Producing the Christian Right: Conservative Evangelicalism, Representation, and the Recent Religious Past

L Benjamin Rolsky

doi:10.3390/rel12030171

Abstract

This essay explores how conservative evangelical Protestants have been represented by both sociologists and journalists of American religion through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right” beginning in the late 1970s. By exploring both popular and academic analyses of conservative Protestantism as understood through terms such as “the Christian Right” and “the Electronic Church”, one is able to identify a set of intellectual assumptions that characterize the study of American evangelicalism and politics in the recent past. In particular, this essay suggests that studies of conservative evangelicalism as understood through “the rise of the Christian Right” tend to reveal as much about their interpreters as they do their respective evangelical subjects. The essay first identifies what these barriers and limitations are by exploring the social scientific literature on conservative evangelicalism at the time. It then foregrounds news reports and academic studies of “the Christian Right” in order to connect journalistic and academic inquiries of the conservative Protestant to the emergence of the evangelical. It then suggests a number of historical and methodological avenues for future research on American evangelicalism and politics that foreground self-reflexivity, interdisciplinarity, and the close reading of conservative texts.

Highlights

A Return to WarnerIn order to identify the intellectual parameters that contributed to the production of “the Christian Right” and the narrative of its rise, it is instructive to return to Warner’s admonitions about the state of sociological study of American evangelicalism in the late
Producing the Christian Right: Conservative Evangelicalism, Abstract: This essay explores how conservative evangelical Protestants have been represented by both sociologists and journalists of American religion through the narrative of the “rise of the Christian Right” beginning in the late 1970s
Like Warner, Wolfe identified three factors that tended to compromise the analytical strength of a given social science study of conservative evangelicalism: the prosperity hypothesis, the extremism disposition, and “the emphasis upon status politics”

Summary

A Return to Warner

In order to identify the intellectual parameters that contributed to the production of “the Christian Right” and the narrative of its rise, it is instructive to return to Warner’s admonitions about the state of sociological study of American evangelicalism in the late. The confluence of sociological correlation, ideological reification, and American electoral politics in the 1970s laid the groundwork for how evangelicals would be studied in both the academy and the public square writ large moving forward Such scholastic scrutiny would have the opposite effect once set against its initial intellectual intentions: to understand American evangelicals and the “rise of the Christian Right” as academic subjects like any other. Like Warner, Wolfe identified three factors that tended to compromise the analytical strength of a given social science study of conservative evangelicalism: the prosperity hypothesis, the extremism disposition, and “the emphasis upon status politics”.18 Extremism defined these subjects of academic inquiry for Bell and his colleagues, but not conservatism per se. Drawing from documents spanning both the popular and the professorial, the following primary sources illustrate how anti-evangelical sensibilities and habits of thought shaped reporting at the time, and how such assumptions continue to shape contemporary analyses of American evangelical politics in general, and “the evangelical” in particular

Describing the Protestant Right in Real Time

Where Do We Go from Here?

Conclusions