5. THE BEGINNING OF DIVISION

Beauty and Salvation in 1974

THE REVEREND MARVIN Horan left the high school up Campbells Creek in the tenth grade. "Back then, the big thing was going to work," Horan said, remembering 1955. Most kids left West Virginia for the upper Midwest in the 1950s. ("If you made it to Cleveland, you had a job," he recalled.) Horan "always wanted to be a truck driver," and that's what he's always been—except for the two years he spent in federal prison, sent up on a charge that in 1974 he conspired to dynamite an elementary school.

Marvin Horan was twenty-five years old and newly married when four women from the Campbells Creek community church came to call in 1964. "I was sitting at home one night watching television," he remembered. "Four women stopped, and they were talking with me about the church. And when these four women left, my whole life changed. It was a miraculous change. I have never been the same since that night, and that's been forty-one years. I have never had the same desires that I had prior to that experience. You cannot come in contact with the Creator and be the same. You just can't. It's impossible."

Horan was called to the ministry that night. To prepare for his work, he "acquired a small library" and began to study. He read for the next three years, until, he said, "I had come to the place where I could address a congregation and do it with some sense and reasoning behind it." Then, as is the way with the independent churches in rural West Virginia, he proclaimed himself a minister. He drove a truck six days a week and preached on Sundays. Reverend Horan led revivals and traveled the circuit among the small fundamentalist churches dotted up the creeks that carve through the southern mountains. In 1969, he was filling the pulpit of a church that was between ministers when he had what he called a "vision." He told the congregation he saw a time when he would be "preaching to thousands of people." He had the premonition again early in 1974, and then, in September of that year, the vision came to pass.

Marvin Horan became the leader of the nation's most violent conflict over school textbooks. In 1974, thousands of people in Kanawha County, West Virginia, believed that some of the new books adopted by the local school board were anti-American, antireligious, "trashy, filthy and one-sided."¹ Objections to the books first voiced in the late spring escalated into meetings, and meetings evolved into mass rallies and marches by late summer. Soon after the children returned to their classrooms in the fall, Horan and others called on parents to keep their children out of school. Coal miners and truck drivers went out on strike in sympathy with the textbook protesters, and by the fall of 1974, most of Kanawha County's commercial life snapped closed. Ten thousand coal miners left their jobs. Parents kept children home, and dozens of schools were emptied. On the first Sunday in September, Horan spoke from the pulpit of his Two-Mile Mountain Mission church. He urged his congregation to continue the boycott of the Kanawha County schools, promising that they would prevail over the school board and the books. He also told his flock that he had received a "vision ... God has revealed to me a victory speech."²

Partisanship Returns—and So Does Religion

Ten years after the Kanawha County textbook controversy, Don J. Goode, a doctoral student at Michigan State University, contacted people who had been on both sides of the textbook war. Goode hoped to learn if opinions about school textbooks were "reflective of more general values."³ He wanted to know if a stand in the textbook war could be considered a proxy for a larger constellation of beliefs—a worldview of society, religion, and politics. Goode convinced the former textbook combatants to answer several questionnaires. In the first, he asked participants what they thought of the nation's courts. The anti-textbook group strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court's decision to ban teacher-led school prayer. The pro-textbook group strongly agreed with this decision. The anti-textbook group thought that the courts gave criminals too many rights and failed to preserve traditional values and that judges too often "made" laws rather than interpreted those on the books. The pro-textbook group thought the opposite.

In another set of questions, Goode asked whether county services would improve if the people of Kanawha County could afford to pay more in taxes. The pro-textbook group strongly agreed that the county could make good use of increased revenues. The anti-textbook group strongly disagreed. The anti-textbook group, Goode concluded, simply "did not have confidence" in government.

Not surprisingly, Goode found a "wide schism" between the groups when he asked about education. The textbook opponents favored prayer in schools, discipline, and the teaching of "traditional Christian and American values." They also thought that extracurricular activities didn't provide "valuable learning experiences" and that schools shouldn't provide "special services (such as hot meals and daycare centers) that some families can't provide" for themselves. The textbook supporters were generally in favor of afterschool activities and the use of schools to provide social services; this group was significantly less enthusiastic about a curriculum that emphasized discipline, school prayer, and the teaching of Christian values.

Finally, Goode prepared a list of eighteen values—such as equality, self-respect, and national security—and asked that individuals rank them in order of importance. The two sides judged many of the values similarly. Both pro- and anti-textbook activists placed a "comfortable life" relatively low on the scale; both sides thought that health and "freedom" were important. The anti-textbook group ranked "national security" significantly higher than the pro-textbook group and "equality" (defined as "brotherhood, equal opportunity for all") significantly lower. The pro-textbook group ranked a "world of beauty in nature and the arts" significantly higher than the anti-textbook group.

The most severe difference between the two groups—people who initially had divided only over which textbooks they thought should be used in the Kanawha County schools in the fall of 1974—came to light in how they judged the importance of a "saved, eternal life." The group that had favored the introduction of the new textbooks placed "salvation" last in their hierarchy of values. Those who opposed the new books ranked a saved, eternal life first.

Political scientists Geoffrey Layman and Edward Carmines gathered survey results from the 1980 through 1992 presidential elections. They compared the effects of race, age, education, religion, and a desire for personal freedom on voting behavior.^* They found that measures of traditional faith appeared to have the strongest impact on presidential votes. Voters cared about issues affecting self-expression—they wanted freedom of speech protected, for example—but traditional religious values mattered the most.⁴ The political division in this country wasn't between regions or classes, Layman and Carmines found. It was between people with liberal notions of religion and those with traditional beliefs.

This was the new politics that appeared in 1974 in Kanawha County. The divide there was about religion and values—and it was expressed geographically. The textbook opponents came largely from the small towns in rural Kanawha County; those who supported the textbooks and the board lived mainly in Charleston, the state capital. There were class differences, too. Opponents were working people who earned less and had less formal education than those living in the city. The mainline religious denominations and the establishment organizations in Charleston—civic clubs and the daily newspaper—supported the school board's choice of books. Opponents worshiped at the Open Door Apostolic Church, the Spradling Gospel Tabernacle, and Reverend Horan's Two-Mile Mountain Mission. This wasn't simply a conflict between clubs or institutions, however. Kanawha County residents were divided over their way of life.

Religion, Public and Private

Social scientists have been predicting for the past three centuries that religion would soon run its course and disappear. Sociologist Rodney Stark found the first forecast of religion's demise in 1710, when Thomas Woolston calmly calculated that Christianity would no longer be with us in 1900. Voltaire (1694–1778) figured that religion would last only another fifty years. In 1822, Thomas Jefferson surmised, "There is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."⁵ Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx all predicted that ascendant industrialism would eventually render religion meaningless. Society would simply "outgrow" the need for organized faith, and humans would be rid of ritual, superstition, and sacred traditions. More bluntly, sociologist Peter Berger announced in 1968 that "by the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture." Indeed, Berger wrote, "the predicament of the believer is increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university."⁶

The promise that religion would fall victim to modernization "has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry," one of the "key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations," wrote political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart.⁷ Which means, of course, that a central tenet of the social sciences over the past three hundred years has been proved spectacularly wrong. (Berger had the good sense to recant in 1997.) But a modernizing, industrial society did have an impact on faith in America. The economic panics of the late nineteenth century, the influx of immigrants, and the contradictions between scientific discoveries (say, evolution) and religious faith led to a split in the Protestant church. The division that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century was not so much between denominations; it was more about how people viewed the world. On one side was what Martin Marty has called "Private Protestantism."⁸ Private Protestants promoted individual salvation and promised that personal morality would be rewarded in the next life. On the other side of that great divide was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society. The latter laid the foundation for Democratic liberalism. The former provided the moral footing and rationale for Republican conservatism.

Private Protestantism considered the consumption of alcohol a personal failing; Public Protestantism looked at drunkenness as a social ill. Private Protestants supported "blue laws" (closing places of business on Sundays); Public Protestants promoted the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Dwight Moody, a Private Protestant revivalist, witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either "these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known." Public Protestants, Marty wrote, saw the Chicago labor strife and reasoned, "either the people were to be evangelized and their needs were to be met and their rights faced, or the Kingdom of God would not come." At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, both a session on the Social Gospel (the name given to Public Protestantism) and a revival conducted by Reverend Moody were held. While the Social Gospel ministers confronted industrial life and sought human perfection through political reform, Moody defined his task differently: "I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can.'"⁹

Josiah Strong, a turn-of-the-century Congregationalist minister, described "two types of Christianity" alive in the country. The division was "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong wrote in 1913. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social." The one staged revivals; the other sought to reform the world.^*10

Walter Rauschenbusch was the most well-known proponent of the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch pastored a church in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and from that vantage point in the new urban slum, he watched the modern industrial order rub raw against humanity. He was an optimist, believing in the "immense latent perfectibility of human nature."¹¹ Perfection, however, required social intervention. Rauschenbusch wrote in 1908 that a "sense of equality is the basis for Christian morality." And to reach that equality, the Social Gospel theologian promoted legislation: a minimum wage, shorter workdays, better food, and cleaner air. The Social Gospel was a moral crusade against the cruelty of the industrial city. Western civilization was at a "decisive point in its development," Rauschenbusch wrote. "Either society confronted social injustice or society would fall: It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge."¹²

The country—or at least a majority of its citizens—followed Rauschenbusch. In 1908, the Methodist Church adopted its Social Creed, a list of social reforms, including "equal rights and complete justice for all men," the end of sweatshops, the prohibition of child labor, the protection of workers from dangerous machinery, and the "abatement of poverty." The title of Charles M. Sheldon's 1896 novel, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, would become the inspiration for W.W.J.D. bumper stickers and woven bracelets sported by Evangelicals in the 1990s. But the original book was a call for Christian socialism. Ecumenicism was the organizational form of the Social Gospel. Thirty-three denominations were represented when the Federal Council of Churches was formed in 1908. The combined representation of Protestant faiths quickly adopted the Methodist Social Creed.¹³

There was a period of intradenominational conflict, but the Social Gospel crowd won most of these organizational disputes. (For instance, modernist Baptists took over the denomination's theological schools and missionary boards, steering them in the direction of the Social Gospel.) The so-called Fundamentalists "lost in their efforts to gain control of any of the denominations" in the early twentieth century, Marty wrote. So the traditionalists responded by setting up institutions parallel to those dominated by practitioners of the Social Gospel.¹⁴ Left out by the mainline denominations, Private Protestant pastors established councils of Fundamentalist preachers, printing houses, and seminaries.^*15 The traditionalists published their own manifesto, twelve booklets printed between 1910 and 1915 titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. These scholarly works fenced off the theological boundaries of Private Protestantism: the Virgin Birth of Christ, the inerrancy of the Bible, Christ's death on behalf of sinners, his Resurrection, and the Second Coming. Three million copies of these booklets were distributed; this was the birth of Fundamentalism.¹⁶

But after the humiliation of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, where a public school teacher was found guilty of violating the state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, the contest was over. The Fundamentalist movement was brought to an "abrupt halt" by the ridicule resulting from the trial, according to the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Christian Century magazine predicted in 1926 that Fundamentalism would be a "disappearing quantity in American religious life." There was a "noticeable drop in attendance" at the 1926 meeting of the World's Christian Fundamentals Association. What followed was the "Great Exodus," Falwell's description of the mass movement of Fundamentalists out of mainline denominations and public life.¹⁷ Evangelicals didn't disappear, of course; they separated. Conservatives organized the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942. They experimented with radio and television. (Between 1967 and 1972, membership in the National Religious Broadcasters increased fourfold.¹⁸) Occasionally, religious conservatives poked their heads out and showed some political force, supporting, for example, the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. But the purpose of the church was saving souls, not saving society.¹⁹

For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the people who would become the Republican religious right were pre-political. They were either unaligned or stuck in political formations established by the Civil War or the New Deal. In 1960, 60 percent of Evangelical Protestants identified themselves as Democrats.²⁰

"Is God Dead?"

In the mid-twentieth century, the strands of what we would recognize as modern conservatism were mostly unconnected. There were libertarians, business conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and conservative intellectuals. But they didn't have a party, and they didn't have each other. After World War II, there occurred what historian Sara Diamond has called a "conservative transformation." The various threads of conservative thought and faith began to intertwine, and social, religious, and ideological movements slowly braided together.²¹

The groups found they had things in common. Libertarians saw as primary the conflict between the individual and the state. They distrusted a government that substituted programs for personal responsibility and freedom. Christian traditionalists also thought that the country lacked discipline and distrusted a government that substituted programs for salvation. (James Dobson sold more than 2 million copies of his 1971 book Dare to Discipline, which encouraged parents to spank children who were disrespectful. The conservative movement simply hoped to extend family discipline to the nation.)²² New York neoconservatives, libertarians, and southern fundamentalists distrusted "social engineering" by the state, whether it was Stalin's Five-Year Plan, Johnson's Great Society, or textbooks recommended by English teachers in West Virginia. Finally, libertarians and fundamentalists found ready allies in the business wing of the Republican Party, those pressing for smaller, cheaper, and less intrusive government.

Historian Lisa McGirr has described the shift in conservative politics in the 1960s from stiff anticommunism to a tossed salad of libertarianism, racial homogeneity, social conservatism, and fundamentalist Christianity. She found the formation of the "New Right" a continent away from Kanawha County, in Orange County, California. The people in Orange County in the 1960s "embraced a set of beliefs whose cornerstone element was opposition to the liberal leviathan that was, in their eyes, the postwar federal government ... Many Orange County conservatives, then, drank a heady and muddled cocktail of traditional and libertarian ideas, linking a Christian view of the world with libertarian rhetoric and libertarian economics." The new conservative movement didn't grow just in the rural South or in coal country. Fundamentalist churches and right-wing politics also thrived among a "modern, young, and affluent population" in California.^*23

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, this impromptu conservative movement in Orange County steered toward the public schools.^† Anaheim fought over sex education from 1968 to 1970. In 1969, Orange County parents protested and eventually shut down a sex education program in the public schools. Parents warned that "secular humanists" were worming their way into the classrooms.²⁴ The John Birch Society in Orange County reprinted and distributed copies of the nineteenth-century McGuffey Readers. By the time the textbook fight began in West Virginia, Orange County conservatives' "concerns about 'morality' and permissiveness would become the driving force behind a full-fledged battle over schools."²⁵

The New Right was starting to coalesce. Religious traditionalists melded with anticommunists. Advocates of traditional morality and personal responsibility found themselves in sympathy with laissez-faire capitalists and Private Protestants. They all had a common enemy in government.²⁶ Free markets, small government, anticommunism, and traditional values, Martin Marty wrote, were all deemed by Private Protestants to be part of "the mission of Christ to the world."²⁷ The "enemy of my enemy" connections could be bizarre. Intellectual conservatives and religious conservatives, for example, found common cause in their distrust of international law and the United Nations. The hardheaded neoconservatives who emerged from New York University thought that the UN was a "charade kept alive by liberal piety about international cooperation and world peace."²⁸ Similarly, in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series of "end of time" novels, the Antichrist takes power in the world by first gaining control of the UN. Nicolae Carpathia (the Antichrist) becomes secretary-general of the UN, promoting disarmament and "global community."²⁹ (In the early 1960s, the Magnolia School District in Orange County banned the UN as an "unfit" topic for the schools.³⁰) Intellectuals who opposed the supremacy of international law would gradually join those who had millennialist fears of world government—and fundamentalist Christians living in West Virginia coal camps would eventually find common ground with neoconservative urban Jews and suburban Californians.

The Social Gospel, meanwhile, became the equivalent of a state religion, its policies enacted by Progressives, New Dealers, and purveyors of the New Frontier and Great Society.³¹ Public Protestantism dominated most of the mainline churches, denominations that all grew at a steady clip through the 1950s. There was a surge of interest in ecumenicism. Time magazine placed Eugene Carson Blake on its cover after he gave a sermon in 1960 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco proposing to merge four major Protestant denominations. (Blake was later named the head of the World Council of Churches.) Mainline denominations were prominent in the early civil rights movement. Blake was arrested along with other religious leaders when they tried to integrate a Baltimore amusement park on July 4, 1963.³² The National Council of Churches (formerly the Federal Council of Churches) called for a "mass meeting of this country's religious leaders to demonstrate their concern over racial tensions in Selma" in 1965.³³

There was talk of a "new reformation" in the mid-1960s, and it was a religious movement designed by Public Protestants. The future lay with the "servant church," announced a Time cover story in 1964.³⁴ Theologians found in the Bible ample teachings that Christianity was a life in service, that the "purpose of the church is mission," not worship or revival.³⁵ Time reported that "modern church thinkers" questioned the need for an organized church at all, believing that "God may well be more apparent in a purely nonreligious organization or movement—such as the civil rights revolution or the fight against poverty and hunger in the world—than in the actions of the churches."³⁶

In May 1966, Time asked what was a very reasonable question in a country dominated—or so it seemed—by Public Protestantism. In large red letters against a pitch-black background, the magazine invited Americans to consider "Is God Dead?"³⁷

"Even Hillbillies Have Constitutional Rights"

Kanawha County was contemplating new textbooks in the spring of 1974 because it had been ordered to. The West Virginia Board of Education had passed a resolution directing local districts to adopt books that "accurately portray minority and ethnic group contributions" to American history and culture.³⁸ The Kanawha County school superintendent recommended 325 books and then put the volumes on shelves in the county's main public library. The board didn't comment on the books; the local press didn't report that new books were on the way. For nearly a month in March and April, the books sat and few people bothered to crack a cover. In mid-April, however, Kanawha County school board member Alice Moore—"Sweet Alice," as she would come to be known—piped up.

Moore was the wife of a fundamentalist preacher in St. Albans, West Virginia. She had run for a seat on the Kanawha County school board in 1970, beating an incumbent in a campaign that was dominated by debate about the propriety of including sex education as a classroom subject. In 1969, the school board had adopted a sex education curriculum recommended by the state and written under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. In good Social Gospel style, the school board announced that the "public school system should assume responsibility for instruction in any important area of community or family living which is not being adequately assumed by home or other agency or institution."³⁹

Moore disagreed. She considered sex education a descent into moral relativism, a "denial of absolutes." Moore argued that the classes represented "the humanistic approach of reasoning out right and wrong on the basis of circumstances," which was "a denial of God." And to Moore, "God's law is absolute!" Her opponent, Dr. Carl Tully, didn't curl up in his confrontation with Sweet Alice. He charged that the John Birch Society supported Moore's campaign. ("Lies Inspired by Birchers Hit Campaign, Tully Says," blared one headline in the Charleston Gazette.) Moore and her supporters wouldn't be happy simply to scrub the schools clean of sex education, Tully warned; they intended to "gain control of the school board and in turn dictate what textbooks will be used, what books to have in the library, and what subjects can be taught and who will teach them."⁴⁰ Rumor spread around Kanawha County that Texas oilman H. L. Hunt had given $100,000 to Moore's 1970 school board campaign. Moore denied it. She also denied a connection with any "Birchers." Moore obviously didn't need much outside help. A week before the election, she appeared on television holding two Bibles she claimed a janitor had retrieved from a school incinerator. "And they [Tully's supporters] have the nerve to call me a book burner," Moore said, holding the crispy sacred texts, fresh from the fiery furnace.⁴¹ Moore defeated Tully in May 1970, and sex education classes were soon banished from Kanawha County schools.⁴²

Moore's initial questions about the 1974 books concerned the use of an African American dialect in some of the language arts texts. "My main objection is that they simply attack traditional philosophy of good grammar and English," Moore said at a May meeting. A week later, Moore's objections were more strenuous. She told the board she represented "a wide constituency of people who don't want this trash." The books presented a view of America from the black perspective, she argued, but they didn't convey the point of view of middle-class whites. "I'm not asking for something anti-black, but we have got to have something from both sides," Moore said. "I want to see something patriotic in those books."⁴³

In the summer of 1974, Marvin Horan was hauling rock used to construct the interstate highway running through Charleston. One of the road job superintendents gave the minister a pamphlet and asked him to read it. Horan said that he glanced at the pamphlet and saw that it was about books in the county schools, "and then I forgot about it." But in August, Horan came home one evening to find a crowd gathered at his neighborhood church, the Point Lick Gospel Tabernacle. His wife told him that the group was examining a set of textbooks, and she suggested that they take a look, too. Alice Moore was there. So were the books. The crowd grew, overflowing the building, so Horan recommended that the group move to a nearby park. Horan mounted the stage. He said a prayer to open the meeting. "And I never did get off that stage because people were insistent that I speak for them," Horan said. "It just happened. Nothing was preplanned. There were no meetings. Nobody talked it over and said this was the way to do it and this would be our approach. None of that was done. It all happened just instantly."

Parents were meeting all over rural Kanawha County. At one rally, protesters passed empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, collecting $719.75, enough to purchase a full-page newspaper ad in the Charleston newspaper criticizing the textbooks. The next meeting on Campbells Creek was larger, Horan recalled more than thirty years later. Thousands came. Police had to close the road entering the park. Horan led that meeting and another at a school gym. Meetings at the park on Campbells Creek ripened into mass marches in Charleston. Horan urged parents to keep their children out of school, and they did, at least in the rural areas of Kanawha County where the movement was centered. "The common man don't know what to do except what he's done, and that's to go home and sit down," Horan said, explaining his strategy. On the first day of school after Labor Day, attendance in Kanawha County schools was off by 20 percent. Protesters appeared in front of school buildings, one carrying a sign saying EVEN HILLBILLIES HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) members honored pickets thrown up by parents, and soon every coal mine in Kanawha County and several in neighboring counties closed.⁴⁴

There was a rural/urban divide in the textbook strike. The Charleston Daily Mail surveyed parents in thirty elementary schools on the use of one group of health textbooks. Only six schools had a majority of parents who would allow their children to use the books. Four of those six were in the city of Charleston. In one rural school that November, only 9 of 922 students attended classes.⁴⁵ Also divided were the independent churches in rural Kanawha County and the mainline denominations in Charleston. And underlying that divide was an increasingly popular belief among Private Protestants in the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Carol Mason, a women's studies professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, interviewed participants in the controversy. Several told her that one of the most read books in the region in 1974 was Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth.⁴⁶ Lindsey's book was a precursor of the Left Behind publishing phenomenon. It presented a meticulously detailed prediction that the world was approaching the end of time and that the Second Coming of Christ would take place in 1988.^* (Carol Mason observed that the book sold more than 10 million copies and, unintentionally perhaps, served as the religious right's equivalent of the Port Huron Statement, Tom Hayden's 1962 manifesto founding Students for a Democratic Society.)⁴⁷ The religious milieu of Kanawha County was a volatile one, where a good number of people were reading about the decline of American civilization and the end of the world, a descent that could be forestalled only by what Lindsey described as a "widespread spiritual awakening."⁴⁸

Class Warfare Inverted

To political leftists of the early 1970s, the Kanawha County textbook dispute was a clear case of "class warfare," the description Calvin Trillin used in The New Yorker.⁴⁹ It was a fight pitting the rich folks on "the hill" in Charleston against those up the creeks out in the county. When UMWA miners joined the strike, the class credentials of the protesters were complete. These were the same coal miners, after all, who had just led a union revolution, deposing a corrupt president and electing rank-and-file miners to high office. The story had a neat, working-class symmetry. The new president of the UMWA, Arnold Miller, was a miner with black lung from Cabin Creek in Kanawha County.^† It was a compelling story (and one that explained away radically conservative behavior by the white working class), but it missed another change that had taken place. Since the end of World War II, class had been diminishing as a marker of political division. Actually, the traditional order of class voting was being inverted. Under the familiar New Deal alignment, working-class voters had supported Democrats and liberal government. (In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt had won 73 percent of voters Gallup identified as of "low socioeconomic standing.") Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, white working-class Americans had begun voting Republican.⁵⁰

This is a disputed area of research, but the academic arguments over class voting have more to do with definition than fact. Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels has correctly reported that the poorest whites, those in the lowest third of the income strata, are still reliable Democratic voters, a pattern that has remained unchanged for the past thirty years. Others also have found that low-income whites have an increasing allegiance to Democrats and that Republicans have gained most of their new votes from middle- and upper-class Americans.⁵¹ If "working class" were defined strictly by income, the discussion would be over. But what about Horan? He drove a truck during the week and often worked a second job pouring concrete at night or on Saturday. He lived in a nice home on a large lot; he wasn't poor, but his labor was manual. Other scholars have defined "working class" to include people like Horan. They consider not only income but also occupation and education. When "working class" is defined using all of those measures, we see a dramatic shift in voting patterns, one that began after the mid-1960s' unraveling.

In the late 1970s, polling expert Everett Carll Ladd Jr. compared white voters of high, medium, and low socioeconomic status (SES). High-SES voters were managers or white-collar workers with some college training. Low-SES voters worked as farm laborers, in service jobs, or in other semiskilled occupations. In 1960, Ladd found, 38 percent of high-SES white workers voted for John F. Kennedy, but 61 percent of low-SES white workers did so. The configuration was straight out of the New Deal handbook. Bosses, managers, and white-collar workers voted Republican. Laborers, field hands, and truck drivers voted Democratic. When Ladd looked at the behavior of white voters by occupation and education from 1948 to 1972, he saw that the New Deal coalition was flipping. Low-SES workers—the white working class in his definition—were voting Republican at increasingly higher rates. High-SES workers, however, were voting more Democratic. In particular, whites who had graduated from college or graduate school were becoming more Democratic. A 1974 Gallup poll found "among graduate students, an almost unbelievably low proportion of 9 percent identified with the GOP."⁵²

The perceptive southern writer John Egerton went to Kanawha County for the Progressive magazine to report on the "battle of the books." What he found was a conflict based on something more than income. The division was a clash between the "hillers" in Charleston and the "creekers" in rural Kanawha County: "Charleston is Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian; the churches in the narrow hollows are Free-Will Baptist, Pentecostal, Church of God in Prophesy. Charleston is double-knit suits, sports cars, cocktail parties; rural Kanawha is khakis, coal trucks, white lightning and abstention. Charleston aspires to a modern, affluent future; Cabin Creek struggles against heavy odds to preserve a hard but often heroic past."⁵³

The divide in West Virginia wasn't between Republicans and Democrats or rich and poor. While Ladd was finding a new division in the broad numbers of the electorate—a New Deal turned upside down—Egerton was seeing the same divide on the ground in West Virginia. That division—of rural and urban, college-educated and working-class, Public and Private Protestant—defines our politics today. In 2004, poor white people continued to vote Democratic. According to Bartels's figures, John Kerry won half his votes from white families earning less than $35,000 a year, a percentage that hasn't changed in thirty years.⁵⁴ But when political analyst Ruy Teixeira looked at whites without a college education in families with a total income between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, George W. Bush beat Kerry by 23 percentage points. The important difference wasn't income, however, but education. Among white college graduates in the same income level ($30,000 to $50,000 per family), Bush and Kerry split the vote evenly. Teixeira found that in 2004, Democrats did worst among working-class whites.⁵⁵

The Organization of a "Political Revolution"

As the Kanawha boycott continued, shots were fired, and one man was beaten. The Charleston Gazette castigated "religious fanatics who encouraged their venomous followers." A minister prayed for the deaths of the three school board members who had voted for the books. "I am asking Christian people to pray that God will kill the giants who have mocked and made fun of dumb fundamentalists," implored the Reverend Charles Quigley. An elementary school on Campbells Creek was firebombed; another on Cabin Creek was dynamited. Shotgun blasts raked school buses. In a strange episode, a constable from Witchers Creek arrested the county school superintendent and three school board members for contributing to the delinquency of minors, a charge brought by the Upper Kanawha Valley Mayors Association. (The officials were arrested at a Methodist church where they were talking with textbook opponents at a meeting arranged by the local bishop.) The charges were dismissed. Protesters attacked some board members at a meeting in early December. Eventually, the Ku Klux Klan marched in support of the textbook opponents.⁵⁶

The violence peaked, and then, as winter came, it ended. The Kanawha County textbook war just petered out. The school board promised to review the textbooks, and in December several men were arrested for the school bombings. The schools gradually refilled with students. In mid-January 1975, a federal grand jury indicted Marvin Horan for conspiring to blow up two elementary schools. According to the indictment, Horan had told a group that he had "paid enough taxes" to own one of the schools and that they "had his permission to do anything they wanted" with the building.⁵⁷ Horan was eventually found guilty of one charge of conspiracy. He appealed the verdict and ran for the state senate, losing to the incumbent. (The political factions of the strike had yet to find a home in the two parties, so Horan ran as a Democrat.) After his appeals were denied, Horan took up residence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. The warden allowed him to hold prayer services on Sunday evenings and to baptize convicts at a church in a nearby town. "You might find this strange," Horan said, "but if I had been a single man, I wouldn't have cared if they ever let me out. The ministry was so rewarding then."

When Horan left prison after two years, just before Christmas 1978, he moved "right back to Campbells Creek, right back into the ministry." But Horan's life wasn't the same there after the strike and his time in prison. Churches across the Midwest asked him to speak, but in Kanawha County the ministers who had supported the strike now shunned the movement's leader. He stayed on Campbells Creek for fourteen years before moving to North Carolina in 1993, when he was fifty-three years old. Horan still drives a truck and preaches, and he is more convinced than ever that the 1974 textbook war was worth fighting. "The books were teaching our children to do things that went against everything we stood for," Horan told me in 2005. "I mean, it took ... the pride of the children away from them. It destroyed the children." Still fond of prophecy, the preacher envisioned the inevitable downfall of the United States, a victim of its moral failings. "Make a mental note of this," Horan said. "Within ten years or twenty years from this day, there'll be another country ruling this one. Another country will be running this one."

In the fall of 1974, after the strike was well under way, the Heritage Foundation sent a lawyer to consult with some of the movement's stalwarts. The newly formed foundation brought leaders of the strike to Washington, D.C., to meet with education commissioner Terrel Bell and an aide to President Gerald Ford.⁵⁸ Conservative activists in Washington hadn't created the movement in West Virginia; Horan and the people in the coal camps of Kanawha County had done that themselves. But the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups recognized within the uprising a potent and, as it turned out, enduring combination of Private Protestant values, distrust of an intrusive government, racial insecurity, and a millennialist belief that America was losing its moral authority and world standing. While liberals either romanticized the textbook strike as "class warfare" or labeled strikers "religious fanatics," conservatives got busy channeling Horan and others into the New Right coalition and the Republican Party. The New Right movement wasn't created as a result of a conspiracy. It was emerging from places like Campbells Creek. The ingredients of conservative ideology were scattered across the country. They just needed to be gathered, organized, and put together using the right recipe. In 1975, the Heritage Foundation formed a group to help coordinate some two hundred textbook protests that had cropped up nationwide.⁵⁹ It asked donors to "help Heritage stop forcing pornography and other objectionable subjects into schools all over America."⁶⁰

The West Virginia textbook strike flipped a switch and illuminated the way the Republican Party could form a coalition of working-class voters; religious conservatives; and small-government, free-market capitalists. Emerging Republican leaders adopted the Kanawha County strikers. Robert Dornan traveled from California to West Virginia to speak at a few rallies.⁶¹ Two years later, he won his first term in Congress. Representative Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican and a founder of the new conservative movement, sent out letters in December 1974 charging that textbook protesters had been subjected to "police brutality."⁶² The Reverend Charles Secrest, a representative of Billy James Hargis's Church of the Christian Crusade, visited Alice Moore, and Moore went to Tulsa to speak to a Christian Crusade audience. The organization sold a tape of her speech for five dollars.⁶³ "It would be a mistake to consider the textbooks the sole point of protest," said Elmer Fike, a businessman and supporter of the strike. "The textbooks were a last straw. Parents here as well as nationwide are calling for a return to fundamental and basic education." After the strike ended, more than seventy Kanawha County residents drove to Washington, D.C., to join Boston antibusing protesters in a rally against federal education policies. "This is the first time the two big struggles against busing and dirty textbooks have stood side by side," said the Reverend Avis Hill. "This is the beginning of a political revolution."⁶⁴

West Virginia—style protests spread, as this new conservative concoction found a purpose and a public voice. "Since the battle of the books in Kanawha County in 1974, incidents of censorship or attempts at censorship have increased markedly," wrote education professor Edward B. Jenkinson. "During the 1977–78 school year, more incidents of removing or censoring books occurred nationally than at any other time in the last twenty-five years."⁶⁵ In 1979, Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail impresario of the conservative movement, complained that during "the 25 years that I've been active in politics, the major religious leaders in America have been liberals who were in bed politically with the Democratic Party."⁶⁶ Viguerie led a group of conservative activists (including Paul Weyrich and Ed McAteer of the Conservative Caucus) away from the cities and the centers of Public Protestantism to Lynchburg, Virginia. They visited with a relatively unknown preacher by the name of Jerry Falwell, a man the conservatives thought had a message that ran counter to the mainline churches' tenets of the Social Gospel and ecumenicism. The New Right leaders urged Falwell to use his church, his weekly television broadcast, and his contacts among other conservative preachers as the foundation of a national political and religious network. Viguerie would help raise funds through direct mail. They said Falwell could call the new organization something like the "moral majority."⁶⁷

Kanawha County, USA: 1974–2004

Political scientist Peter Francia and his coworkers at East Carolina University divided voters in the 2004 presidential election into three groups based on their beliefs about the Bible.⁶⁸ Fundamentalists believed in biblical inerrancy. (Fundamentalists accounted for roughly half of the voters in Republican states, but only 28 percent of the voters in Democratic states.) Biblical Minimalists believed that the Bible was the work of men, not God. (They were 12 percent of the voters in red states, 18 percent in blue states.) Moderates believed that the Bible was the Word of God but shouldn't be taken literally. (This middling group accounted for 38 percent of voters in red states and 53 percent in blue states.)

The geographic division of people by biblical belief and political leaning is further evidence of the Big Sort. But Francia's more interesting finding is that voters' assessment of the Bible could predict how they felt about a range of other issues. Nearly eight out of ten Fundamentalists in red states opposed any government spending for abortions. Three-quarters of the biblical Minimalists in blue states favored government spending for abortions. Nine out of ten Fundamentalists in both blue and red states opposed gay marriage. Nearly three-quarters of the biblical Minimalists favored gay marriage.

Abortion and gay marriage are issues affected by faith. But the divisions between the two religious camps reappeared even with questions that had no discernible connection with faith—and aligned neatly with Republican and Democratic Party positions. Fundamentalists favored increasing the budget deficit in order to cut taxes; biblical Minimalists did not. Fundamentalists supported issues such as a strong military, jobs over the environment, and George W. Bush. Biblical Minimalists were less inclined to believe that it was extremely important to have a strong military, favored the environment over jobs, and didn't support George W. Bush. "It is not a culture war between red states and blue states," Francia wrote, "but rather a war between Fundamentalists and biblical Minimalists within both the red and the blue states."⁶⁹

When graduate student Don Goode questioned West Virginia textbook warriors in the 1980s, he found two cultural tribes. When Goode asked them what they thought about government, the courts, salvation, and welfare, the two camps disagreed about all of these issues. People held remarkably coherent beliefs, so that what a person thought about the power of the courts predicted what he or she believed about school lunch programs. What someone believed about religion, national defense, and the importance of beauty lined up with what he or she thought about the content of school textbooks. Francia discovered that by the 2004 election, Kanawha County politics had gone national.

Democrats tend to blame the division on Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove. Republicans tend to blame it on the 1960s, welfare, drugs, Jimmy Carter, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Looking back at the split between Public and Private Protestants and the Kanawha County textbook strike, one can see that the divide Francia uncovered wasn't foisted on Americans in a conspiracy of the right or the left. The conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s was successful because it orchestrated—and then amplified—the politics emerging from communities as different as Orange County, California, and Kanawha County, West Virginia. Polarization did not come from politicians or the media. Indeed, according to Francia, "elites may be responding to the polarization that exists within the electorate rather than the other way around."^*70 It's just that in the past three decades, Republicans responded better than Democrats.

As with the decline in trust, however, the alignment of right-leaning political parties with churchgoing wasn't something made only in America. It happened everywhere. The most religious people in every industrialized country have come to support the political party on the right. It seemed to come as a surprise to Americans after the 2000 election that those who attended church once a week were overwhelmingly Republican. But there wasn't anything unusual about that relationship. A survey of thirty-two countries in the late 1990s found that seven out of ten of those who attended church once a week voted for the political party on the right. In fact, church attendance in all industrialized societies is the best predictor of right-leaning political ideology.^†71

The United States is peculiar among these nations only in that there are so many churchgoers. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart combined different polls to find that the percentage of people who expressed a belief in God has declined in seventeen of nineteen countries over the past half century. Typically, Scandinavian nations have had the largest percentage of people drifting away from the pews. The two countries that haven't experienced a significant diminishment in belief are Brazil and the United States. When it comes to the number of people who believe in God and attend church regularly, Norris and Inglehart wrote, the United States is, statistically speaking, "a striking deviant case."⁷²

Over time, the ties between churchgoers and the party on the right have weakened in most industrialized countries, but not in the United States. The unusual thing about this country has been the stubborn and quite strong connection between religious belief and political party—a cultural peculiarity that, in the post-materialist politics of values, has allowed computer technicians in Orange County to find common cause with West Virginia coal miners and truck drivers.⁷³