God's Own Party

Abstract

This book traces the history of the Christian Right from its early twentieth-century origins to its involvement in the presidential election of 2008. The book argues that evangelicals’ success in transforming American politics was primarily a result of their ability to link their political agenda to the Republican Party. Evangelicals who believed in reclaiming America as a Christian nation began developing an alliance with the Republican Party during the early years of the Cold War, when Billy Graham cultivated a relationship with the Eisenhower administration. Evangelicals strengthened that tie during the culture wars of the late 1960s and 1970s, when grassroots activists forged alliances with the national conservative movement during their campaigns against sex education, the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, and gay rights. The development of an organized Religious Right in the late 1970s, which resulted partly from evangelicals’ rising socioeconomic status and the growth of the Sunbelt, gave evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson national political influence, but their frustration with their lack of legislative success prompted them to make increased demands of the GOP. As conservative evangelicals gained control of the Republican Party, they pushed the party further to the right. By the early twenty-first century, the Christian Right was the most powerful interest group in the Republican Party, a position that conservative evangelicals used to reshape the nation’s political agenda.