# Rise of the Religious Right **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 13, 2013, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879 "2013-06-13T04:13:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![IceQube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/dfb087/32.png) [@IceQube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IceQube)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/1 "2013-06-13T04:13:45Z")
Why did the RR rise in the 1980s? Was it the hippies’ growing old and conservative? Or was it their parents? Or what?? ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 4:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/2 "2013-06-13T04:48:52Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/3 "2013-06-13T04:49:00Z")
> [@IceQube](#): > > Why did the RR rise in the 1980s? 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. > [@](#): > > Was it the hippies’ growing old and conservative? > > Or was it their parents? > > Or what?? Neither. The RR’s rank and file were largely the same age as the hippies who were disgusted by their excesses. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 5:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/4 "2013-06-13T05:55:43Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/5 "2013-06-13T11:16:39Z")
> [@IceQube](#): > > Why did the RR rise in the 1980s? > > Was it the hippies’ growing old and conservative? > > Or was it their parents? > > Or what?? 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. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/6 "2013-06-13T11:31:22Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/7 "2013-06-13T11:53:05Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/8 "2013-06-13T12:34:43Z")
> [@](#): > > In the mid-1990s, following Bill Clinton’s second electoral ride to the White House, the vibrancy of Religious Right organizations appeared to be on the wane. Outside the sanctuary of the fundamentalist church, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had become public caricatures of intolerance and zealotry. Pundits in the media and the liberal church deemed the movement torn, shattered, and perhaps dead. > > How then, less than a decade later, has the Religious Right become a powerful sector of the Republican Party, holding veto power over most any GOP maneuver? This [article from 2004](http://sojo.net/magazine/2004/07/right-stuff) 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](http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/): > [@](#): > > The Tea Party, which initially described itself as wholly concerned with debt, deficit, and federal overreach, gradually unmasked itself as being almost as theocratic as the activists from the religious right that Armey had denounced only a few years before. If anything, they were even slightly more disposed than the rest of the Republican Party to inject religious issues into the political realm. According to an academic study of the Tea Party, “[T]hey seek ‘deeply religious’ elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates.” The Tea Party faithful are not so much libertarian as authoritarian, the furthest thing from a “live free or die” constitutionalist. 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. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/9 "2013-06-13T12:35:50Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![shiftless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9c0ed/32.png) [@shiftless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shiftless)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/10 "2013-06-13T12:55:57Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/11 "2013-06-13T13:21:48Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/12 "2013-06-13T13:33:17Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2013, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rise-of-the-religious-right/660879/13 "2013-06-13T13:40:52Z")
[That belief system even has a name!](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology)