View From Australia: What happened to the Religious Right?

By Jonathan Bradley

It seems strange to think now in these days of tax-cutting, service-slashing Tea Party Republicans, but in the early years of this century, the most visible face of American conservatism was the Religious Right. That's how it seemed to liberals and Democrats, anyway: the Republican Party had chained itself to an impassioned insurgency of biblical literalists intent on barring schools from teaching evolution, banning women from getting abortions, and rewriting the Constitution to discriminate against gay marriage. President George W. Bush was the feared figurehead of this movement: a born-again true believer who sought counsel from his god when making big political decisions and was possessed with the surety of the blindly faithful.

I've long thought that both the left and the right were duped by Bush's apparent fealty to Christian conservatism. While his administration tossed some bones to his religious supporters with, for instance, foreign aid policies promoting abstinence over condom use, Bush never became the crusader for conservative values the religious right hoped for. As I put it in 2009:

But social conservatism seemed a means only to an end — getting elected ... What did social conservatives gain from the Bush presidency? They held back the tide a bit on stem cells and gay marriage, but as early as two months into Bush’s second term, the country had begun its repudiation of the movement with its clear disdain for Republican attempts to politicize the end-of-life arrangements of Terri Schiavo. Court decisions against the teaching of the supposed creationist silver bullet, Intelligent Design, followed, as did legal gay marriages in a steadily expanding set of states. And Bush didn’t support a constitutional amendment preserving marriage as a heterosexual-exclusive domain. He didn’t create a Supreme Court that would reject Roe. He just soaked up the support of religious conservatives to… well, to what?

That is not to suggest Bush's personal faith was fraudulent, just that he was able to attract social conservative support and give little in return. The religious right's zenith coincided with the 2004 election, when voters in a swathe of states voted for state bans on same sex marriage; the increased turnout probably gave Bush a second term. The movement's demise was swift, however, and by the end of 2005, it had lost its battles over Terri Schiavo and Intelligent Design, and seemed much marginalised as a political force.

Now, suggests a study by Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell, they're back. In fact, they've been back for a while. We just haven't realised it until now:

Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.

[...]

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This is a problem for the Republican party, say Putnam and Campbell. Yesterday in this spot, Emily McCosker discussed a previous Putnam and Campbell study that found the American electorate was more hostile to atheists than they were toward other relatively unpopular groups, like gays or people who'd had a marital affair. According to Putnam and Campbell's new study, Tea Partiers are even more unpopular than atheists. The Christian Right is not particularly popular either; despite that group's political energy in the early '00s, Americans didn't like the direction in which they wanted to take the country then, and they don't like it now.

These were interesting findings, but they seemed a little odd to me. I've met some Tea Party folks, and my impression wasn't that they were Christian conservatives who were pretending to care about government spending because they thought it was more electorally palatable. They didn't seem, however — and Putnam and Campbell confirm they are not — like former independents enraged by government excess. They came across as fairly traditional conservatives who had found some organisational prowess and new energy. (And a penchant for silly costumes.)

So how does my anecdotal experience fit with Putnam and Campbell's data? Ryan Lizza's New Yorker profile of Tea Party-favourite Michele Bachmann offers a clue:

 Liberty is the concept—or at least the word—most resonant with the Republican Party’s Tea Party faction, which Bachmann’s Presidential aspirations depend upon. It is a peculiarity of the current political moment that a politician with a history of pushing sectarian religious beliefs in government has become a hero to a libertarian movement. But Bachmann’s merger of these two strands of ideology is not unique. In fact, the Pew Research Center, in its recent quadrennial study of the American electorate, noted that “the most visible shift in the political landscape” since 2005 “is the emergence of a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives. The long-standing divide between economic, pro-business conservatives and social conservatives has blurred.”

The two wings are now united by the simplest and most enduring strain of conservative ideology: a dislike and distrust of government. Religious and fiscal conservatives have been moving toward this kind of unity for decades, and Bachmann, in her crusades against abortion, education standards, gay marriage—as well as in her passionate opposition to raising the debt ceiling—has always cast government as the villain, often using terms that echo Schaeffer’s post-Roe warning that America risked falling into the hands of “a manipulative and authoritarian élite.”

The Religious Right didn't vanish after its Bush-era disappointments. It has just been steadily morphing into the Right: a political movement centred around a shared view of what America should look like. On average, that movement's preference appears to be for a nation that is more Christian, more white, with low taxes, and spending priorities concentrated on order rather than welfare.

A final note: When looking at distinct, politically influential subsets of society, it's tempting to ask whether they represent America at large, and if they do not, to declare them somehow separate from the mainstream. Conservatives have applied this rubrick to marginalise "coastal elites" for decades. The Tea Party shows how flawed this dichotomy can be. This is a group whose views are not shared by a lot of Americans, but they are not a granular foreign bloc distinct from the mainstream. America, like Walt Whitman, is large. It contains multitudes.

18 August 2011