While gender-based discrimination and oppression are nothing new abroad, for the past decade the U.S. Christian Right has been aggressively exporting its campaigns against reproductive rights and gay rights to countries around the world. Recently,…
Efforts to mobilize Ugandans to hunt down and imprison Ugandan gays and lesbians received worldwide attention during a three-day Family Life Network conference held March 3-5 in Kampala. But the media haven’t caught up with the rest of the story:…
Last October a chartered bus rolled deep through the South, its passengers college-aged young people drawing inspiration from the Freedom Riders of the 1960s. The black vinyl advertising plastered on the side broadcast the riders’ goals, “Equality…
In 2003, the Christian Right shifted the foreign aid policy of the United States so that it promotes abstinence-only education abroad through HIV/AIDS relief grants channeled to the Christian Right base of the George W. Bush Administration. An…
Refuting the Myths of Neoconservative Roman Catholic Economics
In October 1936, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of moral theology at the Catholic University of America took to the airwaves to defend the New Deal from scurrilous attacks made by another Catholic priest, the demagogic radio personality of…
In the wake of pre-election punditry that the Religious Right is dead and that the so called Culture Wars are over, I wrote a piece for The Public Eye: “The Culture Wars Are Not Over: The Institutionalization of the Christian Right.”1 The year was…
Electoral Lessons from the Religious Right for the Religious Left
The main reason why the Religious Right became powerful is not what most people may think. Some would undoubtedly point to the powerful communications media. Others might identify charismatic leaders, the development of “wedge issues,” or even…
Jeff Sharlet’s new book The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, is in the best tradition of American investigative journalism. Sharlet, a scholar of religion based at New York University, writes with insight, verve and…
As the rightist philosopher Richard Weaver famously said, “ideas have consequences.” And I can tell you from personal experience some of the consequences of at least one idea, that of “natural law.”
The Christian Right Embraces Anti-Immigrant Politics
If the September 2007 Values Voters Summit is anything to go by, the Christian Right is now nearly as worked up about illegal immigration as about abortion and same-sex marriage. At that political gathering—sponsored annually in Washington D.C. by…
After the 2000 presidential campaign, I felt a shock of recognition when I read that the George W. Bush Administration planned to use its “faith-based” funding to support organizations to encourage women, especially welfare recipients, to marry. The…
One of the most remarkable, and least remarked upon, features of the contemporary discussion of faith in public life is that a defining feature of the religious right worldview has filtered deeply into mainstream and even progressive thought. This…
In 2008, ballot initiatives could impact races up and down the ballot, including the Presidential campaign, by elevating an issue and shaping the debate. Dissatisfied voters in particular may see ballot initiatives as a means to fill the leadership…
The Heritage Foundation’s headquarters sits two blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., a symbolic representation of its intimate access to Congress and public policymakers. Heritage’s rise to prominence has paralleled the rise to power of…
“Models of idealized family structure lie metaphorically at the heart of our politics,” writes linguist George Lakoff in his 2002 book Moral Politics. “Our beliefs about the family exert a powerful influence over our beliefs about what kind of…
They pledged to “Bring life to the heart of America and bring the heart of America to Life.” In 72 workshops, five plenaries, and three worship services, more than 500 members of the National Right to Life Committee gathered in Kansas City, Missouri…
The Long, Strange History of R.J. Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism
In their struggle to understand George W. Bush, some liberal intellectuals have looked to the writings of Rousas John Rushdoony, the Armenian-American minister whose championing of a theocratic America influenced some of the nooks and crannies of…
Exposing the Right's Attacks on Mainline Protestantism
In February of the year 2000, in South St. Louis, Missouri, the 300-member Redeemer Evangelical United Church of Christ got a new pastor. His name was George Dohm. Soon after he arrived, he told select members whom he called his “disciples” that…
Dispute within the Christian Right over the Supreme Court’s April 18 decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has led to the apparently inadvertent admission by a Focus on the Family official that the ruling could endanger women by…
Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters
The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in…
Opponents of gay marriage in Massachusetts are misleading in saying that religious liberty is threatened by its legalization in the state, says The Reverend Katherine H. Ragsdale, an Episcopal priest and director of the Somerville, MA think tank…
“Death Should Not Be a Taxable Event.” In August of 2005, this headline appeared on the website of the conservative evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. The accompanying article asked Focus members to persuade their Senators to…
A new report by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates documents the growing threat Christian Right NGOs based at the United Nations pose to international policies supporting women’s reproductive health.
How Religious Conservatives Succeeded and Failed in the 2006 Elections
It was a scant five weeks until the 2006 midterm elections, and photogenic Christian Right leader Tony Perkins gripped the podium and smiled confidently at the 1700 activists gathered at the Values Voters Summit. Perkins predicted that his new…
Running Against Sodom and Osama: The Christian Right, Values Voters, and the Culture Wars in 2006, a newly released report from Political Research Associates, lays out the Christian Right’s midterm electoral strategy of demonizing gay men and…
As George Bush’s approval ratings on the Iraq war and the economy continue their slide downward, the Republican Party is determined to use the gay marriage issue and other punitive anti-gay measures to retain control of Congress in the 2006 mid-term…
How Anti-Abortion Myths Feed the Christian Right Agenda
The anti-abortion movement uses B.A.D science and agenda-driven journals to back up false claims about abortions, in an effort to make abortions illegal.
Commentary
Dover is over, for now. Beginning in 2004, an elected school board attempted to change the Dover, PA, science curriculum so that it cast significant doubt on the evolutionary hypothesis.
The board tried to substitute a textbook,…
“Make no mistake,” wrote Avery Post, the national president of the United Church of Christ in 1982, “the objectives of the Institute on Religion and Democracy are the exact opposite of what its name appears to stand for. The purpose of its leaders…
When Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of the Alabama State Supreme Court, installed a two-and-one-half-ton granite monument to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse in Montgomery in June of 2001, he knew it was a deeply symbolic act. He…
Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education in U.S. Schools
The welfare reform law of 1996, premised on the unproven claim that poor women’s failure to marry is the cause of high rates of family poverty in the United States, promoted an abstinence-only-until-marriage policy that teaches that sex outside the…
Over a Year in the Life of President Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative
It may seem like several lifetimes ago, but it was only on January 29, 2001, when President Bush unveiled a cornerstone of his domestic policy agenda—“charitable choice.” Amidst great fanfare and surrounded by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy,…
Since the United Nations held the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in September 1995, women’s rights and human rights groups in the US and throughout the world have worked to “bring the Beijing platform home.” Adopted by consensus…
A woman’s ability to control her reproductive decisions—her reproductive rights—involves more than her right to safe and legal abortion. Reproductive rights encompass the right to bear and raise children, the right to access adequate reproductive…
For those who have worked to further social justice and democratic values in the United States, the election of November 8, 1994 was a defeat. The election results indicate that the American public has repudiated the liberalism that has been the…
Michael Lienesch
Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1993. 260 pp., plus footnotes and index.
In Redeeming America, Michael Lienesch examines…
Overview and Roots
The Christian Right has shown impressive resilience and has rebounded dramatically after a series of embarrassing televangelist scandals of the late 1980s, the collapse of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and the failed…
An eerie unease hangs in the air in Colorado. For lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, nagging questions pervade everyday life: did the kindly person who just gave me her parking place vote for Amendment 2? Did my landlord vote for the amendment,…
The first version of this article appeared in December 1992, and reviewed the role of Dominionism inside the Christian Right. To understand the Tea Party of today, it helps to see where the trend emerged.
As the United States slides…
Chronology of Events: The 1989-1991 Battles
The National Endowment for the Arts was established in 1965. President Lyndon Johnson said upon signing the enabling legislation for the NEA, “We fully recognize that no government can call artistic…