those who wanted access to the Oval Office for the next four years, backing the establishment candidate seemed a safer bet. But there was also the fact that Robertson’s occupation as a clergyman was seen by some as a detriment. It wasn’t just that he was a televangelist launching a campaign amid a slew of televangelist sex scandals, but many Christians themselves didn’t seem entirely confident that a pastor could provide the robust leadership necessary on the national stage. Certainly, Robertson paled in comparison to Reagan. Most evangelicals ended up backing George H. W. Bush, who, sensing which way the winds were blowing, had slowly aligned himself with religious conservatives.⁶

Evangelical support for Bush was tepid, and the feeling was mutual. Bush, too, lacked the rugged masculinity of his predecessor, but fortunately for him, he was running against Michael Dukakis. Republicans wasted no time in impugning Dukakis’s patriotism and sabotaging his masculinity—and in their view the two were closely connected. At least since 1972, Republicans had been arguing that Democrats lacked the strength to defend the nation. In the fall of 1988, evangelicals remained loyal to the Republican Party; 70 percent voted for Bush, and Bush easily beat his Democratic rival.⁷

The second year of Bush’s presidency, in the summer of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In response, the United States forged an international coalition to end the Iraqi occupation. Unlike Catholic bishops and Protestant mainline clergy, most evangelicals enthusiastically supported Operation Desert Storm. In this first major military engagement since America’s humiliating defeat in Vietnam, it wasn’t initially apparent how things would unfold, but once the ground assault against Saddam Hussein’s forces commenced, the answer became clear. This was no Vietnam. It was a stunning display of American military superiority. Granted, cleanup operations were a little messy. Oil wells burned, and Hussein remained in power. But for a time, the taste of renewed American power was exhilarating.⁸

In 1991, the Cold War officially came to an end. For more than four decades, evangelicals had mobilized against an imminent communist threat. With American power restored and their enemy vanquished, the need for evangelical militarism was no longer self-evident.

Nothing if not creative, Pat Robertson led the way in identifying the requisite crisis. Having failed in his presidential bid, Robertson used the millions of names on his campaign mailing list to found the Christian Coalition. In 1991, Robertson published The New World Order, arguing that President Bush was being duped into thinking the threat of communism was over. In his view, totalitarianism had returned to the former Soviet bloc in a more “deceptive and dangerous form.” He also accused Bush of launching the Iraq War as a devious plot to cede American sovereignty to the United Nations. Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist. In the early twentieth century these fears had attached to the League of Nations, and during the Cold War these fears were often channeled into a virulent anticommunism—though Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) had warned of a European Community that would usher in the reign of the devil. With the fall of the Soviet Union, suspicions fell squarely on the UN. And, in the case of Robertson, on the Illuminati, on wealthy Jewish bankers, and on conspiratorial corporate internationalists. The Wall Street Journal dismissed Robertson’s book as “a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits,” written in an “energetically crackpot style.” Meanwhile, it climbed to number four on the New York Times Best Sellers list, selling half a million copies. Under the leadership of Ralph Reed, Robertson’s Christian Coalition quickly grew into the most powerful grassroots organization of the Religious Right, building networks in all fifty states and claiming more than one million members by 1994.⁹

At the end of the Gulf War, President Bush’s approval rating stood at 89 percent. But with the recession of 1990–91, and with his reneging on his “no new taxes” pledge, his popularity soon plummeted. Sensing the president’s vulnerability, Pat Buchanan—a standard-bearer for the Religious Right who had worked for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan—decided to challenge Bush in the 1992 primaries. Concerned about Buchanan’s level of support, Bush reached out to the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention and began to more openly champion conservative social values. In this way, Bush ushered in what Reed termed “the most conservative and the most pro-family platform in the history of the party.” It called for a ban on abortion, opposed LGBT rights, and defended school prayer and homeschool rights. Buchanan didn’t unseat Bush, but he did shift the Republican Party farther to the Right. The Cold War might have ended, but at the opening night of the Republican National Convention, Buchanan declared that a different sort of war had begun: “There is a religious war going on in this country . . . a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. This war is for the soul of America.”¹⁰

The Religious Right, however, promptly lost the first battle of Buchanan’s war. In a three-way race, Bill Clinton emerged victorious over Bush and Ross Perot. If Bush had been a disappointment for American evangelicals, Bill Clinton appeared to be a disaster.

DESPITE HIS SOUTHERN and Baptist credentials, Clinton was anathema to the Religious Right. A draft dodger, a marijuana smoker, and a Democrat, he represented everything they despised about the 1960s. And then there was his wife. She had advocated for civil rights and children’s rights and had campaigned for the antiwar liberal George McGovern and the masculinity-challenged Jimmy Carter. Even worse, as a feminist and a career woman, Hillary Rodham had provoked the ire of religious conservatives when she refused to take her husband’s name. (She later changed her name in an attempt to appease critics and smooth her husband’s path forward.) On the campaign trail in 1992, her feminism became a point of contention when, in response to the insinuation that her law firm had received favors from her husband when he was governor, she retorted: “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas.” The backlash was swift, and brutal. “If I ever entertained the idea of voting for Bill Clinton,” one woman wrote in a letter to Time magazine, “the smug bitchiness of his wife’s comment has nipped that notion in the bud.” She spoke for many. Since the 1970s, the identity of housewives had become highly politicized, and Hillary Rodham Clinton triggered fear, resentment, and disdain among many conservative women, some of whom felt devalued by her very existence. Of course, many women had been reading books and listening to sermons for a good two decades to prepare them to respond in this way. It made no difference that Hillary liked to bake cookies, or that her recipe for chocolate chip cookies took home the top prize in the Family Circle presidential cookie bake-off. When it came to Hillary Clinton, conservative evangelicals were not about to forgive and forget.¹¹

With the Clintons occupying the White House, prospects looked bleak for religious conservatives. On the bright side, the Religious Right had always thrived on a sense of embattlement, and with Clinton’s election, the Christian Coalition and other conservative organizations saw a significant uptick in membership and fundraising. The Clinton White House provided fresh fodder for conservative outrage on a daily basis. In addition to the constant din of corruption allegations, of more immediate concern was the First Lady’s ill-fated attempt to reform American health care. Not only did this smack of socialism as far as conservatives were concerned, but the Christian Coalition insisted that health-care reform concealed a “radical social agenda,” ostensibly by promoting abortion, gay rights, and sex education. But this was just the tip of the iceberg.¹²

“The New World Order Wants Your Children,” Phillis Schlafly warned. When Hillary Clinton published It Takes a Village, a book describing how forces beyond the immediate family impacted the well-being of the nation’s children, Schlafly and other conservatives were adamant that it did not take a village to raise a child. They saw failed efforts to secure federal day-care legislation and the work of the Children’s Defense Fund and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as thinly veiled attempts to infringe on parental rights. Parents didn’t want a village “butting in.” If you allow the village to “usurp your parental authority, you can be sure that the village will teach your children behaviors you don’t want them to learn.” Schlafly envisioned a future where parents no longer had the right to discipline their children, where children could demand to watch television, refuse to attend their parents’ church, even join a cult. By advancing the absurdity of “children’s rights,” the Clinton administration, and the UN, threatened parental authority, an orderly society, and American sovereignty.¹³

Failing to protect national sovereignty wasn’t the only way Clinton was undermining the nation’s security. The Gulf War had briefly reinvigorated narratives of a heroic military and American power, but for conservatives this confidence diminished quickly as Clinton took the helm as commander in chief. On the military front, Clinton’s sins were legion. Early in his presidency he announced his intention to open the armed forces to people regardless of their sexual orientation. Facing immediate backlash, he settled for a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Opposition came from within the military itself and from American evangelicals, and by this point, to be sure, the two groups were not mutually exclusive. Evangelicals in the military used materials supplied by the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and Exodus International to oppose opening the military to gay service members. In turn, Dobson hosted Colonel Ronald D. Ray on his radio show, and Ray warned listeners that “military leaders were real naive about the widespread agenda” homosexuals were advancing.¹⁴

Evangelicals weren’t just concerned about “gays in the military.” They feared the “feminization” of the military as a whole under Clinton’s watch. In 1994, Clinton signed an order allowing women to serve on combat ships and fighter planes, a move that raised the ire of religious conservatives. This not only went against God-ordained gender difference, but by putting women where they didn’t belong it exposed them to the threat of sexual assault. During the 1990s, a series of sex scandals rattled the military. From the Tailhook incident in 1991 to the adultery of air force pilot Kelly Flinn, it was clear to conservatives that the military was no place for women. Women belonged on a pedestal, not on the field of battle. Making matters worse, Clinton further emasculated the military by sending troops on an array of UN peacekeeping missions. As Schlafly put it, Clinton and “overpaid bureaucrats” seemed intent on establishing the UN as “a world government with its own police force and its own taxing authority,” but she reminded readers that “no man can serve two masters.” Sending US soldiers as “UN mercenaries . . . on phony ‘peacekeeping’ expeditions” to places like Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda was unconstitutional and un-American. And unmanly.¹⁵

Schlafly was right to sense that peacekeeping forces differed from traditional militaries. Decoupled from nationalist agendas, the UN stood as a model of post–Cold War, nonimperialist military force, one that appeared to eschew traditional militarism and patriarchal masculinity. Some members of the military also found this change unsettling. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the Gulf War, marine fighter pilots reported that they were losing confidence in themselves. Two years after their decisive victory in Iraq, without a clear mission, they didn’t even feel “like real marines.”¹⁶

IF CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALS needed one more thing not to like about the Clintons, there was the Lewinsky affair. As word leaked out about the president’s “inappropriate relationship” with the former White House intern in January 1998, Schlafly lashed out: “At stake is whether the White House will become a public relations vehicle for lying and polling, akin to a television show, or will remain a platform for the principled articulation of policies and values that Americans respect.” Clinton had “converted the once-serious offense of lying to the American public into a daily rite,” extinguishing all reverence for the presidency. The issue wasn’t really “what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do with Paula or Gennifer or Monica,” but “whether we are going to allow the president to get by with flouting the law and lying about it on television, while hiding behind his popularity in the polls.” If this precedent prevailed, Schlafly prophesied, “Americans can look forward to a succession of TV charlatans and professional liars occupying the White House.”¹⁷

James Dobson, too, issued a lengthy letter to his followers expressing shock and dismay at the humiliation of the president, his family, and the nation. Like Schlafly, Dobson was appalled by his fellow citizens’ willingness to excuse the president’s behavior as “just a private affair—something between himself and Hillary.” Reminding readers that military officials were being held accountable for sexual misconduct, Dobson found it “profoundly disturbing” that the rules seemed to be rewritten for Clinton. What’s more, Clinton’s dishonesty was part of a long history of immorality and untruthfulness. He’d lied about Gennifer Flowers and about dodging the draft. He’d “visited the Soviet Union and other hostile countries during the Vietnam War, claiming that he was only an ‘observer.’” He’d organized and participated in antiwar rallies, and evaded questions about his marijuana use. “Character DOES matter,” Dobson opined. “You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it.”¹⁸

Pat Robertson weighed in as well. Clinton had “debauched, debased and defamed” the presidency, turning the White House into a “playpen for the sexual freedom of the poster child of the 1960s,” he told 3000 members of the Christian Coalition, bringing his audience to their feet. Ralph Reed, too, insisted that character mattered: “We care about the conduct of our leaders, and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.” Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell sent a special edition of his weekly report to more than 160,000 evangelical pastors, urging them to call undecided House members to vote for Clinton’s impeachment. The Christian Coalition collected more than 250,000 signatures on petitions calling for the same. Dobson’s Family Research Council ran television ads calling for Clinton’s resignation due to his “virtue deficit.” Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem signed a public letter criticizing Clinton for his “ill use of women” and his “manipulation of truth,” and SBC leaders Paige Patterson, Al Mohler, and Richard Land signed a letter taking Clinton to task.¹⁹

The unfaithful, draft-dodging, morally deficient president embodied all that was wrong with America. Yet, to evangelicals’ consternation, Clinton’s sexual misconduct seemed to enhance his standing in the eyes of many Americans. Since the 1970s, conservatives had been tarring liberal men as wimps, deficient in masculine leadership qualities. As the details of the Lewinsky scandal came to light, “Bill Clinton’s image went from that of the neutered househusband of an emasculating harridan to that of a swaggering stud-muffin whose untrammeled lust for sexual conquest imperiled all females in his orbit,” according to clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat. Perhaps, “behind the tongue-clucking disapprobation of some male commentators” there lurked “a thinly disguised envy.” Clinton’s job rating received a significant boost as the scandal unfolded—“the formerly feminized president had been resurrected as a phallic leader.”²⁰

Among Clinton’s evangelical critics, it appears that their concern with Clinton’s predatory behavior was more about Clinton than about predatory behavior. Within their own circles, evangelicals didn’t have a strong record when it came to defending women against harassment and abuse. In the 1980s, for example, Dobson had recommended a healthy skepticism toward certain allegations of domestic violence. In Love Must Be Tough (1983), he warned of women who “deliberately ‘baited’” their husbands into hitting them, “verbally antagoniz[ing]” them until they got “the prize” they sought: a bruise they could parade before “neighbors, friends, and the law” to gain a “moral advantage,” and perhaps also justify an otherwise unbiblical escape from marriage through divorce. This argument remained unchanged in his 1996 edition of the book.²¹

In 1991, President Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court provided occasion for evangelicals to reflect further on questions of harassment and abuse. Upon Thomas’s nomination, Anita Hill—herself a devout Christian who had served on the law faculty of Oral Roberts University—reluctantly came forward with her account of Thomas’s persistent sexual harassment. According to Hill, Thomas liked to detail various scenes he’d viewed in pornographic films and boast of his “sexual prowess.” Both Hill and Thomas were black, and the contentious hearings split the African American community. Among white evangelicals there was little dissent; they saw Hill as representative of the corrupt and conniving influence of modern feminism, and they stood behind Thomas.²²

In the pages of Christianity Today, Charles Colson argued that the Thomas hearings were the result of feminism run amuck. Feminists insisted that women should be sexually liberated (“read promiscuous”), use explicit language (“read obscene”), and freed from “the burden of childbearing” (to compete in the workplace), yet now they complained when men used explicit language when talking to women in the workplace. “The very people who deliberately tore down older codes of chivalry and deference to women now want the protection they offer,” he groused. It wasn’t just the family that was under attack, but something even more fundamental: “the very notion of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.” What Americans were seeing was the result of confusion sowed by militant feminists, and since God was “not the author of confusion,” something diabolical must be at work.²³

Phyllis Schlafly scoffed at the very idea that Hill could be a victim of sexual harassment, or, as she put it, “some bad words in the workplace.” Hill was an EEOC lawyer, after all, and would know how to deal with sexual harassment if any such thing had occurred. Schlafly slandered Hill as the epitome of the “phony pose” feminists adopted when they wanted to grab power: “‘poor little me,’ the injured ingenue, the damsel in distress who cries for Big Brother Federal Government to defend her from the wolves in the workplace—not merely from what they might do, but even from what they might say.” Schlafly wasn’t buying it. Hill was smart, tough, and “perfectly capable of telling a man to button his lip, keep his hands off, get lost, bug off or just plain ‘no.’” To Schlafly, the whole thing was just a “last-minute smear” orchestrated by a “feminist mob” trying to lynch Thomas.²⁴

Though few matched Schlafly’s expressiveness, other leading figures of the Christian Right, including Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and Gary Bauer, came to Thomas’s defense as well. This can be explained in part by the greater good evangelicals hoped to accomplish with the ascension of another conservative justice to the Supreme Court. Yet long after Thomas was safely ensconced on the highest court, conservatives continued to mobilize against measures to address sexual harassment and abuse. They opposed the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, on many counts. As Schlafly explained, the VAWA was just one more example of “the federal government’s insatiable demand for more power.” Schlafly also accused feminists of inflating rates of harassment and abuse, and she suggested that most of the exceedingly rare instances of actual harassment could be blamed on feminists themselves. Before the feminists burst on the scene in the 1970s, there had been all sorts of laws protecting and advantaging women, Schlafly contended, but feminists had dismantled these protections in their quest for equality. Now, playing the victim, they busied themselves with inventing new infractions. Adding to the absurdity, feminists wanted to criminalize “all heterosexual sex” as rape “unless an affirmative, sober, explicit verbal consent can be proved.” Apparently jokes, too, were no longer allowed, because feminists didn’t have a sense of humor. Finally, concerns about domestic violence could be linked to a global feminist agenda; when Hillary Clinton represented the United States at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, giving her highly lauded speech “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights,” it only confirmed the nefarious link between globalism, feminism, and the Clinton administration. All the pieces fit together in an intricate plot to undermine the sovereignty of the United States, and the authority of the family patriarch.²⁵

RELIGIOUS LEADERS WERE NOT the Clinton administration’s only, or even its loudest, critics. The 1987 repeal of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which had mandated honest and equitable on-air treatment of controversial issues, ushered in an era of talk radio that would change the tenor of American political conversation. Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic style set the tone. Each day, listeners could tune in to a world where white men still reigned supreme in the public and private spheres. Limbaugh was known for his sexist and misogynistic comments about women. Hillary Clinton was a favorite target, as were various “feminazis” and female journalists, whom he referred to as “infobabes” and “anchorettes.” An enthusiastic supporter of the military, Limbaugh loved to deride Clinton as a draft dodger, even though he himself had secured a deferment to avoid serving in Vietnam. He also liked to talk football and smoke expensive cigars while ridiculing liberal men as the “new castrati.” Millions listened in, often on a daily basis. Blurring the line between news and entertainment, Limbaugh’s popularity was clear, but his influence was difficult to discern. A 1995 Time cover story, at least, warned that his “electronic populism” threatened to short-circuit representative democracy.”²⁶

In 1996, Bill O’Reilly joined Limbaugh in the right-wing media universe. Hired by Roger Ailes to host The O’Reilly Factor at the start-up Fox News Channel, O’Reilly channeled masculine rage in a similar manner, tapping into the anger and resentment brewing among conservative white men sensing their cultural displacement. O’Reilly, too, framed politics, and especially foreign policy, in terms of masculine power. Fox News quickly became a mouthpiece for American conservatism. With bombastic male commentators sharing the screen with women whose qualifications apparently included a sexualized hyper-femininity, throwback masculinity was at the heart of the network’s appeal.²⁷

Neither Limbaugh nor O’Reilly made their name as Christian broadcasters, but many conservative evangelicals were attracted to their masculine brand. In the 1980s, Tim LaHaye had called for a Christian news network. Fox News didn’t frame itself in religious terms, but it more than fit the bill. The fit wasn’t a theological one, at least not in terms of traditional doctrine; it was cultural and political. Fox News hawked a nostalgic vision where white men still dominated, where feminists and other liberals were demonized, and where a militant masculinity and sexualized femininity offered a vision for the way things ought to be. White evangelicals were drawn to the network, and the network, in turn, shaped evangelicalism. But this is not a case of politics hijacking religion; the affinities between Fox News and conservative evangelicalism ran deep. Long before O’Reilly invented the “War on Christmas,” evangelicals knew he was on their side. Within two decades, the influence of Fox News on conservative evangelicalism would be so profound that journalists and scholars alike would find it difficult to separate the two.²⁸

IN THE ABSENCE of a clear, external threat, culture warriors like Robertson, Dobson, Schlafly, and Buchanan identified a new battle, a war on which the soul of the nation depended. Thanks to the steady barrage of scandal, actual and imagined, issuing from the Clinton White House, they were often successful in stoking the fires of evangelical militancy. But during the 1990s, other, and in some cases opposing movements signaled potential new directions for post–Cold War evangelicalism. No longer preoccupied with defending against the spread of communism, many evangelicals began to embrace a more expansive foreign policy agenda as they turned their attention to global poverty, human trafficking, the global AIDS epidemic, and the persecution of Christians around the world. In 1996, the NAE issued a “Statement of Conscience” that elevated religious persecution and human rights as chief foreign policy concerns. As Richard Cizik, the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs, explained, in the post–Cold War era evangelicals had become “more interested in making a difference than in making a statement.” For a time, it seemed evangelicals’ “knee-jerk bellicosity” might be waning as they began to embrace a more diffuse set of commitments.²⁹

The NAE represented a more moderate establishment evangelicalism, but even within the Christian Right some sought to broaden the coalition by softening the message. As head of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed advised members to “avoid hostile and intemperate rhetoric” and to instead embrace a more tolerant posture, emphasizing inclusion. “We have allowed ourselves to be ghettoized by a narrow band of issues like abortion, homosexual rights and prayer in school,” he warned, and it was time for a new direction. Not all members of the Christian Coalition were on board. By 1996 a rift had opened between Reed and members of the old guard unwilling to compromise on deeply held values, men like Falwell, Dobson, Gary Bauer, and many of the organization’s rank and file.³⁰

Tensions between militant and more forward-looking expressions that characterized evangelicalism in the 1990s found expression in evangelical discussions of Christian manhood as well. Here, too, old certainties did not necessarily hold sway. Without the threat of godless communism to justify militant Christian masculinity, many evangelical men began to express uncertainty about what manhood in fact required. Times had changed, it seemed. Perhaps masculinity needed to change as well.