The Christian Right

Vanguards of a Stable Society?

Brief History of the Christian Right

The Basics

  • After WWI and also WWII, there was a greater emphasis upon conservative values.
  • Was also part of a reaction to increasing theological liberalism and cultural modernism (which were in part blamed for conflicts in the world).
  • Some conservative Christians advocated "Back to the Fundamentals."
  • Two primary texts: The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth (series of twelve pamphlets) and the Scofield Reference Bible (emphasized dispensational premillennialism and the inerrancy of the Bible).
  • The Scofield Reference Bible changed people's attitudes regarding the nature of the biblical text.
  • In the 20th century, dispensationalism (via Scofield) largely shaped the tone of conservative Christian thought in England and the U.S.
  • It became a symbol around which early fundamentalists rallied and centralized. (Everyone used the same text.)

Overview of dispensationalism

Dispensationalism is an approach to biblical interpretation which states that God uses different means of working with people (Israel and the Church) during different periods of history, usually seven chronologically successive periods.  However, the dispensational division of history varies among its adherents from three periods, to four, seven, and eight dispensations.  Seven is the most common.

Dispensational premillennialism (very brief summary):

 

  • J. Darby's dispensationalism greatly influenced fundamentalism.
  • Millennialism: 1,000 year reign of Christ
  • Premillennialism: Christ will return before the 1,000 years and reign in person (in Jerusalem). Resurrection and "New Heaven and New Earth" will not happen until afterward.
  • Loosely follows Cyrus Scofield's seven-fold theme:
  1. Innocence (before the Fall)
  2. Conscience (Fall to the Flood)
  3. Human Government
  4. Promise (Abraham to Moses)
  5. Law (Moses to Christ)
  6. Grace (the church age)
  7. Kingdom (the millennium)
  • Dispensational premillennialism: seven-year long period of the Tribulation precedes the millennial kingdom.
  • Separation of rapture (God comes for saints) from Second Coming (God comes with saints).
  • God will revert back to Old Testament promises (and thus create a state of Jewish dominion over the world)

And that view influences the attitudes and positions that DPs have toward Israel

  • National Association of Evangelicals (late 1940s): abandoned the term "fundamentalist" (it had become pejorative)
  • Identified GOP as the party most likely to take a stance against Communism and offer public support for religion

NAE Founding Convention, 1942

  • Bob Jones, Jr., Jerry Falwell, and others broke with Billy Graham and the NAE to form their own alliances.
  • Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority (1979-1980). Supported by Francis Schaeffer, a prominent theologian and author who disdained secular humanism.
  • The Moral Majority is largely credited with "giving" the Whitehouse to Ronald Reagan.
  • This fracture emphasizes the greater reality that the CR is not a homogenous group, but a general category with differing sub-groupings.

Two Boiling Pots

Some of the cultural context...

Princeton Theology

  • Conservative theological movement (1812-1920) that responded (negatively) to higher biblical criticism
  • With increasing theological liberalism, affiliated professors left to found Westminster Theological Seminary (1920s).
  • Emphasized biblical inerrancy, religious experience, sensitivity to the American experience, and a full employment of Presbyterian Confessions.

The Fundamentals

The Fundamentals advanced three primary positions:

  1. The inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of the Bible
  2. Theology, namely in the defense of the Godhead and the importance of salvation
  3. Practical theology, dealing primarily with outlining how experience should be connected with doctrine (experience divorced from doctrine was dangerous).

Social Engagement

Core concerns

  • Family
  • Educational system
  • Moral order (regulated according to biblical law)
  • American Exceptionalism (and U.S. responsibility)--the U.S. as a model for a restored world
  • International relations

In Active Defense of Our World!

The Christian Right maintains/ed that it must criticize and protest the dominant secular normative in order to bring productive change (and to preserve the stability of the normative order).

 

Sitting back was no longer an option.

Some are even a bit more extreme...

This is anthrax, have a nice death.

 

(Letters, containing white powder, sent to abortion clinics by the Army of God)

When fundamentalism becomes active through divergent/fringe movements (e.g., KKK, Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, Army of God, Lambs of Christ):

 

Militant Christian activists also tend to regard moderate strategies as politically inefficacious. Thus, radicalism is often self-consciously a reaction against the very deliberative moderation that dominates the Christian Right. Such moderation has often bred uncompromising and violent radicalism at the fringes of social movements.

Yet radicalism also tends to encourage further moderation within social movements. This has been especially true in the Christian Right, where movement leaders are trying to escape the long shadow of fundamentalists like Randall Terry and Jerry Falwell. (J. Shields)

Quieter Fundamentalism

Fundamentalist emphasis upon biblical inerrancy has legitimated practices such as this:

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