“This World Is Not My Home”: Richard Mouw and Christian Nationalism

Cultivating a Constituency for Conservation

God's Greenhouse

It is a special honor to publish our work alongside rigorous critiques from Dorothy Sue Cobble, Kristoffer Smemo, Eric Schickler, and Devin Caughey. We are grateful for the opportunity to debate our research in the pages of Labor with such an esteemed and interdisciplinary group of labor historians and political scientists. In this memo we will restate our argument, address three common concerns raised by the commentators, respond to specific questions from individual commentators, and reflect on the potential implications of our argument for contemporary American politics.Our article, “Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies,” argues that the CIO's political action committee (CIO-PAC) contributed to an ongoing anti-labor backlash from the Republican Party. The CIO-PAC was founded in 1943 and quickly formed a de facto alliance with the Democratic Party. Although the CIO-PAC repeatedly claimed to be nonpartisan, 94 percent of its endorsements in 1944 went to Democrats. While the CIO-PAC's partisan political engagement helped to attract prolabor support from Democratic members of Congress, it simultaneously pushed the Republican Party further toward anti-labor legislation.The CIO-PAC's opposite effects on the two parties meant that CIO power was associated with increasing polarization; the difference between Democratic and Republican voting on congressional labor legislation was small in districts and states where the CIO was weak, but this difference grew as CIO strength increased. The result was that Republicans were most likely to support anti-labor legislation, such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, when they represented constituencies in which the CIO was at its strongest. As Schickler and Caughey note, this dynamic cannot be explained by most theories of representation, which would expect Republican support for unions to increase with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. In other words, the CIO faced its fiercest enemies in places where we might otherwise expect it to have attracted friends.This polarizing effect of the CIO-PAC, as we stress throughout our article, was not the only cause of the passage of Taft-Hartley. Southern Democrats almost unanimously supported Taft-Hartley on the grounds that the CIO's efforts to unionize the South posed a threat to white supremacy. Around the country, public opposition to the CIO strike wave of 1945–46 encouraged many Democrats and Republicans to support Taft-Hartley. And the rising conservatism of the Republican Party, which had only increased since its late 1930s opposition to the New Deal, made Republicans more likely to support Taft-Hartley than Democrats were. Independent of these important dynamics, we assert that the CIO-PAC's political engagement further galvanized Republican opposition to organized labor in a way that may have contributed to the passage of Taft-Hartley.Our argument is therefore as nuanced as it is controversial, and we are excited to see it inspire difficult questions and critiques. Throughout the commentators’ excellent responses, three main issues were raised repeatedly. First, what was the relationship between the CIO-PAC and the anti-labor animus that motivated large parts of the Republican Party? If one caused the other, our commentators point out, then surely the 1943 creation of the CIO-PAC cannot explain a Republican anti-labor backlash that began in the 1930s. We believe that this common critique is based on a misunderstanding of our argument, and we welcome the opportunity to restate and clarify our claim that “the American labor movement's political strategy coevolved with the labor policy positions of the Republican and Democratic Parties.”Second, how did the CIO-PAC influence Republicans beyond our brief example of New York's 1944 Senate election? While our quantitative analysis does demonstrate a general relationship across the United States, we understand the desire for more qualitative evidence that the CIO-PAC's de facto alliance with the Democratic Party pushed the Republican Party in an anti-labor direction. Below, we briefly discuss how the CIO-PAC's 1946 decision not to endorse progressive, prolabor Republicans in Wisconsin and Minnesota likely contributed to the election of anti-labor Republicans (Joseph McCarthy and Edward John Thye), who voted in favor of Taft-Hartley the following year.Third, was the CIO-PAC responsible for the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947? Cobble suggests that we unfairly blame the CIO-PAC for the anti-labor conservatism of the Republican Party and the passage of Taft-Hartley—“mighty weights,” she writes, “for the CIO-PAC to bear.” Schickler and Caughey, similarly, write that our article suggests that the CIO-PAC “cost unions more than it gained them” and therefore represented a strategic mistake by the CIO. However, we have no intention of holding the CIO materially responsible for the passage of Taft-Hartley, which was ultimately the result of numerous crosscurrents in American political life. Our hope is merely to draw attention to important negative consequences of the CIO-PAC (increased Republican backlash) that have been overlooked in previous research. Whether or not this negative effect was outweighed by the positive effect of increased Democratic support requires additional research. Similarly, more investigation and debate is needed to determine whether or not an alternative political strategy existed by which the CIO could have captured the benefits of the CIO-PAC without suffering all of its negative consequences.We believe that the CIO's political strategy coevolved with the labor policy positions of the Democratic and Republican Parties. This means that (1) the CIO's decisions regarding the PAC were influenced by the labor policies advocated by the two parties and that (2) the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party influenced the subsequent labor policy positions of both parties.Regarding the first point, our article clearly explains how the labor policies supported by Democrats and Republicans in the late 1930s and early 1940s influenced the CIO's decision to create a PAC and almost exclusively to endorse Democrats. The prolabor legislation supported by President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party during the New Deal of the 1930s made a CIO alliance with the Democrats an appealing option. As we note in the article, the roots of the CIO-PAC's alliance with Democrats can be traced back to the CIO's Non-Partisan League of 1936, a short-lived organization that campaigned for FDR's reelection after realizing that “a willing Roosevelt administration offered labor a chance for a new kind of political advocacy.”Just as Democratic support for prolabor policies attracted the CIO, growing Republican opposition to organized labor made a CIO alliance with the GOP all but impossible. As we note in our article, the CIO's 1942 report on the possibility of creating a political action committee concluded that unions “should not pretend that there is the slightest possibility of our achieving genuine influence in the Republican Party” given that “the Republican Party had reconstituted itself on anti–New Deal grounds, making it an unlikely partner.” We also explicitly noted that before the CIO-PAC, “the GOP joined forces with the business community in an increasingly aggressive backlash against the New Deal in the late 1930s and 1940s. This renewed alliance paved the way for an ideological assault on labor rights in the name of economic freedom.” In these ways, we agree with the commentators and the conventional wisdom that “the conservative counterreaction against labor was already well underway in Congress by the late 1930s, with overwhelming support from Republicans.” As we write, “Of course, the Republican Party's move toward anti-unionism was not solely driven by the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party.”However, the Republican Party's general shift toward anti-labor policies before 1943 is only part of the story of Republican voting on Taft-Hartley in 1947. Most important, this rising conservatism cannot explain the variation that continued to exist among Republicans on questions of labor legislation. As Smemo discusses, the vote on Taft-Hartley exposed a rift within the Republican Party; while some “yearned to gut New Deal labor law,” other members of the GOP “could not imagine a direct confrontation with the organized labor movement.” Yes, the GOP was broadly moving to the right of the Democratic Party on labor issues, but many Republicans still voted against anti-labor legislation throughout the Eightieth Congress (1947–48).This is where the second part of our coevolutionary argument comes into play: the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party influenced the subsequent voting behavior of both political parties. For Democrats, support for unions (voting against Taft-Hartley) increased with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. For Republicans, by contrast, support for unions decreased with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. As our interlocutors emphasize, the overall impact of the CIO-PAC on congressional voting was therefore to increase polarization between the two parties.Thus, we fully agree with Smemo that “the anti-labor reaction in Congress began shortly after the 1936 elections” and with Schickler and Caughey that “the CIO-PAC formed in 1943 largely in reaction to the consolidation of this new conservative bloc.” This earlier conservative backlash contributed to the large difference between Republican and Democratic voting on Taft-Hartley; model 4 in table 1 shows that Democrats, on average, were less likely than Republicans to support Taft-Hartley. However, such general partisan differences tell us nothing about why Democrats and Republicans voted similarly to one another in states and districts where the CIO was weak, but voted so disparately in places where the CIO was strongest. We can better understand this polarization, we argue, if we explore the ways in which the CIO-PAC made friends of Democrats and enemies of Republicans.Caughey and Schickler note that the core qualitative evidence for the mechanism presented in our article is an analysis of the New York Senate race in 1944, in which the Republican Party, confronting the CIO-backed Democrat Robert Wagner, decided not to nominate the relatively prolabor candidate Irving Ives in favor of avowed anti-communist Thomas Curran. The reasoning for this decision, we contend, was significantly rooted in the party's reaction to the presence of the CIO-PAC, which had made it difficult for prolabor Republicans to rely on traditional nonpartisan union support and had convinced party leaders to instead shift toward a more explicit anti-union (in this case, anti-communist) stance.As Caughey and Schickler point out, that was not the end of the story, nor did this particular moment signify a permanent break between Republicans and labor. Ives was nominated in 1946 and defeated former governor Herbert H. Lehman in the Republican wave of that year, signifying that the party as a whole was not quite ready to fully commit to a strategy of polarizing the electorate.Yet as Smemo's response to our article makes plain, this partial retreat from a stridently anti-labor platform did not necessarily imply a concomitant shift toward labor. Instead, it reflected a complicated negotiation among the factions of the Republican Party to take advantage of the splits in the labor movement as well as find a way to reconcile hardline business conservatism with the more accommodationist interests in the party. But this move almost inevitably involved shifting the priorities away from explicit alliance with the unions themselves and instead toward making labor legislation more favorable to management.1 After all, despite the endorsement of the AFL, Irving Ives did indeed vote for the Taft-Hartley Act. Similarly, Smemo points out that Ives's Fair Employment Practices Commission was “notoriously weak” and that he championed an “industrial pluralism to keep industrial unions subordinate to management”; by comparing Ives to Curran, our article may have overstated Ives's prolabor credentials.More broadly, however, Cobble points out that the class of 1946 included conservative Republican senators from states without a particularly strong CIO presence, some of whom (like Harry Cain and James Kem) would also vote for Taft-Hartley.2 We do not dispute that the Republican Party as a whole would have “jumped at the chance to eviscerate the Wagner Act in 1947.” What we contend is that in places where the CIO was strong, the Republican response to the PAC was particularly negative. For instance, twelve Republicans either won open seats or beat incumbent Democrats in the 1946 elections; of these, seven were in states with significant CIO membership. At the same time, rather than accommodating labor or moderating their party's pro-Taft-Hartley position, all seven voted for the bill.3 To conventional theories of interest group politics, such an outcome is very puzzling: it appeared that by 1946 in many of those states we would expect the CIO's voice to be loudest and most persuasive, strongly anti-labor Republicans were instead elected. While we agree that a general conservative backlash in public opinion (as well as Truman's more general unpopularity and the onset of the Cold War) partly explains this pattern, we contend that the threat posed by the CIO-PAC to Republicans seems to have played a key polarizing role.Take, as another example, the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who defeated the progressive incumbent Robert La Follette Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary in 1946 and went on to secure one of the state's Senate seats. Cobble is correct that Wisconsin was not the most favorable state for CIO political activism (although it was in the 70th percentile in terms of CIO density among US states) and that McCarthy's conservatism seems particularly ideological. However, the CIO was particularly active in the Wisconsin's urban centers and actively worked to undermine La Follette's campaign by attacking him for being insufficiently committed to the New Deal.Many historians have attributed the CIO's animosity toward La Follette to a communist faction of the union active in Milwaukee, which was ideologically opposed to his stance against the USSR. But historian David Oshinsky convincingly demonstrates that even “the anti-Communists” in the CIO “were committed firmly to the Democratic party and pictured La Follette's return to the GOP as the Waterloo for liberal unity in Wisconsin.”4 Thus, Howard McMurray, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, engaged in a calculated effort to appeal to CIO partisanship by tying La Follette—a consistent supporter of many of the New Deal labor efforts, even though lukewarm at times in his support for Roosevelt—to “‘calculated subversion’ of the liberal forces in Wisconsin.”5 Throughout the campaign, McMurray and the labor press worked in tandem to attack La Follette and shift the labor vote toward the Democrats, a strategy that largely reflected the national CIO-PAC's own priorities.Moreover, the attack was successful. La Follette's vote share plummeted in labor wards (particularly those with strong CIO presence) in cities like Kenosha and Milwaukee during the primary in 1946, while the Democrat's rose relative to 1940, when La Follette had last been on the ballot,6 even though the AFL had directly endorsed La Follette's candidacy. As the New York Times opined in 1946, “The CIO forces contributed to La Follette's as the CIO-PAC the to vote in the Democratic might Joseph McCarthy have from La Follette's at the of the Oshinsky that at the of the Republican a relatively in to even made a to the labor vote that do not blame labor for and and leaders who had that labor unions are as a part of the American way of as some of the on As the campaign however, and he the effect of the CIO-PAC's campaign against La McCarthy seems to have increasingly convinced of the political benefits of tying labor directly to concerns about Thus, he claimed that the union strategy of labor action with the who that their theories will in an of industrial and and he McMurray of being more than a being by the in In other words, though McCarthy was particularly to the interests of organized it that he also no to to the of industrial Instead, he went on the progressive Republicans also from the CIO's shift toward partisanship in the 1946 even when they the direct of the a former of the Party in Minnesota who had to the Republicans in of increasing in 1940, had been a to labor and had been a key of the state's liberal In had voted in favor of the Wagner Act. However, by 1946 the CIO had largely for partisan the way for his conservative Republican Edward to secure the party's and in the general In his Thomas noted that despite the that such as the and the would back in the state's the CIO will vote in the Democratic primary where there is a better for among the CIO, and Democratic In this case, the partisan shift by the CIO-PAC less for Republicans to to labor they increasingly that industrial were willing to in Republican at other words, we agree with our interlocutors that the story did not end with Irving Ives's in But the partisan by the CIO-PAC had a effect on a of Senate in the following and made it in some the Republican Party to shift even further away from an alliance with organized is that the McCarthy and also to a mechanism which the CIO-PAC may have contributed to the Republican backlash against organized labor. In both the CIO-PAC its support from progressive Republicans senators and helped to the outcome of Republican toward anti-labor both of whom went on to general in 1946 and vote in favor of Taft-Hartley in 1947. If the CIO-PAC had supported prolabor Democrats while also prolabor Republicans such as La Follette and the of the Republican Party in may have been less the very it is to imagine that CIO-PAC support for La Follette and could have their primary and general election as well as two Senate against Taft-Hartley. We are therefore grateful to our commentators for us to further explore the effect of the CIO-PAC on Republicans New is for new research on the 1946 election of anti-labor Republicans in and states in which the CIO was well organized Republicans won Senate and voted in favor of Taft-Hartley. whether if how the CIO-PAC influenced Republican and the subsequent labor policy positions of Republicans in these the same time, we that the CIO-PAC played an important and overlooked in the of Taft-Hartley, we do not contend that the CIO be for the of the GOP backlash or the passage in 1947. The argument we in our article is more nuanced and less than the presented by our We that the CIO-PAC to a backlash from the Republican Party that in the passage of As explained we that the Republican backlash against organized labor began before the CIO-PAC, our argument that the CIO-PAC merely contributed to a Similarly, we believe that it was this Republican backlash numerous but not to the that in the passage of Taft-Hartley. To be we do not believe that the creation of the CIO-PAC and its informal alliance on its to the GOP backlash or the passage of being we do that the partisan polarization associated with the CIO-PAC important and questions about the and of The commentators of the CIO-PAC's alliance with the Democratic Party and that the CIO gained more from Democrats than it from Cobble argues that the CIO-PAC the more than the and that “the effect of the CIO than the Similarly, Schickler and Caughey that was only the CIO was so to the Democratic Party that it anti-labor legislation as as it In these ways, the commentators to our main argument about the negative of the CIO-PAC it contributed to the Republican anti-labor while that these were clearly outweighed by the positive But we believe that the debate is not quite this if the benefits of the CIO-PAC outweighed its it that an alternative political strategy could have captured most of these benefits without suffering all of the same As Schickler and Caughey note when our that Republicans were increasingly anti-labor as CIO strength in their the only dynamic in American political is that increasingly when the of the CIO have a way to support prolabor if most of were without a backlash of the of white In other words, the benefits of the CIO-PAC outweighed its does not it was the alternative strategy was the nonpartisan political to our friends and our of their political party. the CIO have continued this nonpartisan in a way that the benefits of the CIO-PAC without suffering all of its negative In our article, we offered two to the of the First, a large that the AFL had impact on the or passage of prolabor legislation during the early our own analysis of congressional voting on the Wagner Act that AFL union density was not associated with support or opposition from Democrats or As we the AFL support nor opposition from either however, and for the kind of debate we hope our work will argues that “the AFL to national with a in the early and some with the prolabor the way for the Wagner But if the nonpartisan contributed to such important the CIO could also have support for prolabor legislation without a partisan alliance with the Democratic Party. there a political strategy between the nonpartisan and the CIO-PAC that could have support from Democrats without simultaneously backlash from a debate about the political strategy of the CIO would a debate about the CIO's economic strategy during the 1940s. Schickler and Caughey, and have that the strike wave at the end of to a public backlash against the CIO that contributed to the passage of Taft-Hartley in The CIO was the argument and a strategy might have captured important economic without the backlash that in Taft-Hartley. In contrast, argues that organized was driven by a of CIO during than strike for and a better when the opportunity CIO leaders a in for union that the union and large In a this may have the CIO more than it but suggests that an alternative strategy may have many of the same benefits without suffering the same the three common concerns the commentators posed a of questions that This briefly on these additional were very to that Schickler and Caughey our and of CIO density to be both and are correct that the only other on CIO comes from is for only congressional our for congressional The two are relatively for the districts in the with our of CIO density is are also when despite the relative in variation districts as we voting on Taft-Hartley model 1 from table we find a negative and significant between Democrat and CIO. This means that the difference between Democratic and Republican voting on Taft-Hartley increased with the strength of the CIO. The main difference we find the is that the effect of CIO is no positive and when one the CIO density is not associated with Republican support for this in it is that our article may have a for our argument about the CIO-PAC and the Republican we only that the CIO-PAC had negative consequences if it Republicans to support What if the CIO-PAC only in a relationship between CIO density and Republican voting on that (as we the suggests that Republican members of Congress did not respond to the CIO in the way most theories of would Republicans in districts with CIO constituencies were no more likely to vote against Taft-Hartley then were Republicans in districts with CIO Taft-Hartley was supported by the overwhelming of Republicans in Congress, within the party continued to Republican members of the and Republican members of the Senate their support from the vote on Taft-Hartley. In his on the relationship between Taft-Hartley and the Republican Party, Smemo that this between and Republicans into the subsequent Smemo explains that the GOP to gut New Deal labor the party's could not imagine a direct confrontation with the organized labor this welcome for a Smemo the for more research on the dynamic relationship between the CIO-PAC and the Republican Party. Our article demonstrates that in Republicans with strong CIO constituencies were more likely to support Taft-Hartley than Republicans with CIO this relationship into the a between contrast, Smemo suggests that the within the GOP may have been the it could be that in were the of anti-labor legislation such as the by course, this will further research on congressional voting in the If the dynamic we in our article during this then the polarizing effect of the CIO-PAC Democrats but may to explain partisan polarization a of contrast, if Smemo is correct that the relationship in the (as Schickler and note that most theories of would then this would a for did the CIO-PAC from Republicans in to to in the way we would expect organized interest to the CIO from many Republicans from strong CIO states voted in favor of Taft-Hartley) and its political strategy in a way that Democratic support without If such strategic would further about the creation of the CIO-PAC and the passage of the CIO have such a political strategy earlier and the passage of the effects of the CIO-PAC on both the Democratic and Republican as well as the more general consequences of shift away from is to the of in the United Taft-Hartley was not only a for it also a relatively political for the unions as part and of the Democratic we believe it is to organized labor and party in a coevolutionary This us that for one within a party in partisan rather than can have and creating The and engaged of our interlocutors to our argument about the of political strategy on the part of the CIO also the of and the of specific to on work on the passage of Taft-Hartley in may even for contemporary American to be “the most is clearly meant to and the New Deal, when organized labor first began its alliance with the Democratic Party. as in the the Democratic Party is clearly the one with which unions have the our research suggests that labor be with its partisan of the Republican Party inevitably to power in the And while GOP no like the progressive Republicans of the 1930s, there still may be some potential for Republicans to support organized Republican members of the of voted in favor of the the to the most prolabor legislation in Congress in a And while the of the for the increasingly labor there is potential for the party's faction to support labor unions moving a Republican and that Republican senators share his that a conservative labor movement.” Although labor unions would be in to most Republican it is also to imagine that Senate could to Republicans who would then to be enemies of organized with one party can the of prolabor policies to the same other policy in contemporary American life. labor movement be of its of who power in This may only be however, if unions are willing to from a Democratic Party that itself increasingly the of class and among Our story of the CIO-PAC and Taft-Hartley suggests that labor movement would be to find ways to Democrats without potential in the such a it did for the CIO-PAC in the may more to the of the than to on of the labor As their own but they do not it as they they do not it but given and from the

Chapter 1: Just War: Mainline churches and the justness of the Vietnam War from 1964-1968 Chapter 2: Prophets or Patriots? Mainline churches and the attendant issues of the Vietnam War Chapter 3: Souls Not Society: The revolt of mainline conservatives Chapter 4: The Problem with the Conservative evangelicals' concepts of war and peace Chapter 5: Evil was Loose in the World: Conservative evangelicals' response from 1964 to 1968 Chapter 6: Recasting the Vision: Conservative evangelicals' response from 1969 to 1973 Chapter 7: Alabama not Vietnam: The unique response of African-American Protestants

“Whiskey vs. Lager Beer— Bejabers”: The Irish, the Bête Noire of Lincoln’s Republican Party Greg Koos (bio) following william v. shannon’s oft-quoted dictum that “the Irish were a rural people in Ireland, and they became a city people in the United States,” much attention is given to large urban centers, with the assumption that such places do indeed typify the Irish American experience.1 The work supporting this truism usually focuses on the East Coast. Kevin Kenny broadened these observations: “the Irish in the United States shared a marked preference for towns and cities. . . . Fully 44.5% of the Irish-born population lived in the fifty largest cities in the United States in 1870, and well over half the remainder lived in small towns, mining villages. . . . Combining the population of these smaller industrial and urban areas with that of large cities . . . three-quarters of the American-born Irish lived in industrial areas in 1870.”2 That “well over half the remainder lived in small towns, mining villages [etc.]” strongly suggests that studies of these places should be undertaken. Such work should examine not only smaller industrial areas but also rural areas, including midwestern Irish settlement. For it is also known that 50 percent of people who emigrated to the United States before 1860 landed at New Orleans and spread through the Mississippi River valley. These immigrants were largely Irish and German.3 [End Page 123] This study examines the experiences of Irish immigrants in Bloomington, Illinois, a railroad and agricultural center whose population had reached seven thousand by 1860.4 It recounts their arrival in the 1850s as common laborers working to construct the Illinois Central Railroad (ICRR) line, which ran north and south through the state, and the Chicago & Mississippi Railroad (C&MRR) line, which connected Chicago to St. Louis. Because the C&MRR shops were in Bloomington, and because many other local economic opportunities arose there, hundreds of these workers remained in the area. As new residents they helped start a Catholic parish, enjoyed the conviviality of saloons, and participated in the community’s political life. In politics, following a long-term association, the Irish joined with the Democratic Party.5 However, they also joined the Democratic Party in reaction to the virulent hate directed toward their religion and their ethnicity by Know-Nothing nativists in the mid-1850s. Nativism arose in the East, largely driven by evangelical Protestants who bitterly opposed the Catholic faith. With the mass migration of Irish into the United States, these elements saw a major threat to democracy, which, in their view, was based upon Protestant tenets.6 Political opposition to the Irish in the Midwest resulted in election-day riots in St. Louis in 1852 and 1854 as well as election riots in Cincinnati in 1855. Opposition to immigrants was further underscored by evangelical Protestants’ drive to ban the consumption of beer, wine, and spirits, the argument being that these intoxicating beverages interfered with the rightful rise of honest workmen. Both Irish and German people rejected prohibition, leading to conflicts such as the German-led 1855 lager riots in Chicago.7 In the later 1850s the Republican Party continued that virulent nativist stance. The Catholic Church’s open support for slavery, coupled with defensiveness inspired by evangelical Protestant opposition to the Irish, provided the grounds for many Irish to openly oppose abolitionism.8 Ian Delahanty summarized the issue thus: “Historians are far from unanimous . . . in explaining why Irish Americans were so singularly hostile to all shades of antislavery. [End Page 124] Immigrants’ fears of labor competition from freed slaves, their purported need to establish a white racial identity, their attachment to the proslavery Democratic Party, and their receptiveness to the influence of a proslavery American Catholic hierarchy have all weighed heavily in the discussion.”9 From this stance came racist views and violence directed toward African Americans. The Irish became deeply embroiled in the widespread turmoil involving nativism, antislavery movements, and an emerging national civil war. A strong wish to be identified as Americans underscored Irish immigrants’ enthusiastic participation in civic life. When war broke out members of the Irish community stepped forward to serve as Americans.10...

Americans, and others, have used the term “Zionism” to relate to groups and individuals that have promoted the idea that Jews should settle in Palestine and build a commonwealth there. Zionist ideas and movements have had a long and varied presence in America, beginning in colonial times. Despite the absence of a unified Zionist program, both Christian and Jewish Zionists translated religious messianic yearnings into political, social, or cultural goals, varying in their motivations and visions. Christian Zionism has developed mostly among messianic-oriented Protestants, although at times other Christians too have supported Zionist goals. In recent decades, Christian Zionism has been associated with conservative evangelicals, in America as well as in other countries. Zionism developed a noticeable presence among Jews in America at the turn of the 20th century. In its first decades, the movement attracted few followers, most Jews preferring other political or ideological options. It gained more ground after the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and the movement grew further following the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933. During the 1960s–1980s, the majority of Jews in the United States embraced pro-Zionist views, which by that time both Christians and Jews understood as promoting support for Israel in the American public arena. The cooperation between Christian and Jewish Zionists, over the building of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine or over supporting it, has been more extensive than standard histories of Zionism have suggested. Christian and Jewish Zionists have provided each other immense encouragement, offering validation and legitimizing each other’s messianic convictions and projects. Christian supporters have acted as pro-Zionist lobbies, attempting to influence American policies. Their activities became crucial during World War I and then again in the 1970s–2000s, with the resurgence of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. Cooperation between conservative American Christian and Jewish Orthodox messianic groups developed at the turn of the 21st century, with many evangelical Christians contributing to support Jewish settlers and organizations that prepare for the building of the Third Temple in Jerusalem. This alliance has stirred strong reactions among pro-Palestinian and liberal Christians and Jews, who object to what they see as one-dimensional support of right-wing Israeli causes on behalf of messianic interpretations they do not share. For many antagonists, Zionism has become synonymous with a state they oppose and agendas they see as hostile to their cause. Self-identification as Zionist is currently prevalent among Modern Orthodox Jews and conservative evangelical Christians. Many others, including former liberal Christian supporters and progressive Jews, in the United States, Europe, and Israel, have moved to define themselves as post-Zionists, if not as non-Zionists altogether.

In the midst of American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the aftermath of the presidential election in Iran, support for American involvement in Iran has increased in some circles. In this piece, our desire is to give a conservative, evangelical Christian response to why America should not support any military action against Iran. A position advocated by many of us is “Just War.” In short, this position permits war if certain conditions are met. Just War theory has a long and storied heritage in the Western world, going back to writers such as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius. Two criteria in particular are relevant. The first is just cause: there must be a specific reason for going to war. The second criterion is last resort: all other nonviolent options must be pursued. In the case of Iran, we see no just cause for a military strike. The nuclear issue does not provide just cause for military intervention, nor does the aftermath of the most recent presidential election. Iran has not attacked either the United States or any other vulnerable country. As conservative evangelicals, we find ourselves on the dovish end of the Just War spectrum. As followers of Christ, our impulse is to be at peace with all men, personally. The apostle Paul instructs us, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12.8). Our reflex is nonviolence. The gospel of Christ is not advanced by means of the sword. However, it is also true that the Christian Scriptures teach that the state may legitimately employ force in order to protect her citizens and keep public order. Indeed, the state is given these responsibilities by God himself. Christians, consequently, are called upon to support the government in its legitimate role. It is incumbent upon Christians, therefore, to urge their leaders in Congress and their President to shape foreign policy in a manner that reflects the peaceful and non-violent dispositions described in Scripture. Unless the global community is threatened by the actions of Iran (which currently they are not),the American government must not interfere and allow Iranians to determine their own fate. Military intervention must have just cause and it must necessarily be a last resort

Lucy Caldwell’s The Meeting Point (2011): From Ireland to Bahrain and Back Kelli Maloy The Meeting Point (2011), the second novel by Belfast native Lucy Caldwell, focuses on Euan and Ruth Armstrong, an Anglican minister and his wife who travel from County Down to Bahrain for a mission trip; Euan’s mission is both a response to the events of September 11, 2001, and an anticipation of the war in Iraq, which is declared during the course of the novel’s narrative.1 When they arrive in Bahrain, Euan reveals that the true nature of the mission is something quite different. The real purpose of the trip is to enter Saudi Arabia, where he and a contact will distribute Bibles and baptize converts. During the course of their month-long stay in Bahrain, Ruth has an affair with a local man, Farid, and entrusts Farid’s teenage cousin, Noor, with the Armstrongs’ toddler. Set between 2003 and 2010, the novel is framed by the impact of the global recession on the North and shaped by the international role of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger. As a voice of evangelical Christianity, Euan embodies the post-9/11 fundamentalist rhetoric that became prominent in the United States and in allied countries, as well as post-Troubles patterns of violence and xenophobia in Northern Ireland. He characterizes Muslims as non-believers “dying of thirst” for the Word of God, awaiting salvation in a land of “venomous snakes and scorpions.”2 The causes and effects of present-day Islamophobia have become increasingly complex, but reactions to the events of 9/11 remain a linchpin of the recent surge in evangelical Christianity. In a 2014 analysis of Christian dispensationalism, Grayson R. Robertson III argues that the fall of Communism in 1989 “cleared the way for Islam to once again become the primary eschatological enemy of Christianity” and that the events of 9/11 prompted “the most dramatic increase in the amount of evangelical Christian literature devoted to forecasting [End Page 41] the final biblical dispensation since the late 1960s and early 1970s.”3 President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, Robertson argues, was based largely on the advice of dispensational pre-millennialist advisors who regarded Saddam Hussein as the Antichrist, come to rebuild Babylon and launch missiles toward Israel, and saw the region as the location of the Battle of Armageddon as outlined in Revelation.4 President Bush’s use of the term “crusade” to describe the “Global War on Terror” notoriously framed American foreign policy as a response to a perceived threat to Christian hegemony. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, later stated that the term “had been intended not to signify opposition to Islam but ‘a broad cause’ that other nations should join,” an ostensibly slight semantic distinction.5 Widespread evidence of Islamophobia since 2001 would suggest that such opposition did, indeed, fuel this “broad cause” and produced a spike in evangelicalism, both in the United States and beyond. One study found that of the 450 evangelical churches in the Republic of Ireland in 2010, 60 percent had existed for fewer than ten years.6 Much as the elimination of the encroaching global threat of Communism sparked anti-Islamic Christian evangelicalism in the United States, the political nature of evangelicalism in Northern Ireland has allowed for the transfer of rhetoric once reserved for Catholics to Muslims. The role of the Rev. Ian Paisley in galvanizing followers to support the tenets of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)—specifically, to reject the Good Friday Agreement—cannot be overlooked.7 However, the collective sense of Unionist identity has waned in recent [End Page 42] decades. Claire Mitchell and Jennifer Todd trace this identity crisis both to the integration of Catholics in governance and to the fact that “the United Kingdom itself can no longer be seen as a model and upholder of the Unionist position.” Having “lost the argument with regard to the political future of Northern Ireland,” conservative evangelicals, who “thrive on opposition,” have replaced the “Catholic other” with the “Islamic other.” Some of the evangelicals interviewed by Mitchell and Todd expressed a sense of abandonment and conceded that a united...

Politics and religion are closely related. Professor Kazunobu Horiuchi, Reitaku University, Japan, is interested in the relationship between evangelicals and politics in the US and believes there are misconceptions about conservative evangelicals. He is knowledgeable about the involvement and influence of conservative evangelicals in politics and is also interested in the links between religion and poverty. Indeed, in recent years, Horiuchi has been focusing on his research on evangelical efforts to address poverty issues, including conservative evangelicals’ reluctance to contribute to societal issues such as eradicating poverty and the active role of the Evangelical Left in such societal issues. In one study, he is working to empirically verify how conservative evangelical and liberal Evangelical Left churches actually tackle social or international poverty issues in church-side social contribution activities centred on poverty issues. To do this, he is exploring the history of the formation of the Religious Left and the Evangelical Left, the contents of the movement and an examination of the possible impact of these movements on the future of US society and politics. Horiuchi now has a grant to conduct research on the relationship between the US evangelical movement and race issues and this will be an area of focus for the next three years.

The phrase Religious Right refers to a loose network of political actors, religious organizations, and political pressure groups that formed in the United States in the late 1970s. Also referred to as the Christian Right, representative organizations associated with the movement included Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy, Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, and Ed McAteer’s Religious Roundtable. Leaders and organizations associated with the Religious Right made a broad-based religious appeal to Americans that emphasized traditional family values, championed free-market economics, and advocated a hardline foreign policy approach to the Soviet Union. They also criticized secular and materialistic trends in American culture that many in the Religious Right associated with the moral and economic decline of the nation. The organizations of the Religious Right had a major influence on the 1976 and 1980 presidential elections by directly affecting the political fortunes of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Although many of the organizations declined and disbanded in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, some of the organizations of the Religious Right persisted into the 2000s and continue to shape policy discussions, drive voter turnout, and influence religious and political life in the United States. Even though actors in the Religious Right appealed broadly to the conservative cultural sensibilities of Americans from Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, and Jewish backgrounds, the movement most capably mobilized white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The decentralized nature of white evangelical Protestantism means that organizers associated with the Religious Right mobilized coalitions of activists and rank-and-file members from large conservative denominational bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, and the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, while also drawing support from independent churches associated with Reformed, Pentecostal, charismatic, and nondenominational Protestantism. Further, the term Religious Right has also been used by scholars and journalists alike to identify a broad ecumenical coalition of activist Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and other cultural conservatives who have made common cause with Protestants over social issues related to sexual morality—including resisting abortion rights, combating pornography, and fighting against rights for homosexuals—since the 1970s. Scholars often trace the roots of the Religious Right to the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, a series of theological and institutional disputes that split conservative Protestants in the early 20th century. In the intervening decades between the 1920s and 1970s, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists developed an institutional subculture of churches, colleges, and voluntary societies that created a popular perception of their withdrawal and isolation from mainstream social and political culture in the United States. This institutional separation, however, did not stop conservative Protestants from contributing to many of the most important political controversies of the 20th century, including debates over cultural change, economic theory, and foreign policy during the Cold War. By the late 1970s, a unique convergence of social changes and new developments in law, politics, and media led to the emergence of a distinct coalition of special interest political groups that have since been labeled the Religious or Christian Right. These groups had a profound effect on electoral outcomes and public policy debates that has persisted well into the 21st century.

During the decades of the Cold War, belief and power blended in ways that better integrated Protestant evangelicals into the mainstream American political culture. As the nuclear age corresponded with the early Cold War, evangelicals offered an eschatological narrative to help make sense of what appeared to many to be an increasingly dangerous world. At the same time, the post–World War II anticommunism that developed during the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made room for evangelical interpretations that supported their good-versus-evil rhetoric. Evangelist Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders consistently referenced Cold War events and promoted Christian nationalism while at the same time calling on Americans to turn to God and away from sin. Evangelical missionaries, who had long interpreted the world for fellow believers in the pews back home, were agents advocating for American values abroad, but they also weighed in on American foreign policy matters in sometimes unexpected ways. By the time the Cold War world order had fully emerged in the 1950s, cold warriors were fighting the geopolitical battle for influence in part by promoting an “American way of life” that included religion, allowing evangelicals to help shape the Cold War consensus. White evangelicals were more ambivalent about supporting the civil rights movement that challenged the inclusivity of that consensus, even though civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. made the case for civil rights using moral and spiritual arguments that were familiar to evangelicalism. As the long sixties brought divisions within the country over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the women’s rights movement, evangelicals participated in the political discussions that captivated the country and were divided themselves. By the 1970s, conservative evangelicals helped to create the Religious Right, and a small group of liberal evangelicals began to contest it. The Religious Right would be more successful, however, in defining political evangelicalism as the culture wars extended into the 1980s. Conservative evangelicalism matured during the Reagan years and become an important part of the conservative coalition. Even as the Cold War ended, the political networks and organizations that evangelicals formed in the second half of the 20th century, both conservative and progressive, have continued to influence evangelicals’ political participation.

In an adroit and theoretically sophisticated monograph entitled Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, Jason Bivins takes his readers on a guided tour of an important religious formation within U.S. conservative evangelicalism—the religion of fear, a cultural formation that is part social critique and part political agenda, a formation that has its roots in the early history of the republic and has flourished in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Tacking back and forth between brief and sweeping histories of the rise of evangelicalism in the United States, on the one hand, and close readings of strategically chosen exemplars on the other, Bivins offers both a portrait of a not-to-be-ignored religio-political force and a nuanced analysis of how the diverse manifestations of this force perform pedagogical work, impose disciplines based on religiously inflected social critique, and dangerously narrow the terrain of the political. His book concludes with a critique of the academic field of religious studies, which has in his view failed to rise to the analytical occasion in the face of this religio-political project. Moreover, he issues an urgent plea for resistance against the evacuation of the sphere of the political by narratives of moral panic and moral promise.

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.

This article examines the divide within the Republican Party between business interests and conservative evangelicals during the debate over the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). Business interests were able to build compromises by raising their concerns over practical matters such as costs. Conservative evangelicals advocated for changes due to their moral and ideological positions on homosexuality and HIV. Conservative evangelicals did not receive their desired changes because they constructed their concerns with public safety themes. This led to conservative evangelicals and their opponents talking past each other instead of addressing their concerns. The dynamics shown from the opposition of conservative evangelicals in the ADA debate demonstrate that their influence in elections did not lead to dominance within the Republican Party in shaping policy.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the everyday religious lives of conservative evangelical Christians in London. Conservative evangelicalism has attracted increased public attention in recent years as a number of Christian groups have become increasingly visible in arguing that Christians are being marginalized in British society as their lifestyles are threatened by universalizing processes associated with modernization. Seeking to move beyond simplistic stereotypes of evangelicals that arise from polarizing media narratives, I explore how members of a large conservative evangelical congregation experience and fmd ways of negotiating concerns, uncertainties and human frailties that shape social life more broadly. My central argument is that their experience of God as coherent and transcendent, mediated through word-based practices, both responds to and intensifies their consciousness of internal moral fragmentation, binding them more closely in their sense of dependence on God and each other. Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to nonns of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice.