Why did the RR rise in the 1980s?
Was it the hippies’ growing old and conservative?
Or was it their parents?
Or what??
Off the top of my head, it was partly in backlash against the perceived excesses of the sixties and seventies, and also a political lever that helped secure the southeast states, replacing the racism that was becoming slightly less acceptable.
Economic stagnation, rising crime rates, families breaking up, legalized abortion, and the tentative beginnings of AIDS. Seems to me some sort of reaction would be natural to most people.
Neither. The RR’s rank and file were largely the same age as the hippies who were disgusted by their excesses.
They finally had a friend in the White House in the 80s. It was also the time that political and religious opposition to abortion grew together as a single entity. Cable TV was also a contributing factor, it allowed the creation of mega-churches led by TV preachers like Robertson and Falwell.
They were there all along, they just weren’t organized before then.
I heard a man on TV (while The first George Bush was in office) that the religious right were going to try to get people elected to further their cause, they intended to unite with the Catholics to get Roe V wade over turned and bring more Christian principles in to law. If they did this or not, it seems they have tried. They seem to be still pushing their agenda. The country is very divided because of this. Many just vote on those social issues.
What we now consider right-wing religious conservatism was the norm in America before 1960. Prayer in schools, Sunday blue laws and strict moral codes for public behavior were unremarkable. What happened in the 1980s was that as the tidewater of mainstream culture continued to recede from the former standard, conservatives became more vocal and strident about preserving what remained.
ETA: ironically, people in 1960 were already complaining about the “immorality” of American culture. If they could have seen Family Guy or the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, they’d have had fits.
OK, let’s go over this one again: the hippies were NOT the majority of Boomerdom. Not even the majority of the liberally-inclined. There were at least just as many squares growing up at the same time.
And the religious right got started before the Reagan administration: the televangelists (Robertson, Bakker, Swaggart, etc.) started growing really big during the mid-70s (though many of them had been around small-time for many years before) as a backlash to the culture trends of the late 60s-early 70s. It was during the Carter years, though, that they became motivated to go political and respond to outreach from the political conservatives. The Moral Majority organization itself was started in 1979 to be able to lobby and campaign for conservative policies in the next election. They then peaked during the Reagan years as mentioned, for the reasons mentioned.
This article from 2004 details how the religious right took over the Republican Party. It’s from Sojourner–published by Jim Wallis, an Evangelical minister who does not agree with the Religious Right; he’s been Jon Stewart’s guest a few times.
How are things in 2012? From a Republican lamenting the fate of his party:
There have always been conservative-minded religious folk in the USA. But many of them avoided politics–belonging to denominations that had suffered in countries with Established Churches. That changed in the late 20th century–and much of that happened in Texas.
And a lot of the motivation was Carter’s decision to cut off funding for Christian schools whose main purpose was actually segregation. That’s really when they started getting political and joined up with the Catholic push to end Roe v Wade. Prior to that, the protestant denominations weren’t particularly interested in the abortion debate.
TV. As Tripolar said, they were there all along. They weren’t organized and they weren’t as visible. Of course, that could be said of a lot of groups.
Even before cable there were public access channels, the UHF channels. That is how Pat Robertson got started. The shows were cheap to make, just put a camera in front of a preacher. All those little old ladies who couldn’t get out to prayer meetings finally learned who to fear, who was the cause of all the problems in the world and where to send their checks.
The Religious Right was mostly a backlash against the Supreme Court’s rulings on various issues from prayer in schools in 1962 to abortion on demand in 1973. The fact that so many issues were going against religious peoples beliefs and they were not even allowed to vote on the issues made alot of people angry enough to want to get involved in politics. The fact that there was so much upheaval in that same era, (Vietnam, Watergate, Crime doubling) made it appear that things were getting worse at the same time as their beliefs and practices were being attacked made it seem important enough to get involved.
Just in the past decade or so have the RR been so partisanly and blatantly Republican in their economic policy. When I go on long drives often I will be searching the left hand side of the dial for public radio and I occasionally hear snippets of religious channels that also inhabit the lower FM frequencies. Several times a trip I will stop on what appears to be someone talking about economic policy only to discover that it is a religious teacher talking about how God supports capitalism. I’m not even joking. I hadn’t noticed this until the last few years.