When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling Culture in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling 

Culture in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 3, 2026

Before you read further, take a few minutes to watch this chilling snapshot of Texas history narrated by Drew McCoy on his Youtube channel, "Genetically Modified Skeptic." What it documents is not just “interesting history.” It is a chilling and largely buried account of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence in Texas—targeting German immigrants whose only real crime was thinking differently.

Many of these settlers were freethinkers, abolitionists, and skeptics of organized religion. For that, they were surveilled, harassed, and in some cases murdered. Their communities were policed not just for political loyalty, but for ideological and religious conformity. This is Texas history—but not the version that makes it into textbooks.

We should be asking why.

Because what this video reveals is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

There’s a moment in the video where the past collapses into the present. What initially appears to be a critique of religion opens into something far more consequential: a genealogy of power. This is not simply about belief systems. It is about how dominant religious ideologies—particularly forms of conservative Protestantism—have historically aligned themselves with political authority to discipline populations, define belonging, and consolidate control over public life.

What begins as theology becomes governance. And what cannot be controlled becomes a threat—in this case, German “freethinkers,” white people stripped of belonging—exposed as not white enough when they refused ideological conformity.

At its core, the video underscores a critical truth: the modern religious right—also known today as “Christian nationalists”—did not emerge out of nowhere. It is the product of long-term, strategic organizing rooted in earlier histories of exclusion, enforcement, and at times, outright violence. From the suppression of dissenting religious communities to contemporary campaigns around “family values,” education, and national identity, the throughline is clear—power is maintained by controlling culture.

And culture is controlled, in large part, through education.

If that sounds abstract, consider what is happening right now in Texas.

At the K–12 level, battles over the State Board of Education’s social studies TEKS standards have become proxy wars over history itself—what counts as legitimate knowledge, whose stories are centered, and which truths are softened, distorted, or erased. The same impulse that once targeted German freethinkers now operates through curricular gatekeeping—policing how young people come to understand democracy, race, religion, and dissent.

At the university level, the struggle over Ethnic Studies—and more recently, the passage and implementation of SB 17 and SB 37—extends this project. Programs, scholarship, and entire fields that interrogate power, colonialism, and racial hierarchy are cast as threats to the state. Faculty governance is restructured. Academic freedom is narrowed. Knowledge itself is disciplined.

The tactics are strikingly familiar:

The manufacturing of moral panic.

 The targeting of educators, intellectuals, and marginalized communities.

The insistence that dominant norms are under siege.

These are not new strategies. They are recycled technologies of power.
And they work.

This is why the video matters now. Because the battles we are witnessing across Texas—over curriculum, DEI, academic freedom, and even the right to teach truthful histories—are not isolated skirmishes. They are the latest expression of a much longer project: the regulation of knowledge in the service of ideology.

In this light, policies like SB 17 and SB 37 do not stand alone. They are part of a broader architecture of governance that seeks to narrow what can be known, said, and taught. This is not simply policy—it is the institutionalization of a worldview.

A worldview that has always required enemies.

What Drew McCoy ultimately offers is not just historical recovery, but a warning. Movements built over generations do not disappear when challenged. They adapt. They rebrand. They relocate their battles—from churches to school boards, from pulpits to legislatures, from doctrine to policy.

And they continue.

So the question is not whether this history is relevant.

It is whether we are willing to confront what it reveals about the present.

Because once you recognize the pattern—the suppression of dissent, the policing of thought, the fusion of faith and state power—it becomes impossible to dismiss what is happening now as accidental or benign.

This is not new.

It is simply returning in a different form.

If this history troubles you, it should. And it should move you—not just to reflection, but to action. The next battleground is already set. The Texas State Board of Education will meet June 22–26, 2026, where proposed, deeply reactionary social studies standards will be debated—standards that will shape what millions of Texas students are allowed to know about their own history. 

Show up. Testify. Bear witness. Refuse the erasure. And stay connected to those organizing on the ground by following Social Studies Advocate on Instagram. The struggle over knowledge is not abstract. It is happening now—and it requires all of us.

The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

Under-statement of the year: 

"We are all reaping what that [anti-science] movement has sown."

Humanity's been through the Dark Ages already.  Now we have to evolve lest we get another four years with this walking disaster and his minions.

Get involved, my friends.  Be bold.  Vote.  

-Angela Valenzuela

The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been haunted by the science denialism of his ultraconservative religious allies.

By Katherine Stewart

Ms. Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”

·       March 27, 2020

President Trump participated in a prayer before speaking at the Evangelicals for Trump kick-off rally at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami in January.Credit...Tom Brenner/Reuters

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”  
By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.

Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. Far from it. Yet none of the benign uses of religion in this time of crisis have anything to do with Mr. Trump’s expressed hope that the country would be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” He could, of course, have said, “by mid-April.” But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”

“I think it would be a beautiful time,” the president said.  

Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. When you’re engaged in a struggle between the “party of life” and the “party of death,” as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don’t need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion and analysis. Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.

In an interview on March 13 on “Fox & Friends,” Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus “hype” and “overreacting.” “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” he said.

When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in-person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was “politically motivated.” Figures like the anti-L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as — you guessed it — “fake news.”

One of the first casualties of fact-free hyper-partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. February 2020 will go down in history as the month in which the United States, in painful contrast with countries like South Korea and Germany, failed to develop the mass testing capability that might have saved many lives. Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well.

Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar’s signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the “Department of Life.” Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.

I shudder as I read this piece by Marilynne Robinson published in The Guardian.  She aptly characterizes religion as profoundly caught up with partisanship politics—even to the point of taking a blind eye to the otherwise obvious cruelty of U.S. border policy that involves the ripping away of children from their parents' bodies if they cross the U.S.-Mexico border and attempt to seek asylum or try to enter the country without papers.

Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

This is a very arrogant and destructive kind of Christianity that needs to open its eyes to its own interest in preserving existing hierarchies of privilege and power even if at the expense of their own humanity as so-called Christians. 

While this may get rationalized by some on the right as "nation building" or "making America great," this is nothing short of a pact with the devil that magically and mysteriously never presents itself lucidly in this way.  

Given that the devil is the master of deception, masquerading as an angel of light, what may seem righteous and good is actually woefully and horribly wrong. Take it from the Bible itself in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, verses 13-15 as follows:

13For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their actions.

Nothing good, my friends, can possibly come out of a policy that brutally tears families apart—either for us as a country or those who are directly affected.  

Speak up, everybody!  Get woke!  Do something!  Call all of those that represent you and speak against this tragedy that is already of unspeakable proportions. 

We are truly in the grips of a profound, moral crisis to which we are all obliged to respond if we ourselves, by our silence or inaction, are not to be complicit. 

And for Christians, please don't let your brand of Christianity fall prey to the lies and distortions of the evil one.  And let's all disavow policies that would make Jesus cry. 

Angela Valenzuela

A moral crisis grips the US border. Yet the religious right is shamefully silent

Marilynne RobinsonThe Christian right is allowing Trump to escape responsibility for the immoral policy of separating children from their parents. Have they no shame?

As a matter of recent policy, agents of the American government take children from their parents’ arms at our southern border. They are kept at separate facilities for indeterminate periods of time. The parents are jailed and the children are put in the care of non-governmental agencies, sometimes in other states. It is hard to imagine that the higher rate of incarceration and the new system of calculated injury to children would not soon overwhelm existing arrangements no matter how many shelters and beds are provided for a frightened, heartbroken population of the very young, whose miseries are intended as a disincentive to future potential border-crossers.

The only nod to shared humanity in this policy is an obvious understanding that a child’s grief is a particularly wrenching experience for a parent, powerful enough – so the designers of the policy clearly believe – to weigh against the threats to that same child’s safety and health and prospects for a better life that bring parents and children to the American border. This effect would be much heightened by any parent’s knowing that the one sufficient comfort for any child in almost all circumstances, and especially one like this, is to be taken into his mother’s or his father’s arms.

I am sure that, among these non-governmental caregivers, good-hearted people can be found at more or less the same rate as in the general population. But the policy in question is new, and the demands it entails are special and grave. The child grief they try to deal with must include mourning, feelings of abandonment, a kind of visceral knowledge of loss that can be quieted sometimes but never dispelled. Especially in the case of the small children, their parents’ arms would have been home and comfort through the whole length of their journey to our border.

What have we become? America is not alone in struggling with the flow of refugees from actual and virtual wars. Desperation and destitution obscure the dignity and worthiness of people when they are dealt with in such numbers. Given the will, some can see them as alien in the most negative sense, and threatening. Nothing is excused by the fact that this is predictable, perhaps inevitable.

But there is nothing inevitable about this recent change in American policy, this “zero tolerance” that separates families by jailing all adults who try to enter the country illegally, as well as some of those who come seeking asylum. Donald Trump, who has called the policy a “horrible law”, though his own administration put it in place, pretends that the Democrats must be forced to change it, when the Democrats are very much out of power, and when he could reverse the policy as readily as it was put in place. By speaking as if it were a political issue he suggests stalemate, deadlock, precluding any thought that the policy will be changed.

It should be obvious that without politics there can be no such thing as representative government, and equally obvious that politics as now understood and practiced is a great threat to our democracy. Partisanship has hardened into empowered irrationality. I read from time to time that liberals are offensively self-righteous, perhaps because we say this kind of thing: people on the right are so utterly certain they own the moral high ground that for them Trump’s lie can have the ring of truth. After all, who but Democrats would do something so patently horrible? Sometimes at least Trump does find just the right word.

 

Partisanship has hardened into empowered irrationality

Party identification at present aligns with important asymmetries in the American population. Relatively speaking, it is Republicans who own guns, who claim to be religious, who resent immigration. This list only hints at the profound differences of worldview that lie behind these partisan divides. There is a generalized fearfulness on the right that makes many people feel they need guns. Their fears are stoked when they are told that immigrants are criminals, rapists and animals. Behind much of this is a spurious Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

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Insinuating an element of demonism into the interpretation of ordinary life justifies the word and the concept “horrible”, and retaliation in kind, whence all those guns. We have patriots who hate the country, Christians who insult and deprive the poor and the stranger. We have a president who, with the decisive support of self-declared conservativeness, acts with contempt for law and custom, and for decency. He has a degree of latitude, where his base is concerned, that is incomprehensible to those whose mental landscape is not demon-haunted. His moral shabbiness is a minor thing, they say, over against the forces of evil that assail him.

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Can a movement that defines itself by its vehement rejection of American culture ever really wish or work for civility and accommodation? Might not such a movement resist solutions to social problems, for example gun violence and poverty, because these things confirm a view of the culture that is central to their rejection of it? Do they place any value on America’s good name? Questions like these arise from the social and political consequences of the years in power of the so-called Christian right. They are uniquely Trump’s prop and stay. Will they let him escape his responsibility for a policy that even he denounces in moral terms, and allow him to keep it in place? The question cannot be avoided – have they no shame?

• Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist.

According to this piece authored by R. G. Ratcliffe in the Texas Monthly, here's what's happening in Texas right now within the Republican Party: "a loose coalition of educators, business people and moderate Republicans are attempting to challenge this Empire—mostly Patrick—in the Republican primaries."

And the Empire headed by Gov. Abbott strikes back...  Read on.

-Angela

The Empire Strikes Back, Texas Republican Style

By

R.G. Ratcliffe

Date

Feb 9, 2018

Abbott and Patrick are bringing the power of incumbency to bear against a Rebellion of educators, business leaders and moderate Republicans.

The battle for Republican power in Texas is taking a familiar story line as the primary elections draw near. Think of the religious fundamentalists and no-tax tea partiers as the Empire in control of a state government, helmed by Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and advised by Attorney General Ken Paxton. But recently, a Rebellion formed, and a loose coalition of educators, business people and moderate Republicans are attempting to challenge this Empire—mostly Patrick—in the Republican primaries.

Now, it is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Bathroom Bill was destroyed last year, voting in the primaries begins February 20. Fueled by a Death Star of money, the Empire is striking back.
One group in the Rebellion has been the Texas Association of Business, which played a key role in defeating legislation to limit public bathroom access to the gender listed on a person’s birth certificate. The bill was a swipe at transgender people, and business leaders across Texas worried that such discrimination would dissuade corporations and their employees from relocating to Texas. Patrick pushed the bathroom bill, and Abbott added it to the agenda of a special session. Both were thwarted. 

During a speech at a Texas Public Policy Foundation gathering on Thursday, Patrick lashed out at the Texas Association of Business. Without specifically naming the group, he said, “Just because a business group has a business title in front of it doesn’t necessarily mean they were being run by conservative Republicans.”

Patrick also sniped at moderate Republicans who are pushing primary voters to elect “responsible Republicans.” He said a responsible Republican is a conservative Republican. “When I hear people today who criticize the conservatives who led this state for the last fifteen years, it’s one thing when they’re on the other side, but sometimes when it comes from our own team, I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want the state to be in the hands of moderates, liberals, progressives, because if it is, we’ll be California and the country will be in trouble.”

Along with the saber-rattling, Patrick is spending money like a man who is worried about the Rebellion. Patrick is facing a primary opponent, Rockwall city council member Scott Milder, who in any other set of circumstances would be considered an also-ran. But the education community has rallied behind Milder as a supporter of public education and an opponent of private school vouchers. Patrick is countering by spending $5 million on television advertising when Milder has just $40,000 in the bank.

Meanwhile, Abbott has tossed aside Ronald Reagan’s 11^th Commandment to never speak ill of another Republican. Abbott so far has endorsed challengers to incumbent Republican House members Sarah Davis of Houston, Lyle Larson of San Antonio, and Wayne Faircloth of Galveston. Abbott promised last year to work against any legislator who thwarted his agenda, and his endorsements are making good on that promise. Susanna Dokupil, who has Abbott’s endorsement in her race against Davis, worked as an assistant solicitor general for Abbott when he was state attorney general. Abbott is spending $161,000 on television commercials against Davis and on behalf of Dokupil.

And in an apparent attempt to suppress the vote of educators through intimidation, Paul Bettencourt, a state senator and Patrick ally, asked Paxton to rule that school district spending to bolster voter turnout was a violation of state law and the state Constitution. Paxton, in a non-binding opinion, wrote that using school buses to shuttle people to polling places, unless there was an educational purpose, would likely violate the law because it would serve “no public purpose.”

Empower Texans is using Paxton’s ruling in a letter sent out statewide to school district employees, seeking “whistleblowers” to report districts, principals or teachers who use public resources to help anyone vote. “Some school districts across the State of Texas are vowing to illegally misuse school district recourses [sic] to electioneer for liberal candidates in upcoming elections,” said the letter by Empower Texans general counsel Tony McDonald.

Although Empower Texans portrays itself as a grassroots organization, it is a right wing advocacy group. It’s primary funding since January 2017 has come from just four families: Midland oilman Tim Dunn ($1.2 million); Cisco fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks ($1.2 million); Midland oilman Kyle Stallings ($278,000); and Chambers County oilman Mayes Middleton ($200,000). All are religious conservatives. Middleton, with Abbott’s endorsement, is the Republican challenging Faircloth.

Educators across Texas are responding to the McDonald letter by creating their own whistle blowing Twitter hashtag: #blowingthewhistle. Former State Board of Education member Thomas Ratliff is among those sharing the hashtag.

There are approximately 705,000 public school employees in the state, and if they turn out in the Republican primary, they can impact the results. Because the Texas Democratic Party has been unable to win a statewide election in more than two decades, many elections in the state are decided in the Republican primary. House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate, business-oriented Republican, recently wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle urging people to vote in the Republican primary.

In fact, less than half the people who voted Republican for governor that November had cast a ballot in the GOP primary just eight months earlier. In other words, about 1.4 million Texans who felt compelled to vote Republican in the general election did not take part in choosing the Republican nominees.

Small primary turnout creates a disconnect between the 28 million people who live in Texas and the small number of us entrusted with its leadership. Low turnout in primaries gives elected officials an excuse to focus on pleasing a narrow set of voters, interest groups and priorities. In fact, at the end of last year’s legislative session, I lamented the fact that there had been more urgency surrounding so-called bathroom bills (which were not a priority of mine) than fixing our school finance system (which was a priority of mine). But many in the state Capitol felt greater pressure from primary voters to act on misguided bathroom proposals than on the more difficult work of improving the way we fund public education.

Straus is helping to raise money for a political committee called the Associated Republicans of Texas (ART), a group founded in the seventies with the goal of turning the Legislature Republican. But the group always has focused more on fiscal concerns than social issues.

In one of those strange bedfellows of politics, Empower Texans is criticizing one of ART’s leading donors—Houston beer distributor John Nau—for donating $5,000 to the reelection campaigns of both Davis and Faircloth. Nau is Abbott’s campaign treasurer and gave $100,000 to ART. “While Gov. Greg Abbott has taken the extraordinary action of endorsing against liberal Republican incumbent lawmakers in the March 6th primary, his campaign treasurer is working to undermine his efforts behind the scenes,” wrote Empower Texans capitol writer Brandon Waltens.

It also is notable that the Republican Party of Texas executive committee last month voted to censure Straus for blocking Patrick’s bathroom bill from being considered in the House. Straus had said the bill was bad for business and that he did not want to have on his conscience the possible suicide of a teenager having a sexual identity crisis. Because Straus already has announced his plans to retire, the censure measure looked like the party was kicking him on his way out the door. But as Scott Braddock, editor of the political newsletter Quorum Report noted:

Yes, censuring Straus was about more than just a farewell kick by the right wing. It was about freezing Straus to limit the aid he could provide the Rebellion. Think Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. To be continued….

RENDER TO CAESAR: Some Baptists feel ‘caught in the middle’

Hmmm. A new awakening or re-awakening of the religious right? Quote: "“It’s evangelicals reclaiming their birthright and their historical legacy as reformers, in the 19th-century sense of the term,” he said, noting that evangelicals in 19th-century America and Britain often were at the forefront of progressive political movements. They led fights against slavery, for women’s rights and for child welfare, for instance." Read on.

-Angela

RENDER TO CAESAR: Some Baptists feel ‘caught in the middle’

By Robert Marus / Associated Baptist Press / 6/22/07

It may look dead, but it’s really just evolving—even though its members might not like that word. And it may be developing into something its founders wouldn’t recognize.

That’s what some experts say about the future of the Religious Right as a political movement. And even many very conservative Southern Baptists are part of the trend.

The recent death of Virginia Baptist pastor and political activist Jerry Falwell put an exclamation point on months’ worth of media attention to the ever-more-evident fissures within conservative Christian ranks over how to proceed in secular politics.

Although his influence had waned in recent years, Falwell widely was regarded as a godfather of the Religious Right. Historians of religion and politics regard his launch of the Moral Majority in 1979 as seminal in unifying conservative Christians as a voting bloc.

But now Falwell is dead, and his peers in the “Big Three” of the Religious Right—Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family head James Dobson—are advanced in years.

The movement they launched, meanwhile, seems to have passed the apex of its power. In 1994, Christian conservatives helped elect a Republican Congress dominated by their own kind; it stayed in power more than a decade. They twice helped provide the margin of victory for a president—George W. Bush—who not only spoke their theological language, but also provided at least lip service to their favorite legislative goals. And they, with the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, finally were within reach of having a reliable socially conservative majority on that powerful body.

But Democrats won the 2006 congressional elections handily, and the current top contenders for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination don’t inspire in Religious Right leaders the same kind of trust that Bush did—to put it mildly.

At the same time, many younger evangelicals are rethinking which issues influence their voting. Some are beginning to assert that protecting the environment, supporting international human rights and avoiding war are “pro-life” issues just as much as efforts to stop abortion. And polls show homosexuality and government-sanctioned prayers don’t get young evangelicals nearly as exercised as those old “wedge issues” do their elders.

Is it time to break out the dirges and the black veils for a political movement?

“No,” says Barry Hankins, an expert on Christian conservatives who teaches at Baylor University, noting it’s not the first time some prematurely have declared the Religious Right dead.

“It came up in about 1989 or so when Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority,” he recalled. Another flurry of eulogies for the Religious Right appeared in the press in the late 1990s, after the Moral Majority’s successor—the Christian Coalition—began to flounder.

Several years ago, Hankins proposed the notion the Christian Right wasn’t dying; it was maturing. Rather than existing as a single, highly visible organization, it was becoming a movement with diverse influences.

Such maturation could be happening to the Christian conservative movement again, Han-kins said—but it might end up looking fundamentally different as a result.

“I think you have this new kind of wider segment of evangelicals who are publicly oriented and politically conscious, but they’re not tied to the old Christian Right machinery,” he said.

Randall Ballmer, a Columbia University historian and expert in American evangelicalism, agreed. “The younger folks are worried about the environment, they’re worried about climate change, they’re worried about global warming,” he said.

Younger evangelicals also focus on international human rights, poverty and healthcare. Southern Baptist mega-celebrity Rick Warren, for instance, has adopted alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa and other Third World concerns as a major emphasis of his California church’s ministry.

The divide between the Religious Right power structure and new leaders who want to adopt a broader set of causes as core emphases has been laid bare by well-publicized intramural battles in recent months.

One was a long-simmering dispute over the chief public-policy officer for the National Association of Evangelicals. In March, a group of conservative Christian luminaries—including Dobson and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council—sent a letter to NAE board members asking them to rein in or fire Richard Cizik, the organization’s vice president for governmental affairs. Dobson and his colleagues were upset with Cizik for his outspokenness on confronting global warming.

He and other environmentalist Christians have argued that, if the scientific consensus is right that global warming is real and human-induced, millions of the world’s poor people’s lives and livelihoods are threatened by rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. Therefore, Cizik has said, drastic action to reverse global warming’s effects is necessary.

Not so fast, said the letter writers, who echoed the view of many pro-business conservatives that whether global warming is human-caused still is an open question—as is the question of whether drastic efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would end up having a more detrimental economic effect than climate change itself.

Just as importantly, they argued, Cizik was “using the global-warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children. In their place has come a preoccupation with climate concerns that extend beyond the NAE’s mandate and its own statement of purpose.”

They released the missive to news outlets in an effort to mount a public-relations campaign against Cizik, but NAE board members rebuffed the ouster attempt.

Ballmer hopes a broadening of the evangelical agenda reflects the movement coming back to its past.

“It’s evangelicals reclaiming their birthright and their historical legacy as reformers, in the 19th-century sense of the term,” he said, noting that evangelicals in 19th-century America and Britain often were at the forefront of progressive political movements. They led fights against slavery, for women’s rights and for child welfare, for instance.

“What I hope is happening is that evangelicals are beginning to wake up to that, to recognize that evangelical activism in the 19th century—particularly in the antebellum period—was oriented toward those on the margins of society,” he said.

Whether it’s a departure from the Religious Right or an evolution of it, the trend is evident even within the Southern Baptist Convention. Some blogging Southern Baptist pastors have included, among their complaints about the SBC leadership, critiques of its close relationship with the right wing of the Republican Party.

“While I’ve been a card-carrying member of the so-called ‘Religious Right’ since I first voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1996 Presidential primaries, I’m sick and tired of the Religious Right,” said Texas pastor Benjamin Cole, in a post on his blog (baptistblog.wordpress.com) written prior to Falwell’s death.

“I can no longer stand to see Southern Baptist leaders pander to Republican politicians, and I’m ready for a man to occupy the White House who won’t shun evangelical voters on the one hand, or flirt with them on the other.”

Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, said merely opposing legalized abortion doesn’t make someone 100 percent pro-life. For example, messengers to the SBC annual meeting watered down an already-mild resolution about global warming after some objected the resolution encouraged too much government involvement in the issue.

“Our predecessors in the Southern Baptist Convention, the most ardent supporters of the conservative resurgence, somehow see global warming and … ecological concerns among young evangelicals (as) somehow apart from any Christian concern,” he said. “But they think the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is very much an issue of religious liberty.”

Cole said pastors like him find a dissonance in such views. “I think there’s a lot of young, emerging, arising—whatever you want to call it—evangelicals who watch that and go, ‘There is no coherent political philosophy of the Religious Right. There is no unifying theme except for support for the Republican Party,’” he said.

Paul Littleton, an Oklahoma pastor who operates the “Caught in the Middle” blog (middlekid.typepad.com) said in a December post that he—a Republican—is nonetheless tired of evangelicalism’s close association with the GOP.

“I’m conflicted because I am a part of an American evangelical Christianity that is almost entirely and uncritically in bed with the Republican Party—who will support them as long as they support capitalism and oppose abortion and homosexual marriage. Do that, and we’ll vote for you, we’ll go to war with you, we’ll let you spend the country into oblivion, and we’ll be silent when you make sexual advances toward minor pages. And I don’t go for any of that stuff,” said Littleton, pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Sapulpa, a suburb of Tulsa.

Baylor’s Hankins said the SBC’s leaders getting closely involved with the Republican Party was an understandable part of the “ebb and flow” of Southern Baptist life.

“I think part of what we’ve seen over the last quarter-century is that, as the Southern Baptist conservative movement gained ascendancy and gained control of the denomination, it was a heady experience to be aligned with political power. But, on the other hand, it was genuinely a way of having an influence in the culture,” he said.

“And as these things go, the avenue to Southern Baptists exercising influence in the culture can also work the other way around, with the Republican Party utilizing the power and influence of Southern Baptists for Republican ends. So, you had a nice symbiotic relationship there.”

Cole hopes his generation is beginning to “regard partisan politics as the ‘tar baby.’ You know, you can punch at it, but you’re going to get stuck in it,” he said.

“As a Southern Baptist, I don’t want to wake up any more in the morning and look on the pillow beside me and find an elephant.”



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