Rethinking the Reasonableness of the Religious Right

Abstract

Using a sample of members of Moral Majority, we compare two general explanations of activism within the organization: "pathological" theories, which posit a connection between personal deficiencies and conservative political activism, and "representational" theories, in which supporters of right-wing organizations are thought to be motivated primarily by unrepresented policy preferences. We find much stronger support for the representational view and offer several possible explanations for this finding. The resurgence of religiously-motivated political activity which characterized the decade of the 1980s raised a number of important normative questions. Indeed, the reassertion of religious values in the political arena was accompanied by arguments that fervent religious belief is something of a dangerous stranger to democratic politics. Religious values are thought by some to be private and nonnegotiable, and therefore inappropriate in the public sphere of politics (see Greenawalt, 1988, for an account of permissible and impermissible uses of religion in politics). Strong religious beliefs are thought to be associated with, and perhaps causally related to, personality disorders incompatible with democratic civility. For example, a recent work on the politics of abortion has suggested that there exists an intimate connection between Christian fundamentalism and a propensity to commit violent acts (Blanchard and Prewitt, 1993). In this study our purpose is twofold. We examine the attitudes and beliefs of members of a religiously distinctive political organization to address the following questions: First, do such organizations include members with psychologically or socially pathological characteristics? Second, are such characteristics associated with level of political activity within the organization? Are the most "maladjusted" members the most active, or is participation somehow related to more "civil" attitudes and behaviors? When the Christian Right of the 1950s crusaded against communism, scholars were quick to posit pathological theories to explain support for these organizations. Those who supported the Christian Right were variously accused of being authoritarian, dogmatic, alienated, anxious about their social status, moti