Framing the Christian Right: How
Progressives and Post-War Liberals
Constructed the Religious Right
Jon A. Shields
The Christian Right is the most anticipated social movement in
American history. Decades before Catholics and conservative evangelicals ended centuries of antagonism by cooperating on social
issues, an elite class of Progressive-era intellectuals and journalists
were describing what it regarded as the deep and dangerous affinities between Catholics and evangelicals. Catholic opposition to
eugenics and the evangelical crusade against teaching evolution in
public schools helped persuade Progressives that religious orthodoxy—rather than any particular theological tradition—was a
grave threat to science, reason, and social progress. These thinkers
warned darkly that both groups were natural allies because they
shared an unqualified allegiance to an external and unscientific
authority in the pope and an inerrant Bible. Ignorance and primal
bigotries were further assumed to shape the political opinions of
Catholics and evangelicals.
As conflicts over Darwinism faded, it appeared that
Progressive-era fears might be laid to rest. Catholic and evangelical
support for McCarthyism after the Second World War, however,
once again excited alarm in academic and elite journalistic circles.
Prominent postwar liberals, including Martin Seymour Lipset,
Richard Hofstadter, and David Riesman, revived the Progressive
critique of Christian orthodoxy by positing many of the same
assumptions about the perilous effects of religious orthodoxy
on democratic citizenship. Unlike their Progressive heirs, though,
postwar thinkers did not merely believe that Catholics and
JON A. SHIELDS (BA, University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD, University of
Virginia) is assistant professor in the Department of Government at Claremont
McKenna College. He is author of The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.
His articles have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Perspectives on Political
Science, Critical Review, Wilson Quarterly, and Society. Special interests include
the Christian Right, abortion politics, and social movements.
Journal of Church and State vol. 53 no. 4, pages 635 – 655; doi:10.1093/jcs/csr027
Advance Access publication May 19, 2011
# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the J. M. Dawson
Institute of Church-State Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
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Journal of Church and State
evangelicals were natural allies. They further argued that an actual
political alliance between evangelicals and Catholics was a real possibility in their lifetime. These liberals believed that Catholics and
Protestants might overcome Reformation-era fights to create a
truly pan-Christian social movement.
Despite some remarkably careful historical scholarship on the
conflict between liberal elites and theologically conservative Christians in the Progressive and postwar eras, there has been a tendency
to focus almost exclusively on either Protestant evangelicals or
Catholics. The story has usually been told either as a conflict
between Protestant cultural ideals and Catholicism (as reflected in
Prohibition, for example) or as one that focuses on the conflict
between modernism and Protestant fundamentalism.1 Yet, as this
essay shows, Progressives and postwar liberals were often deeply
concerned about the influence of orthodox Christianity in general
rather than Protestant fundamentalists or Catholics in particular.
In fact, Progressive and postwar academics and journalists anticipated the historic political coalition of Catholics and evangelicals
and crafted a critique of a social movement yet to be formed.
For all the foresight of Progressive and postwar thinkers, however,
they also distorted the way many contemporary observers ultimately understood the Christian Right. Radicals often mar and
shape the image of the movements they represent. Yet decades
before the Christian Right coalesced, its image was being shaped
by prominent academics and journalists. No other contemporary
American social movement, including environmentalism, animal
rights, or even second-wave feminism, confronted such a negative
public image and anticipatory dread at their founding. These
expectations may help explain why elite reaction to the Christian
Right was overwhelmingly negative.
By stressing the significance of religious orthodoxy, Progressives
and postwar liberals also helped lay an intellectual foundation for
new analytical categories that further distorted the way observers
saw religious conservatives. After the reality of a thriving Christian
Right confirmed the old belief in the unifying power of Christian
orthodoxy, it was but a short step for social scientists and journalists to posit that all orthodox believers (whether Muslims,
Christians, or Jews) shared important affinities. Such believers are
1. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, new ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and
American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003);
Jay P. Dolan, In Search of American Catholicism: A History of Religion and
Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
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Framing the Christian Right
thought to share “orthodox vision,” “strong religion,” “strong ontology,”
and, especially, “fundamentalism.” These flawed paradigms further
clouded the way we understand religion in general and reinforced
the old, simplistic caricatures of Christian conservatives.
Progressives Construct the Christian Right
Both evangelical Protestants and Catholics protested the scientific
and social revolutions created by Darwinism, albeit in very different ways. While evangelicals opposed the teaching of evolution in
public schools, Catholics lobbied against eugenics laws designed
to weed out the genetically “unfit.” Though one may be inclined
to regard these religious campaigns as rather disparate today,
Progressive-era intellectuals argued that they were both driven
by a dangerous faith in unscientific authorities. Christian orthodoxy—rather than a particular theological tradition—was hailed
as the greatest threat to science and social progress. By
de-emphasizing theological differences and stressing the perils
of orthodoxy, Progressives routinely argued that evangelicals
and Catholics were natural allies against reason, progress, and
science.
Religious opposition to Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species
led almost immediately to intellectual critiques of theologically
conservative Christians. In 1874 John William Draper, a professor
at the University of New York, published The History of the Conflict between Science and Religion, a best seller that had a major
influence on turn-of-the-century Progressives. Draper predicted a
“coming conflict” between modernism and religion: “The time
approaches when men must take their choice between quiescent,
immobile faith and ever advancing Science.” For Draper, though,
there was really nothing new about this conflict, since all of
human history pitted religion against science: “The history of
science . . . is a narrative of the conflict of two contending
powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on the one
side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and
human interests on the other.” But although Draper often
described the conflict as one between religion and science, the
great threat to scientific progress was really Catholicism. In fact,
he argued that Protestantism has never “arrayed itself in opposition to the advancement of knowledge,” while the Catholic
Church was the principal “power which kept Europe in a stagnant
condition for many centuries, ferociously suppressing by the
stake and the sword every attempt at progress; a power . . . that
sets itself above reason and common sense; that loudly proclaims
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Journal of Church and State
the hatred it entertains against liberty of thought and freedom of
civic institutions.”2
The president of Cornell University, Andrew Dickson White, followed Draper’s lead by authoring two polemical histories of religion
and science. Unlike Draper, however, White did not insist that there
was anything about Catholicism in particular that threatened social
and scientific progress. Instead, any orthodox Christianity, or what
White called “provincial” Protestantism and Catholicism, threatened
the advance of reason, science, and progress. As White explained, the
struggle has not been between science and Catholicism, but rather
“between Science and Dogmatic Theology.” In White’s view, “theological dogmas” have only excited “narrow-minded, loud-voiced men”
and have been “the deadly foe . . . of scientific inquiry.”3
As the historian Edward Larson has shown, both Draper’s and
White’s works were enormously popular and had a major influence
on how Progressives saw the relationship between reason and
science on the one hand and faith and religion on the other. By the
time the conflict between evolution and creationism exploded in
the 1920s, Progressive intellectuals enjoyed a much larger framework for understanding the relationship between science and religion. As they saw it, opposition to evolution was merely the most
recent chapter in a long history of oppressive and violent religious
resistance to scientific progress.4 What has not been emphasized,
however, is that Progressive intellectuals were most influenced by
Draper’s and White’s emphasis on “traditionary” and “provincial”
faith. And it is this concern with a religious orthodoxy that cut
across faith traditions that allowed Progressive intellectuals to see
Catholics and conservative Protestants as natural allies even in an
era of intense political and social conflict between Catholics and
Protestants.
Throughout the Progressive era, journalists and intellectuals
argued that the supernaturalism of Catholics and evangelicals
might harm American democracy. As early as 1913, for instance,
the editors of the New York Times called belief in biblical literalism
the “paper Pope” of fundamentalist Protestantism, a criticism that
was later leveled against evangelical opponents of eugenics. In
their view, both Catholics and conservative Protestants were beholden to “infallible” authorities.5 The New York Times also called
2. John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science
(New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1877), vi, x, 352 – 53, 363 – 67.
3. Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom, 2 vols. (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), 1: ix, 85, 113, 168– 69.
4. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 21– 23.
5. “Dr. Mains Defends Views: Says Bible Has Been the ‘Paper Pope’ of Protestantism,” New York Times, March 11, 1913.
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Framing the Christian Right
fundamentalists “more or less Catholic” because one Baptist minister allegedly condemned some fellow Christians to hell.6 As another
editorial put it: “if we must have a Pope, it is better to have one Pope
trained for his calling and selected for his merits than a whole
league of bush-league Popes with no special qualification except a
desire to send their enemies to hell.”7
The editors of the New Republic also expressed alarm over religious orthodoxy when, in 1915, a Catholic social worker objected
to euthanizing a deformed newborn. However, the New Republic
did not make an issue of the social worker’s Catholicism, which is
never mentioned in the editorial. Instead, its editors argued that
the case demonstrated the dangers more generally of “ancient religious scruple[s]” and “dogmatic scruples.” Those who are beholden
to such scruples, the article continued, “grow violent at the thought
of any interference with what they regard as God’s plan.” Appalled
that “the refusal to keep alive a deformed idiot [had] become a
moral issue throughout the nation,” the editors concluded that it
is always “desirable to weed out the utterly unfit.”8 By 1927 the
New Republic would make this more general concern over orthodox
Christianity even more explicit: “The real conflict is not between a
Church and a State or between Catholicism and Americanism, but
between a culture which is based on absolutism and encourages
obedience, uniformity, and intellectual subservience, and a culture
which encourages curiosity, hypotheses, experimentation, verification by facts, and a consciousness of the process of individual
and social life as opposed to conclusions about it.”9
In the 1920s, political fights over teaching evolution in public
schools and eugenics led to even greater alarm among the liberal
intellectual class over orthodox Christianity. Maynard Shipley’s
very popular The War on Modern Science chronicled fundamentalist
opposition to teaching evolution in American high schools. But,
here again, Shipley was not simply concerned with a particular religious tradition; he was frightened by religious orthodoxy more
broadly. According to Shipley, fundamentalist believers are
“afflicted with the disease of traditionalism”: “In spirit both Protestant and Roman Catholic Fundamentalism view the state as a divine
instrument through which they may function in the name of ‘the
Word.’” And the “fundamentalists hold, with the Pope, that governments founded without the participation—which means the
control—of the church and clergy are unworthy of respect.”
6. “By-Products,” New York Times, December 23, 1923.
7. Ibid., December 9, 1923.
8. “The Defective Baby,” New Republic, November 17, 1915, 85– 86.
9. “More about Catholicism and the Presidency,” New Republic, May 11, 1927,
315– 17.
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Journal of Church and State
Shipley also rooted Protestant and Catholic religious fundamentalism in a common psychological anger and inferiority: “This resentment is powerful and dangerous because it is rooted in emotion. It
arises from the inferiority complex which orthodox belief soothes
and contemporary science explains.” Finally, in Shipley’s view, the
schism between reasoning modernists and dogmatic believers was
so vast that it had created a culture war that was altogether new:
“For the first time in our history, organized knowledge has come
into open conflict with organized ignorance.”10
Although historians have persuasively traced fundamentalism to
a certain movement within evangelical Protestantism,11 for Progressive intellectuals the term fundamentalism was used far more
broadly. Much like Shipley, they regarded orthodox Christianity as
fundamentalist whether it was Protestant or Catholic. The editors
of the Nation, for example, warned that the Scopes trial was only
the next chapter in religious persecution that began with Rome
since it threatened to “take us straight back to the Middle Ages,
when scientific truth was determined by the vote of ecclesiastical
councils.”12 After Bryan’s death, the editors of the New Republic
linked his Protestant faith to Roman Catholicism: “he believed profoundly in the literal inspiration, in the wholly salutary magic of his
certain words and scripts” that are “analogous to the magical
ferment which passes from the altar to the devout worshipers
during the Catholic mass. The Lord had strung them together into
inspired histories and truths.”13 As early as 1922, the Nation also
opined that Bryan’s faith did not spring from a particular Protestant
tradition but from a “terrified traditionalism.”14 Similarly, the New
Republic attributed the trial to “religious orthodoxy” and a “religious state of mind.”15 In another article on the trial, its editors
declared: “Crimes against human liberty are always committed in
the name of sacred and absolute principles.”16
10. Maynard Shipley, The War on Modern Science: A Short History of the Fundamentalist Attacks on Evolution and Modernism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1927), 4, 8, 30, 41– 42, 374.
11. See, for example, Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture.
12. “Tennessee vs. Truth,” Nation, July 8, 1925, 58.
13. “William Jennings Bryan,” New Republic, August 12, 1925, 304– 6.
14. “Mr. Bryan’s Religion,” Nation, August 5, 1922, 387.
15. “The Cure of Fundamentalism,” New Republic, June 10, 1925, 58– 59.
16. “The Conduct of the Scopes Trial,” New Republic, August 19, 1925, 331 –
33. H. L. Mencken even drew parallels between what he regarded as Christian
and Islamic fundamentalism, an intellectual maneuver that has become
common in the contemporary culture wars. According to Mencken, the “new
Holy Cause” is comparable to that of the “dry mullahs, clerics, and lay” in
earlier campaigns against alcohol. H. L. Mencken, “In Tennessee,” Nation, July
1, 1925, 21– 22.
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Framing the Christian Right
Likewise, Christian opposition to eugenics laws was not blamed
on Catholic or Protestant theology. Progressives believed that both
Catholics and evangelicals were united by a common fundamentalism. Albert Edward Wiggam, a leading member of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and best-selling
author of The New Decalogue of Science, traced opposition to eugenics to “dogmatic faith” and “dogmatic religion” more broadly.
Reflecting back on European history, Wiggam concluded: “For a
thousand years . . . men closed their minds and wandered in darkness through those weary centuries when faith replaced reason
and authority usurped logic.” Turning to fundamentalist opposition
to eugenics in Tennessee, he likewise claimed that conservative
evangelicals were “children of darkness.”17 Fellow eugenicist
Alfred Scott Warthin, president of the National Association of
American Physicians, similarly claimed that “old faiths, superstitions, emotions, and religious dogma must pass away” if the race
is to be salvaged through eugenics.18 In the pages of the Atlantic
Monthly, the biologist Julian Huxley argued that if “religion will
abandon its claims to fixity and certainty (as many liberal churchmen are already doing), then it will see in the pursuit of truth something sacred.” Only then, Huxley continued, will we “have life and
have it more abundantly.”19
In some respects, it is not so surprising that Progressive thinkers
linked opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools and
eugenics laws. William Jennings Bryan, for example, opposed the
teaching of evolution in large part because of his strong objection
to social Darwinism. As Bryan declared in 1904, Darwinism is “the
merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak,”
and at the trial itself he claimed that eugenics was one reason he
opposed the teaching of evolution. In fact, the textbook under
dispute in the Scopes trial was George Hunter’s Civic Biology, a
work that espoused social Darwinism and scientific racism. It
asserted, for instance, that the Caucasian race is “the highest type
of all.” Other fundamentalist leaders, such as the extremely
popular and outrageous evangelist Billy Sunday, also routinely
tied the teaching of evolution to eugenics. As historian Edward
Larson explains, “Everywhere the public debate over eugenics
colored people’s thinking about the theory of evolution.” In addition, the eugenics campaign coincided with fights over public
17. Albert Edward Wiggam, The New Decalogue of Science (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1923), 91, 105– 6, 239 – 46.
18. Quoted in “Do Religion and Love Harm the Race,” Literary Digest 96, January
28, 1928, 30.
19. Julian S. Huxley, “Religion Meets Science,” Atlantic Monthly 147, March
1931, 383.
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Journal of Church and State
schools. By 1935, in fact, thirty-five states had passed laws that
called either for the sexual segregation or sterilization of “feebleminded” or “unfit” human beings.20
These affinities, moreover, did in fact reveal new emerging fault
lines in American politics. The eugenics controversy in particular
divided progressive and conservative thinkers within Judaism, Protestantism, and even Catholicism. As historian Christine Rosen
explains:
Religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from
traditional tenets. The liberals and moderates in their respective faiths—
those who challenged their churches to conform to modern circumstance—became
the eugenics
movement’s
most enthusiastic
supporters.21
Progressive-era fights over eugenics as well as euthanasia also
marked the beginning of larger philosophical battles that pitted
the quality of life versus the sanctity of life. As early as 1915, in
fact, the New Republic rooted opposition to eugenics in “a sense
of the sanctity of life.” Its editors further suggested that society
should not simply think of life merely “quantitatively” but should
rather value those lives that are “capable of being swift and sure
and winning.”22 Charles Eliot, a professor of literature at Harvard,
likewise claimed that opposition to euthanasia stemmed from
“the doctrine of the sacredness of human life.” Placing this view
firmly against science and reason, Eliot claimed: “It is not to be
hoped that a superstition so deeply rooted in tradition . . . will
readily yield to reason.”23 The Eugenics Review took a similar position in its 1917 article “Quality not Quantity.”24
Nonetheless, there was almost no cooperation between Catholics
and evangelicals during this period. While the Catholic Church
aggressively opposed eugenics in every state and was in fact the
first major organization in America to take a stand against it, conservative evangelicals tended to be less concerned about eugenics
than they were about evolution in the public schools since it
impinged directly on their children’s education. And although
there was some sympathy in Catholic circles for Bryan’s campaign
against the teaching of evolution in public schools, it did not
result in real organized Catholic support. In fact, Catholics were
deeply suspicious of the campaign against evolution because they
20. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 23– 28.
21. Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 116, 184.
22. “The Defective Baby.”
23. “Pathetic Case of Chicago Baby Recalls Some Other Interesting Parallels,”
Washington Post, December 5, 1915.
24. “Quality not Quantity,” Eugenics Review 8 (January 1917): 297 – 321.
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Framing the Christian Right
regarded it as yet a new front in Protestants’ efforts to control the
public schools.25
Theology, politics, and prejudice remained an important barrier
to political cooperation between Catholics and evangelicals. Thus,
there was no coalition of “organized ignorance,” as Maynard
Shipley put it. To the contrary, the institutionalized conflict
between Catholics and evangelicals actually deepened in the
1920s. As the historian John McGreevy has emphasized, the Ku
Klux Klan attracted millions of new members and became “even
more fiercely anti-Catholic.”26 In his classic account of American
nativism, John Higham also found that during the 1920s the evangelical “anti-Catholic crusade . . . was reasserting itself more powerfully than ever.”27 Evangelical Protestants also supported
Prohibition and opposed Al Smith’s presidential nomination in
1928. Given such intense conflict and animosity between Catholics
and evangelicals, it is all the more striking that so many Progressive
thinkers considered them naturally allied against social, political,
and scientific progress.
The Christian Right and the Menace
of Anticommunism
The cultural tenor of the early Cold War soothed intellectual anxiety
over orthodox Christianity. In 1948 the bishop of the Methodist
Church in New York, G. Bromley Oxnam, confidently declared that
with the exception of a “few smoldering fires . . . the nineteenth
century ‘war’ between science and theology has ended.”28 A year
later, Charles Braden, a broadly-read historian at Northwestern University, declared: “The Battle between science and religion is pretty
well decided. Religion has come to terms with the newer scientific
climate.”29 Meanwhile, Will Herberg’s 1950s influential classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew found that in spite of rising church attendance,
Americans’ faith had become “secularized.” By secularized, Herberg
25. Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 107 – 108; Larson, Summer for
the Gods, 22– 23, 126 – 27. Catholics and evangelicals, however, apparently
moved beyond sectarian divisions to work together to oppose sterilization
laws in New Orleans. Kathryn W. Kemp, “Jean and Kate Gordon, New Orleans
Social Reformers, 1898– 1933,” Louisiana History 24 (1983): 389 –401.
26. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 147 – 48.
27. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 291– 93.
28. G. Bromley Oxnam, “Religion and Science in Accord,” The ANNALS of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 256 (1948): 141.
29. Charles Samuel Braden, They Also Believe: A Study of Modern American
Cults and Minority Religious Movements (New York: The MacMillan Company,
1949), 254 – 55.
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Journal of Church and State
meant that religious faith had little influence on Americans
daily lives and he found none of the religious fundamentalism
that menaced Progressive intellectuals. On the other hand,
Herberg thought militant atheism was on the decline as well. As
he put it, “Clarence Darrow, the last of the village atheists, has
left no successors . . . Religion has become part of the ethos of
American life to such a degree that overt anti-religion is all but
unconceivable.”30
Shortly after the publication of Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Daniel
Boorstin famously described The Genius of American Politics as its
aversion to grand political theory and religious dogma.31 Theodor
Adorno and his colleagues also found little evidence that religious
Americans were proto-fascists in their classic study on authoritarianism despite their anti-religious worldview. First published in
1950, The Authoritarian Personality exposed only a very weak correlation between religiosity and either authoritarianism or ethnocentricism, a relationship that its authors described as “not
particularly striking.” As Adorno and his colleagues put it, “the traditional equation between ‘fanaticism’ and fanatical prejudice no
longer seems to hold.” And like Herberg, they believed that religion
had become less doctrinaire and largely transformed into “a
‘cultural good’ like patriotism or traditional art.”32
Yet even these works kept alive Progressive fears of Catholics and
conservative evangelicals. Boorstin’s book, which really captured
the consensus-oriented spirit of the post-war era, warned of the
lurking dangers of orthodox Christianity. After reviewing the
sweep of American history, Boorstin placed Catholics and fundamentalist evangelicals against the dominant political tradition. As
Boorstin explained, unlike mainline Protestants, who have been “virtually without dogma” and embrace a “generalized religion,” Catholics and the “uncompromising minor Protestant sects” remain
doctrinaire and unassimilated.33 And despite their benign empirical
results, Adorno and his colleagues nonetheless maintained that
orthodox varieties of Christianity with their “rigid antithesis of
good and evil” and “ascetic ideals” were a potential threat to tolerance and democracy. Their view of Catholicism was especially
grim: “Psychologically, fascist hierarchies may function largely
as secularizations and substitutes of ecclesiastical ones. It is not
30. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), 1 – 5, 40– 41, 46– 47, 260, 270 – 72.
31. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953).
32. T. W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1969), 208 – 21, 727 – 38.
33. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 147– 48.
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Framing the Christian Right
accidental that Nazism arose in Southern Germany with its strong
Roman-Catholic tradition.”34 Some intellectuals even continued to
see America as deeply divided between secular rationalism and religious fundamentalism as they warned of the dangers of the “orthodox mind.”35
If liberal intellectuals spent less energy critiquing orthodox Christianity, it may have been because they were also increasingly on the
defensive since modernism and secularism were often viewed as
having paved the way for brutal fascist and communist regimes.
Reflecting on the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, Catholic intellectual Barbara Ward argued in Faith and Freedom that “totalitarian
government in its extremist form has returned when the waning
of religion left the altars of the soul empty and turned men back
to the oldest gods of all—the idols of the tribe.”36
When the second conference on the “Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith” was convened in 1944, its academic participants set
out to counter what John Dewey described as the “organized
attack . . . against science and against technology as inherently
materialistic.”37 Some participants responded by turning their
opponents’ claims on their head. That is, it was not modernism
or a commitment to seeking and applying scientific solutions to
social problems that bred authoritarianism; rather “dogmatic religion” was the real threat to liberal democracy. For instance,
Charles W. Morris, a professor of philosophy at the University of
Chicago, argued that the “dogmatic attitude,” whether of a religious origin or not, “subordinates growth to attainment, openminded flexibility to fearsome defensiveness, creativity to sensitivity” and “is the major enemy which the democratic attitude
faces today on the domestic and international fronts.”38 In addition, wartime efforts to introduce religious teachings into public
education were regarded as an “authoritarian attempt to capture
education.”39
34. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality, 208 – 21, 727 – 38.
35. See, for example, Oliver L. Reiser and Blodwen Davies, “Religion and Science
in Conflict,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 256 (1948): 137.
36. Barbara Ward, Faith and Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1954), 265 – 71.
37. John Dewey, “Democratic Faith and Education,” The Authoritarian Attempt
to Capture Education, ed. John Dewey and Sidney Hook (New York: King’s Crown
Press, 1945), 4.
38. Charles W. Morris, “Discussion,” The Authoritarian Attempt to Capture
Education, 142.
39. The conference papers were collected in an edited volume by John Dewey
et al, The Authoritarian Attempt to Capture Education: Papers from the Second
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Journal of Church and State
While defenders of secularism were on the defense after the war,
so were Catholics. Critics wondered whether Catholicism was compatible with liberal democracy given Catholic support for Franco’s
Spain and Pope Pius XI’s concordats with Mussolini and Hitler.40
This resurgence of anti-Catholicism in intellectual circles momentarily deflected attention away from the old Progressive-era critique
of orthodox Christianity toward a renewed focus on the illiberalism
of the Catholic Church. Paul Blanshard’s remarkably popular and
influential 1949 work American Freedom and Catholic Power
argued that everything from Catholic families to lay organizations
fostered deference to authority that rendered Catholics unfit for
democratic citizenship and participation in a larger democratic
culture. The lay organization Catholic Action, for example, was
designed to “work for a totally Catholic civilization—political,
medical, cultural, economic, and religious.” Other Catholic organizations, such as the American Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, embraced the “cell technique used by communism to infiltrate
other bodies.” Meanwhile, the Church hierarchy schemed to replace
American’s liberal democracy with a Catholic theocracy bent on
world domination. As Blanshard explained, “The American Catholic
people themselves have no representatives of their own choosing . . .
and they are compelled by the very nature of the Church’s authoritarian structure to accept religious as well as nonreligious policies
that have been imposed on them from abroad.”41
Blanshard’s book grew out of a dozen essays he wrote for The
Nation and was well received by liberal intellectuals. Unlike his Progressive predecessors, though, Blanshard did not regard theologically conservative Christians as a threat to American democracy.
In fact, every reference to Protestantism in American Freedom and
Catholic Power is unfailingly positive.
Blanshard’s critique faded from the intellectual limelight as the
rise of McCarthyism reignited concerns that a conservative Christian coalition of Catholics and Protestant evangelicals might
threaten American democracy. Intellectuals responded to the rise
of McCarthyism as a new impetus to defend liberalism against the
threat of evangelical fundamentalism and Catholicism. In 1955
Seymour Martin Lipset declared that “the two religious groups
which are the most anti-civil libertarian groups are the Catholics
and fundamentalism Protestant sects” and “both fall under the
Conference on the Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith (New York: King’s Crown
Press, 1945)..
40. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 189 – 94.
41. Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1949), 8, 150– 55, 230– 32, 271 – 72.
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Framing the Christian Right
general heading of extreme moralizing or Puritanical religions.”42
Like progressive intellectuals, Lipset seemed to think that anyone
who was truly obedient to religious dogmas could not be good democratic citizens. As Lipset and Earl Raab explained in The Politics of
Unreason: “the application of any ‘fundamental’—that is, revealed—
truth to the political scene, being undebatable, makes impossible
the open market place of ideas and powers.”43 Curiously,
Lipset also partially rooted the anticommunism of such orthodox
Christians in their sexual ethics: “the current anti-communist
crusade has united the two most morally and sexually inhibited
groups in America, the fundamentalist Protestants and the Irish
Catholics.”44
Edward A. Shils’s popular polemic against McCarthyism, The
Torment of Secrecy, also rooted the red scare in Christian orthodoxy. For Shils, fundamentalism was a catchall term that included
all of conservative Christianity. In fact, he refers variously to “orthodox Christianity,” “traditional puritanical morals,” “traditional morality,” “old time religion,” and “fundamentalist strains of thought”
as synonyms for fundamentalism. Shils also explicitly located
Roman Catholics and conservative evangelical Protestants in the
“fundamentalist sector” and blamed them for inflicting their
“embittered, defensive, and suspicious” selves on others.45
The election of a Catholic Democrat in 1960 only seemed to exacerbate liberal anxieties. After the election, for example, the Harvard
social scientist David Riesman, feared the “possibility of an alliance,
attempted but never consummated prior to the Korean War: that
between Protestant and Catholic fundamentalism.” Riesman continued: “whatever sectarian or doctrinal differences divide the discontented from each other in theological terms, all can agree on the
gospel of Americanism.”46 And, finally, Alan Westin, public law professor at Columbia University reported, “the distinct possibility of
an unprecedented coalition of Catholic and Protestant rightfundamentalists in the 1960s.”47
It was historian Richard Hofstadter, however, who most successfully popularized the dangers of Christian orthodoxy in his 1962
42. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Sources of the ‘Radical Right’ (1955),” The Radical
Right, 3rd ed., ed. Daniel Bell (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002),
355– 56.
43. Lipset and Rabb, The Politics of Unreason, 12.
44. Lipset, “Sources of the ‘Radical Right’ (1955),” 355 – 56.
45. Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (Glencoe: Free Press, 1956), 90– 93, 181 – 87.
46. David Riesman, “The Intellectuals and the Discontented Class: Some
Further Reflections (1962),” The Radical Right, 138– 39, 148.
47. Alan F. Westin, “The John Birch Society (1962),” The Radical Right, 260.
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Journal of Church and State
classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter devoted
himself to the subject of anti-intellectualism because McCarthyism
had “aroused the fear that the critical mind was at ruinous discount.” In tracing the deeper historical roots of “the national disrespect for the mind” Hofstadter found that “one of the most striking
developments of our time has been the emergence of a kind of
union, or at least a capacity for cooperation, between Protestant
and Catholic fundamentalists, who share a common Puritanism,”
“mindless militancy,” and “ecumenicism of hatred.” And although
Hofstadter was primarily preoccupied with evangelicals, he saw
Catholics as suffering from a “cultural impoverishment” and as
equally hostile to modernism: “a great many Catholics have been
as responsive as Protestant fundamentalists to that revolt against
modernity of which I have spoken.” The fundamentalist “revolt
against modernity” that Hofstadter has in mind began with fights
over Darwinism or, more precisely, battles over teaching evolution
since he never mentions eugenics either in Anti-Intellectualism in
American Life or The Age of Reform, an account of Progressive-era
reform. Like most historians, the paradigmatic conflict for Hofstadter between modernism and religion was the Scopes trial.48
Some intellectuals, of course, were skeptical of the notion of any
deep affinities between Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants. David Danzig, a frequent contributor on religion for Commentary, argued in 1962 that “unlike Catholicism” the “local and
regional character” of Protestant fundamentalism “shields it from
the liberalizing social adjustments invariably created by contending
ethnic interests.”49 Others insisted that fundamentalism was a
uniquely Protestant phenomenon and that radical conservatism
had little appeal to Roman Catholics.50 These thinkers, however,
tended to be less influential and prominent than genuinely public
intellectuals such as Lipset, Shils, and Hofstadter. According to historian Edward Larson, for instance, it was Hofstadter’s analysis of
religious fundamentalism that would have a major influence on
public education. Because of Hofstadter’s scholarship, writes
Larson, “nearly every American history survey text has lumped fundamentalism with reactionary forces during the 1920s.”51
48. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York:
Vintage Books, 1962), 3, 125– 31, 136 – 41.
49. David Danzig, “The Radical Right and the Rise of the Fundamentalist Minority,” Commentary (April 1962): 293 – 94.
50. Murray S. Stedman, Jr., Religion and Politics in America (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and World, 1964), 127 – 31. John Harold Redekop, The American Far
Right: A Case Study of Billy James Hargis and Christian Crusade (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968), 113 – 38.
51. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 236.
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Framing the Christian Right
In retrospect, it is not altogether surprising that some prominent
post-war liberals regarded Catholics and evangelicals as natural
allies. Both were prominent in anticommunist politics. Catholics,
such as William Buckley and Joseph McCarthy, were some of the
most visible opponents of communism. And although evangelicals
were less prominent at the elite level, they were especially active in
anticommunist organizations, such as the Christian AntiCommunist Crusade and the John Birch Society.
Conservative elites were also rethinking the nature of conservatism, which at least implicitly suggested that Catholics and
evangelicals were natural allies. In his influential work, The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk argued that a serious, orthodox
Christianity was essential to ordering democratic societies.
Thus, he approvingly noted that America “is simultaneously the
home of muscular Protestantism and a chief prop of Rome.”52
Richard Weaver’s, Ideas Have Consequences, meanwhile, argued
for the virtues of “dogma,” “metaphysical certitude,” and “ultimates” over and against “the truth-denying doctrines of the relativists.”53 For his part, William Buckley seemed to appreciate the
support of evangelical Protestants in the fight against communism. As E. J. Dionne noted, the National Review crowd “welcomed these [new] evangelical allies.”54
Yet throughout this period there was no real political cooperation
between Catholics and evangelicals. Old prejudices still remained
very much intact. The Southern Baptist Convention supported
desegregation as early as 1954, partly because it feared Catholic
missionary success in Africa and Asia. As the historian David Chappell explains, Catholics were “mopping up” because they “could
claim with some justification to have dissociated themselves from
racism—from any particularly American or southern sin.”55 Even
as late as the early 1970s, evangelicals were slow to enlist in the
pro-life movement because of their enduring anti-Catholicism.
James Risen and Judy Thomas contend that, in the early phases
of the conflict, evangelicals “steered clear of anti-abortion activism
in part because of their antipathy toward all things Catholic.”56 Likewise, James McGreevy argues that many prominent evangelicals
52. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago:
Henry Regnery Company, 1953), 190– 91, 384 –85, 399 – 400.
53. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1948), 129 – 33.
54. E. J. Dionne Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1991), 216 – 17.
55. David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim
Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 147 – 50.
56. Risen and Thomas, Wrath of Angels, 188.
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Journal of Church and State
endorsed abortion liberalization because they did not believe American abortion law should be dictated by the Vatican.57 Of course,
evangelicals did eventually overcome their sense that the pro-life
movement was inherently a Catholic issue. But it required an expensive campaign by the popular evangelical theologian Francis
Schaeffer.58
Nonetheless, evangelicals and Catholics were understood by
many prominent intellectuals to be natural allies throughout the
postwar era. As David Riesman put it, the union simply needed to
be “consummated.”
The Prophecy Comes True
Political observers are usually not very good at predicting the
future. Yet, in the late 1970s, the liberal prophecy came true. Catholics and evangelicals campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography, and sex education. More than any other
campaign, however, it was the pro-life cause that brought Catholics
and evangelical Protestants together in massive numbers. Collectively, in fact, they launched the largest campaign of civil disobediences since the 1960s antiwar movement. For the first time in
American history, thousands of Catholics and evangelicals
marched, picketed, and were jailed together. It is remarkable that
Progressive and postwar liberals were able to see deep affinities
between Catholics and evangelicals, especially given the sharp tensions between them. It is even more remarkable that they articulated what some regard as the major fault lines in today’s culture
wars.
Yet, for all its foresight, this intellectual tradition also distorted
the way many observers ultimately understood the Christian
Right. When the Christian Right finally emerged, intellectuals and
elite journalists inherited a well-worn critique of orthodox Christians handed down uncritically from their Progressive heirs and
further developed by mid-century scholars.
The critique was a polemical one from the beginning. It was intimately tied to political conflict over issues such as euthanasia,
eugenics, teaching evolution in public schools, anticommunism,
and the role of religion in public life. It also ignored the ways in
which Catholics and evangelicals grounded their opposition to
57. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 262.
58. For an excellent history of evangelicals and abortion in the 1970s, see Daniel
K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 111 – 20, 129– 32, 153 –58.
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Framing the Christian Right
Darwinism on public reason. The best study of Catholic opposition
to eugenics laws, for example, concluded:
Catholic activists worked within the social and political context of religious pluralism in the United States. Thus, they created a multifaceted
argument against eugenic sterilization that would appeal to non-Catholics
by emphasizing the scientific objections to the procedure, legal questions
about appeal and due process, and, finally, social justice questions raised
by economic and racial status of the targeted populations.59
Recent historical scholarship has also highlighted the ways in
which evangelical opponents of evolution rested their arguments
on liberal democratic grounds. William Jennings Bryan, for instance,
argued that parents should exert some democratic control over the
content of their children’s public education, especially when it
threatens their faith in God and moral values. He further argued
that Darwinism justified a more barbarous society, including militarism and laissez-faire capitalism.60
Despite such reasonable arguments, Christians—and Protestant
evangelicals in particular—did sometimes behave in ways that fit
these polemical caricatures. Even still, there is not a clear relationship between the mass behavior of Christian opponents of Darwinism and elite prejudices. George Marsden has even argued that elite
ridicule of Protestant fundamentalism caused the movement to
“conform to its popular image.” “Before 1925 the movement had
commanded much respect,” Marsden found, “but after the
summer of 1925 the voices of ridicule were raised so loudly that
many moderate Protestant conservatives quietly dropped support
of the cause rather than be embarrassed by association.”61
The history of these conflicts was also handed down in a way that
fit the critique of orthodox Christianity. Postwar liberals, for
instance, regarded the Scopes trial as the paradigmatic struggle
between scientific rationalism and religion, rather than the eugenics
controversy, which was forgotten altogether. This political context
also helps explain why most critical accounts rested on little to no
empirical evidence. It had simply become an article of faith that
orthodox Christians were bad citizens. This faith shared much in
common with other long-standing Western myths about Christianity and religion in general, including their supposed tendency to
undermine science and foster violence. In fact, recent scholarship
59. Sharon M. Leon, “‘A Human Being and Not a Mere Social Factor’: Catholic
Strategies for Dealing with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s,” Church History
73, no. 2 (2004): 383 – 411.
60. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 31– 59, 198 – 99.
61. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 184– 95.
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Journal of Church and State
has shown that Christianity has contributed in instrumental ways to
the advancement of science and democracy.62
It is, of course, difficult to say with any precision just how much
independent influence this polemical tradition had on journalistic
and scholarly accounts of the Christian Right. With far more confidence we can conclude that no other American social movement has
been so negatively caricatured before it even formed. It would strain
credulity to imagine that this long intellectual tradition had no
influence on how liberal elites reacted to the Christian Right.
There is, moreover, a strong case for continuity. As other work
has demonstrated, many journalists and intellectuals continue to
assume that conservative Christians are angry, intolerant, ignorant,
and bigoted, just as they have for decades.63
There were, of course, Catholic and evangelical activists that fit
some of the old dark caricatures relatively well, such as Joseph Schiedler, Jerry Falwell, and Randall Terry. But we know now that such radicals should not have been elevated as paradigmatic examples of
Christian Right activists. Although a range of reasonable perspectives on the Christian Right exists, a growing body of empirical
work suggests that it is not radically different from other social
movements in terms of its zealotry, willingness to compromise,
and even to the extent to which it articulates goals on secular, philosophical grounds.64 Viewed over the course of the last century, a surprising number of the expressed goals of Catholics and evangelicals
even fit within the liberal tradition, including the rights of the “unfit”
62. For recent criticisms of these myths see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of
Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); David Knight, Science and Spirituality:
The Volatile Connection (New York: Routledge, 2003); Hugh Heclo, Christianity
and American Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
63. James Davison Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy
in America’s Culture Wars (New York: Free Press, 1994), 153– 89; Louis Bolce and
Gerald De Maio, “A Prejudice for the Thinking Classes: Media Exposure, Political
Sophistication, and the Anti-Christian Fundamentalist,” American Politics
Research 36, no. 2 (2008): 155– 85; Jon A. Shields, The Democratic Virtues of
the Christian Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 10– 15.
64. Mark Rozell and Clyde Wilcox, Second Coming: The Christian Right in Virginia Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Michael Moen,
The Transformation of the Christian Right (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1992); Clyde Wilcox and Carin Larson, Onward Christian Soldiers: The
Religious Right in American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 2006); Preston
Shires, Hippies of the Religious Right (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007);
Michael D. Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the
American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Shields, Democratic
Virtues of the Christian Right.
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Framing the Christian Right
(eugenics), parents (evolution), citizens (anticommunism), embryos
(abortion), and the elderly (euthanasia).65 From a comparative perspective, even the uncompromising factions in the Christian Right
that fit some of the negative caricatures are hardly exceptional.
American social movements have always produced radical factions,
such as the Black Power in the civil rights movement, the Weatherman
in the New Left, and eco-terrorists in the environmental movement.
Despite all the anticipatory dread in elite circles, the Christian
Right turned out to be a rather pedestrian social movement.
Perhaps because the inherited stereotypes of the Christian Right
seemed to fit some of the most sensational Christian radicals so
well, it obviated a serious and textured look at Christian conservatives. Until very recently there has been a relative dearth of
serious scholarship on the Christian Right, especially when compared to 1960s social movements. Even at this late date there are
only two serious studies of the “rescue” movement, even though
its activists were jailed and arrested more often than activists in
the civil rights and antiwar movements. In fact, it is arguably the
largest campaign of civil disobedience in American history.66
Global Fundamentalism
It was not simply negative expectations that distorted elite views of
the Christian Right. The Progressive and postwar emphasis on the
significance of religious orthodoxy helped lay an intellectual foundation for troubled analytical categories that reinforced the old stereotypes. Comparative work on religion has attempted to delineate a
kind of antimodern, religious orthodoxy that cuts across all of the
world religions. It represents an unfolding of the Progressive and
postwar thinkers’ own logic since it extends their critique of orthodox Christianity to the Islamic and Jewish worlds. Such believers
apparently share “strong religion,” “orthodox vision,” “strong ontology,” or simply “fundamentalism.”67
65. Scholars, however, debate the extent to which the motives of Christian Right
activists are consistent with the liberal tradition. In the context of the abortion
conflict, for instance, scholars debate the extent to which the right-to-life movement is driven by gender traditionalism or human rights. See Kristin Luker,
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984); Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, 102– 7;
Ziad Munson, The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
66. Risen and Thomas, Wrath of Angels; Mark Allan Steiner, The Rhetoric of
Operation Rescue: Projecting the Christian Pro-Life Message (Oxford: T&T
Clark Publishers, 2006).
67. Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion:
The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago
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Journal of Church and State
In some respects this approach to thinking about religion and politics seems vindicated by the Christian Right itself, which helped
weaken the old theologically-based political cleavages. Nonetheless,
simply hunting for affinities between orthodox believers in radically
different faith traditions creates its own distortions. Partly because
the entire project depends on identifying “family resemblances”
between remarkably diverse faiths and traditions, important differences are muted or ignored altogether. The result is that orthodox
Christians in America appear to have more in common with
violent Islamic theocrats than they do with other Christians.
According to Martin Marty, for example, Christian conservatives
and Islamic terrorists embrace similar political strategies: “Al
Qaeda and the New Christian Right in America . . . mimic, adapt
to, absorb, and exploit many of the strategies, tactics, hardware, lifestyles, and even the rational arguments of the secular forces.”68
This is a very thin reed on which to hang an analysis of global fundamentalism. Yes, both groups are strategic and sometimes try and
engage their opponents on their own terms. But this is true of nearly
every significant political movement, secular and religious.
More commonly, scholars argue that the Christian Right and
Islamic theocrats are similar species of fundamentalism because
they believe they are fighting against a “godless, secular culture”
and the “erosion of religious identity.”69 This definition, however,
is so expansive that it would include many religious social movements that scholars do not normally associate with fundamentalism, such as the Solidarity Movement in Poland.
Nonetheless, this ever expanding concept of fundamentalism has
a lot going for it: It appeals both to social scientists who seek parsimony and political opponents of the Christian Right who like unflattering comparisons to Islamic theocrats. The latter camp is
especially well represented in elite journalistic circles.70 Not surprisingly, this polemical project has a counterpart on the right.
Press, 2003); Hunter, Culture Wars, 108– 27; Steven K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Martin E. Marty et al., Accounting for Fundamentalisms:
The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).
68. Martin E. Marty, “Our Religio-Secular World,” Daedalus 132 (Summer 2003):
42– 48.
69. R. Scott Appleby and Martin E. Marty, “Fundamentalism,” Foreign Policy 6
(January –February 2002): 16; Almond, Appleby, and Sivan, Strong Religion,
16– 18.
70. Carla Power, “The Age of Fundamentalism,” Newsweek International,
December 9, 2002, 49; Barbara Ehrenreich, “Christian Wahhabists,” Progressive
6 (January 2002): 12– 13; Ellen Willis, “Bringing the Holy War Home,” Nation,
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Framing the Christian Right
Conservative polemicists, such as Jonah Goldberg, have attempted
to identify “family resemblances” between liberalism and fascism.71
Problems, however, would remain even if academic and journalistic observers of religion had not tried to lump elements from all the
world religions into a single fundamentalist sector. Even within the
Christian Right persistent doctrinal differences between orthodox
Christians are often neglected. Social scientists, for instance, were
slow to recognize and are still often blind to the role of peculiar
strains of Protestant theology in contributing to violence in the
pro-life movement, as well as lingering tensions between Catholics
and Protestants.72
Stressing affinities between Catholic and Protestants allowed Progressive and postwar thinkers to appreciate the potential political
significance of Christian orthodoxy even in an era in which doctrinal
differences ran very deep. Yet this same emphasis on religious
orthodoxy—particularly as it is extended beyond the Christian
world—also obscures the enduring importance of doctrinal differences and reinforces the old simplistic caricatures of conservative
Christians.
There are signs, however, that at least some of these problems are
finally subsiding. In recent years a growing number of secular scholars and journalists have successfully challenged their own preconceived expectations and prejudices by doing careful work on
Christian conservatives. To varying degrees they all ultimately
reject the old stereotypes that for so long framed elite expectations
of the Christian Right.73 What is particularly striking about much of
this work is that it is pitched to broad, popular audiences. It is the
sort of work that might change minds in the editorial offices of
the New York Times and New Republic rather than simply in small
academic circles. This kind of scholarship was not done in the
Progressive and postwar eras. Perhaps it will even help destroy
the negative caricatures that were created and handed down uncritically for nearly a century.
December 17, 2001, 15; “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy,” American Prospect 14
(June 2003): 9.
71. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left,
From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
72. One important exception is Risen and Thomas, Wrath of Angels.
73. James Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life Inside a Fundamentalist Baptist Church
(New York: Vintage, 2004); Tanya Erzen, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian
Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006); Hanna Rosin, God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save
America (New York: Mariner Books, 2008); Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple:
A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (New York: Grand Central
Publishing, 2010).
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