Throughout my semester of research and exploration of the topic of Christianity in the south, politics emerged at every turn. As I examined various aspects of the intermingling of southern life and Christianity and as I delved into how Christianity shapes southern culture, I found that there was an unspoken political discourse richly entwined with the Christian faith in the minds of many southerners. Paul Harvey has noted that academic scholarship in the field of post-Civil War religion in the south is “still in its adolescence” (Harvey 387). This study is an attempt to add to this growing field and to answer the questions of how Christianity and politics became so inextricably linked in the south and how this political undercurrent manifests itself in southern Christianity today.
In order to understand how it is that Christianity became inextricably linked with politics in the southern mind, we must trace back to the earliest European settlements, where Protestantism already “exercised dominant political power in the south” (Lienesch 111). Initially, this Protestantism was vehemently in support of the separation of church and state as is evident by protestant separatist James Madison’s Bill of Rights provision that prevented the establishment of a state church in the new America (Lienesch 111). With the antebellum south, however, came a pervasive politico-religious agenda. Mid-nineteenth century southerners saw their richly religious culture as “the last bastion of Christian civilization in America,” and took threats to this culture as threats against Christianity (Wilson, “Lost Cause” 207). Lienesch notes, “By 1861 any separation between church and state had all but disappeared, as southern clergymen in large numbers supported the Confederacy, describing the impending war as a crusade for righteousness” (Lienesch 112). Southerners thus saw the Civil War as a righteous Christian war and after their loss reacted to progressive pressure from the north with much resistance.
The history of the south is a history of conflict between tradition and progress that largely results from this progressive pressure following the Civil War (Robinson). The result of southerners’ resistance of progress was the religion of the lost cause, which Lienesch describes as “the combination of Christian and Confederate imagery to reiterate the righteousness of the war” (Lienesch 112). Southerners believed that God was on their side during the Civil War, and they reconciled their loss by turning to the religion of the lost cause and a strong emphasis on personal morality (Robinson). These allowed southerners to view the war as righteous and themselves as God’s chosen people, who had lost the war due to their own personal moral failings. The result was a culture that arduously valued personal morality and re-invented their history and their traditions in order to keep them alive; history and traditions anchored in the evangelical-leaning protestant churches of the south (Robinson). As Applebome notes in Dixie Rising, “it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the true myth of the south was born” (Applebome 126). It wasn’t until southern culture had to be preserved that it really came alive (Robinson). Glenn Feldman notes that “religion in the south has, far more often than not, been a force for convention, tradition, continuity, the status quo: in a word, conservatism” (Feldman 288). The status quo society to which Feldman refers was, if not invented by the church, then certainly upheld by the church in the post Civil War south. Feldman equates the status quo society of the south with hard right politics, and says that “the white south has never really changed politically, and in the way that politics is a reflection of society, it has not changed fundamentally either” (Feldman 293). Whether or not Feldman’s statement holds true today, it certainly holds truth for the early years following the Civil War in the south and through the early nineteenth century.
The politically hard right status quo society did not just encompass evangelical Protestants in the post-war south; all of society was wrapped up in the church. Paul Harvey, referencing Ted Ownby’s Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920, notes that “although evangelicalism was never as all-pervasive as the believers hoped, ‘people who rarely attended church and who lived far outside the evangelicals’ moral code nevertheless found ways to express their belief in the virtues of the dominant religion’… Evangelicals (in the late nineteenth century), Ownby contends, moved from church discipline to disciplining society as a whole” (qtd. Harvey 395). As Harvey points out, the religion of the lost cause and strict personal morality reached its arms out from the church doors and wrapped them around southern communities, embracing them with a fervor that would not soon let go. The religion of the lost cause became the southern civil religion, and established a distinctively southern set of values and way of life that was based in moralistic Puritanism and traditional Protestant Christianity. Southern civil religion provided southerners with an identity in the nation and a basis for a public moral code during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, but southern identity was about to change (Wilson, “Lost Cause” 209). The advent of the late twentieth century brought drastic political and religious change to the region.
The second half of the twentieth century were tumultuous years, and the dust had to settle before religious historians and sociologists could really figure out what had happened. Prior to the dramatic shift that accompanied the second half of the twentieth century, the increasingly evangelical and pro-segregation Democratic Party provided the political wherewithal for wealthy southern whites to pursue their political agendas through the mid-twentieth century, during which time the south remained solid blue (Hallen, Flynt 495). However, a dramatic shift in southern politics occurred in the late twentieth century, following the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of moderate anti-segregation leaders in the Democratic Party in the 1970s (Bullock 216). White Southern Democrats or “Dixiecrats,” Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Bill, were alienated from the Democratic Party as southern Blacks solidified their allegiance to the new Democrats (Bullock 216). This shift of party allegiance across the southern electorate during the second half of the twentieth century had much to do with race and the 1954 Brown v Board of Education desegregation Supreme Court ruling (Flynt 496). It also had to do with suburbanization, economic and class changes, and new leadership in both parties (Flynt 495). Many southern political leaders shifted their allegiances away from the Democratic Party. One such leader was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, whose 1964 political shift to the Republican Party estranged white southerners further from the Democratic Party and helped to cement the dividing lines of the southern electorate (Hallen, Bullock 216). Thus, into the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, the GOP was seen as the greatest political ally to southern civil religion and the southern way of life, not to mention southern evangelicals.
While southern states were changing color politically, turning from blue to red, southern evangelical Christianity became more and more conservative. Southern evangelicals started the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s with the goal of returning to traditional southern family values, the values of the southern civil religion. Often during this period, conservative southerners and protestant evangelicals would unite to support political agendas including Prohibition, Sunday closing campaigns, Jim Crow laws, economic reform, school prayer, and outlawing the teaching of evolution in public schools, and to oppose other political issues such as the public financing of private schools, abortion and sex education, homosexuality, and women’s liberation (Lienesch 112, Flynt 499). The shift of southern politicians combined with the personal morality issues of the culture wars led southern Christians to feel that the GOP best represented their political interests in the late twentieth century. Republican politicians embraced the political agenda of southern Christians and the south became solid red (Hallen). Southern evangelical churches were a large part of why the south became reliably Republican. “Evangelical Christians… virtually turned their churches into Republican precinct headquarters, registering new voters, distributing voter guides, and warning delinquent members who neglected to vote that they were partly responsible for murdering fetuses and destroying the moral fiber of this country” (Flynt 499). There was a convenience to this relationship that both the southern churches and the GOP benefitted from. In the reconstruction south, the church had provided communities with social networks and places of political organization; in the late twentieth century south, the GOP now provided the church with means to political ends and the church provided the GOP with a core voter base (Hallen, Robinson). This has many modern-day ramifications, which will be explored later. The social gospel, as southern civil religion has been called, defined the post-war south socially, religiously, and politically. However, the social gospel was not the only gospel that took root in the post-Civil War south; evangelical fundamentalism took a stronghold that must be explored if we are to understand how Christian and political roads have converged in the south since the Civil War.
Fundamentalism has been a harbinger of political conservatism in the south since the early twentieth century. Fundamentalism grew out of southern Protestant evangelicalism, which Charles Reagan Wilson said “came to dominate the religious life of southerners… and served as an unofficially established religious tradition, powerful in worldly resources, institutional reach, moral authority, and cultural hegemony” (Wilson, “Overview” 2). This deep and wide influence of protestant evangelicalism combined with the pervasive southern civil religion led to a climate in which some Christians felt that the gospel was being distorted and misrepresented, and that they needed to branch off from and resist these mainstream patterns of Christianity (Mathewson). A return to the fundamentals of the faith was desired, and a theology that was obsessed with “doctrinal exactitude and correct belief” in the supreme authority of the Bible emerged (Hill 2). Thus southern evangelical fundamentalists were born. George Marsden has defined a fundamentalist as “an evangelical who is angry about something… who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with secular humanism” (Marsden 1). Marsden provides a clear articulation of how southern evangelical fundamentalism developed in opposition to liberal theology and to cultural secularism.
Initially and for most of its history, the fundamentalist movement remained apolitical. Early leaders such as Jerry Falwell “insisted that the church separate itself from politics and concentrate instead on the winning of souls” (Lienesch 113). In early fundamentalist churches in the south, politics took a back seat to evangelism. Hill articulates this well: “Organizing politically was simply not an item in the divine calling. Thus for half a century or more, the movement was separatist and contrarian. To most, there was no use, nor any faithfulness, in working to improve things; the Lord’s second advent would take care of that” (Hill 2). Hill outlines well the fundamentalist theology that led adherents of the movement to retract from society from the time of the rise of the movement in the 1920s until the 1970s, when fundamentalism gained national attention and became politically active. Hill describes this shift as a shift from a theology of retreat to a theology of conquest (Hill 2). Hill suggests that the catalyst for this shift was “the vacuum in public moral life that has resulted from radical polarization and the cultural conquest by relativist and secularist mentalities” (Hill 3). Fundamentalism is always reactive (Mathewson). The protestant evangelical fundamentalism that emerged on the national stage in the late twentieth century was reacting to the growing prominence of secularism in America and had switched their mode of reaction from a reaction of defense to a reaction of offense. Their offense was and is based upon one of the primary tenets of fundamentalism, that of presuppositionalism.
One of the clearest and most consistent tenets of evangelical fundamentalism in the American south is that of presuppositionalism, which maintains that the Bible is both authoritative and self-evidently true (Mathewson). The implication of presuppositionalism is that every sphere of life is guided by the authoritative word of the Bible, including social morality and politics (Mathewson). For much of the twentieth century, mainline Protestants aligned with the secular political consensus, which in the south was guided primarily by southern civil religion, thereby squeezing out conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who resisted the secular consensus because it did not adhere to Biblical teaching (Marsden 94). The late twentieth century saw personal morality come into the political spotlight, giving evangelical fundamentalists issues to rally around; they had plenty to say about personal morality. Leaders like Falwell, who had initially called for the separation of believers from society and politics, began ‘exhorting’ their followers to take political action regarding issues such as abortion, gay marriage, gun ownership, and the roles of women (Lienesch 113). The religious-political coalition that organized around these and other issues became known as the Religious Right, and manifested itself in organizations such as the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority. For the Religious Right, the separation of church and state was secondary to the agenda of “setting evangelical moral standards for the nation,” (Marsden 97). Hill poignantly notes that this new agenda took precedence over southern identity; for evangelical fundamentalists, being Christian was far more important than being southern, and thus organizations such as the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority took on a national, rather than a southern, scope of influence (Hill 3). Thus, with the rise of southern evangelical fundamentalists, religion and politics became more entwined in the south (and in the nation) than they had ever been. As a result, tensions arose in the south regarding the separation of church and state.
In the south, history and tradition are valued, so it follows that debate over the separation of church and state would look to history for answers. When it comes to the issue of the separation of church and state, in the south there are essentially two sides: fundamentalists and evangelicals who maintain that the founding era and the Constitution were based on evangelical principles, and the secularists or adherents of southern civil religion who do not. Historically speaking, the latter are correct; “an evangelical discourse about the sacred character of the founding” did not emerge until the 1830s (Noll 185.) However, when dealing with religion and politics, history is sometimes silenced, and in this case, the ramifications of southern evangelicals holding onto a view of the founding of the nation as an evangelical one are important despite the history. It is true that the founding occurred in an overwhelmingly protestant atmosphere. However, this Protestantism was not of the same theology as modern evangelicalism and in fact “differed substantially from modern evangelical conservative Protestantism” (Noll 185, 191). Thus, a conflict emerges that cannot be easily reconciled. Noll articulately outlines this conflict: “The founders’ guidelines for religion and society came out of a situation that was much more theistic than some modern liberals admit, but also out of a situation that was much less explicitly Christian than modern evangelicals wish it had been. The founders wanted much less specific religious influence on politics than contemporary evangelical conservative Protestants seek, but they looked to religion for much more support for republican morality than opponents of contemporary evangelicals can tolerate” (Noll 200). Regardless of the religious environment in which the nation was founded, the majority of the tension surrounding separation of church and state throughout most of post-Civil War southern history has been rooted in evangelical agendas based on presuppositionalist views of the Bible.
The issue of the separation of church and state split the southern protestant church into two main branches: one expressing social liberalism and wanting to remain a part of the larger American culture and the other a more conservative one that resisted the chaos and confusion that came with the changing of the times. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 became a symbolic battle between these two schools of thought. The trial surrounded John Scopes, a Tennessee high school science teacher, who agreed to be arrested and prosecuted for breaking Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools. Scopes was a pawn in the great battle of theologies that was raged between the conservative fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan and the ACLU lawyer Clarence Darrow. Though the state of Tennessee upheld the law, Darrow won the culture battle, and the world ridiculed the fundamentalists who defended the law based upon the Bible. In Marsden’s words, the Scopes Monkey Trial “thrust fundamentalism into worldwide attention and brought about its decline as an effective national force” (Marsden 60). The Scopes Monkey Trial is a prime example of evangelical fundamentalists prioritizing presuppositionalism above the separation of church and state. As a result of the trial and the cultural ridicule that followed, fundamentalists shut themselves away from the secular world. The Scopes Trial was the beginning of the south recognizing and responding to evangelical fundamentalism, and southern Protestantism has been split between fundamentalists and mainstream protestants ever since.
We have established that there is a rich political history of Christianity in the south that has led to the linkage of politics and religion in the southerner’s mind. From the rise of personal morality and the religion of the lost cause, the southern civil religion and the hard right status quo society, from the branching off of evangelical fundamentalists and the tension surrounding the separation of church and state, political discourse pervades the history of Christianity in the south. But what are the ramifications of this for today’s society? What are the consequences for today’s southerners and for today’s Christians? The political undercurrent of Christianity in the south manifests itself today in ways that are even more compelling than the manifestations of the past.
There are many interesting things happening in southern Christianity today. Protestant evangelical theology is leaning more and more toward fundamentalism and fundamentalist denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) are stronger than ever. Meanwhile, mainline protestant churches are losing members as their congregations age. The south is not as homogenously dominated by political conservatism today as it once was, but the modern south is a product of its history and we have seen that in southern history, Christianity and politics go hand-in-hand. In order to understand the new political movements happening among southern Christians today, we must first observe how Christianity is changing.
Southern protestant evangelicals have become fundamentalists in that they have adopted theologies that are exclusivist, value “doctrinal exactitude and correct belief,” are presuppositionalist and value particular teachings above others (Hill 2). These characteristics do not differentiate the new southern fundamentalists from any other Christian fundamentalists; what does differentiate them is that the new southern fundamentalist is politically active and very much a part of society, rather than being withdrawn from society. Hill states, “What makes the new phenomenon of southern fundamentalism distinctive is that its people have always been at home in the world. They are old-style southern evangelicals who have on certain issues shifted to align themselves with the recently-emergent more conservative movements” (Hill 3). The shift from traditional mainline Protestantism to modern fundamentalism has also been a result of southerners’ disillusionment with traditional southern civil religion. Martin notes, “fundamentalism…provided a new basis for community for people who had lost faith in the Lost Cause and could no longer treat its icons as the basis for solidarity” (Martin 3). Fundamentalist evangelicalism has taken on the role of the traditional Protestant church in the south.
Politics have played a large role in this shift from southern evangelicalism to a more conservative fundamentalism. The political whirlwind surrounding the issues of the mid-twentieth century culture wars has been resurrected, with harder-right conservative Christians demanding the restoration of ‘family values.’ Issues including abortion, homosexuality and marriage, and sexual education have motivated activism among conservative southern Christians. Secular America has responded to this deepened political conservatism among southern Christians in the late twentieth century by “eradicating evangelicalism from academia and public life altogether,” thereby freeing society of the “repressive features of evangelical ideology” (Marsden 99). As a result, fundamentalist evangelicals in the south have either closed themselves off from secular society completely or become even more politically active, seeking legislative reform of social morality.
Today, the Religious Right inspires visions of cultural domination in those who fear it. People are aware of the evangelical-fundamentalist leanings of the modern leaders of the Religious Right, and some are uncomfortable with the idea of the Religious Right Christianizing America, especially when it comes to issues of personal morality such as abortion and gay marriage (Smith 92-93). The political agenda of contemporary evangelical conservatives inspires negative reactions in many Americans, ranging from distaste to outright fear. In Christian America: What Evangelicals Really Want, Christian Smith refers to Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman’s 1984 Holy Terror, in which they claim that evangelicals are waging a “guerilla war on our private thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, on our nation’s timeless values and historic freedoms… with an arsenal of advanced hardware aimed at the most fragile part of our humanity” (qtd. Smith 92). Smith also references an ACLU article; “the new evangelicals are a radical anti-Bill-of-Rights movement that seeks not to conserve traditional American values, but to overthrow them” (qtd. Smith, 92). Smith asserts that these fears of domination are largely unfounded as he evaluates the role of evangelicals in politics today. He asserts, “The vast majority of ordinary evangelicals, even those animated by Christian Right issues, clearly disavow aspirations to (cultural) domination” (Smith 99). Rather than operating as a homogenous conglomerate with the goal of complete cultural domination, a “disciplined, charging army,” as it has been called, Smith says that today’s Religious Right functions “like a divided and hesitant extended family” (Smith 128). Over the course of over 200 interviews, Smith found that “for every one evangelical interviewed who expressed support for a Christian Right leader or organization, there was another evangelical who expressed outright opposition” (Smith 122). In essence, there is debate among evangelical Christians as to what the role of Christians in politics should be. Smith asserts that most evangelical Christians feel an ambivalence between the idea that the political realm is an effective means of creating positive social change and exerting Christian influence on society and the contrary idea that the world’s social problems can only be solved through personal evangelism and the spiritual transformation of individuals and that therefore Christians should focus on evangelism rather than political activism (Smith 115). Smith’s findings illuminate why it is that among southern evangelicals and fundamentalists there can be much dispute regarding the role of Christians in politics. However, the loudest voices are often the only ones heard, and the loudest voices in the Religious Right today are those who passionately feel that they have the responsibility to initiate Christian social change through political action.
The leaders of the Religious Right who are dedicated to a vision of a Christian America are for the most part adherents of Christian Dominion theology and Christian Reconstructionism. Mark Juergensmeyer defines Dominion Theology as “the position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things, including secular politics and society” (Juergensmeyer 27). Christian Reconstructionists take aggressive political action to further the Dominionist idea of asserting God’s law over all aspects of life. They support the formation of a theonomy, a political state where God’s Biblical law rules (Mathewson). Politically active Reconstructionists in the United States claim that they do not want to legislate morality; that rather they desire to maintain public standards for conduct. However, they desire that these public standards for conduct would be Biblically based (Juergensmeyer 28).
The political goals of Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists, i.e. modern Christian fundamentalists, are pursued by organizations such as the Christian Coalition, which originally grew out of southern evangelicalism. The organizations of the Religious Right in general, and the Christian Coalition in particular, anchor themselves politically in the Republican Party (Bullock 217-218). Charles Bullock and Mark Smith note this in their essay “The Religious Right and Electoral Politics in the South.” They observe, “Republicans seek to encourage voting among Christian conservatives through use of targeted mail and telephone calls… The Christian Coalition, although purporting to be nonpartisan, has distributed voting guides designed to make Republican candidates attractive to Religious Right fundamentalists at churches attended by Christian conservatives. The activities of figures such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James A. Dobson of Focus on the Family often parallel those of the Christian Coalition in this respect” (Bullock 218). Bullock and Smith, upon a close study of the political climate and electoral results in eleven southern states between 1994 and 2000, offer a “core constituency theory,” stating “the power of core constituencies, such as the Religious Right for the GOP, is real. Yet these constituencies and the candidates that appeal to them must maintain a delicate balancing act so as not to alienate general election voters with primary contests that indulge too overtly in the issues that move core constituents” (Bullock 215). They find, in essence, that there is a real core constituency of conservative Christian voters in the south that support Republican candidates, but they also find that if candidates appeal overtly and exclusively to this conservative Christian core, they are not likely to win in general elections. Thus, like Christian Smith, Bullock and Smith do not find that the political power of the Religious Right is “absolute or unfettered,” but that it is “undeniably strong” (Bullock 215). Bullock and Smith also assert that this conservative Christian Republican voting core is more prominent in the south than elsewhere in the United States: “Our expectation is that the presence of Religious Right candidates in the GOP is higher in the south than elsewhere…(but) the evidence does not support contentions that Christian conservatives have taken over candidate recruitment in the GOP across the south” (Bullock 227-228). Bullock and Smith also note that the voting Religious Right may even impede a candidate from success in general elections because the general public may view their political stances as extreme (Bullock 228). Bullock and Smith contribute important findings: that there is in fact a core constituency of conservative Christian voters that consistently support Republican candidates, that the prominence of this core constituency is concentrated in southern states, and that the conservative Christian voter core of the GOP does not make the GOP politically invincible, especially if candidates overtly support hard-right Christian social policies in primary elections. However, it is very important to note that while there is a core constituency of conservative Christian voters in the south, many southern evangelical fundamentalists do not value political activism because their theological principles steer them away from being involved in secular society; Bullock and Smith are talking about voters, not full-time activists. The prominence of this Christian conservative core in the south begs the question: Are these modern voters conservative because they are southern, or because they are evangelical?
Sam Hill would answer that it is because they are evangelical, and in fact has little to nothing to do with their cultural southern identity. Hill, in an essay entitled “Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture: Has it Done What the Civil Rights Movement Couldn’t Do?” suggests that the rise of fundamental evangelicalism as an extension of traditional Protestantism in the modern south has sparked a “radical revolution” in southern culture, and is eroding the distinctive southern culture by propounding social exclusivity, while the Civil Rights Movement was a “conservative revolution” of southern culture that propounded social inclusion (Hill 6). Hill uses the Civil Rights Movement as a point of comparison for the modern Christian fundamentalist movement, observing “The Civil Rights Movement reconfigured all the existing parts of southern society and culture by insisting that all be considered equal partners, by law and, desirably, in informal practice. Fundamentalism insists on establishing public policy for the entire public whether most, many, or only a few subscribe… It is perhaps too simplistic to label these competing views of public life as a contrast between democracy and theocracy, but their conflict is apparent” (Hill 7). The inclusive nature of the Civil Rights Movement and the exclusivist nature of the fundamentalist movement both completely reconfigured southern society in their own generations. Hill’s point is that the Christian fundamentalist movement that is taking place in the modern south is reconfiguring society more dramatically than did the Civil Rights Movement, and that it is reconfiguring southern culture in such a way that the traditional southern identity is eroded as fundamentalist theology takes root. The dissolution of a distinctly southern culture results from fundamentalist theology because rather than viewing the south as Zion, as traditional southern Protestantism did, modern evangelical fundamentalism views the south as a part of the evil, secular fallen world, and thus southern Christian theology has become far more exclusivist than it ever has been in southern history (Martin 3).
The political ramifications of this exclusivist fundamentalism and its dissolution of traditional southern culture are based on the fact that, as Hill points out, “southern fundamentalists… hold more in common with their coreligionists in other parts of the country than they do with many coregionalists within their own denominations” (Hill 7, emphasis mine). In essence, faith has become more important than regional culture for southern evangelicals. A fundamentalists’ identity as a Christian takes precedence over their identity as a southerner. Whereas the traditional mainline Protestant denominations that dominated the south for most of its history were inextricably linked to and proud of their southern heritage, the new Christian fundamentalism of the modern south is not bound to southern identity, but rather bound to “ideological correctness” (Hill 7). As a result, the evangelical fundamentalist movement has taken on a national scope and the political issues that matter to today’s evangelicals have consequently also taken on a national rather than southern scope. Furthermore, despite the persistence of the conservative Christian voting core of the GOP in the south, many new fundamentalists are prioritizing faith over politics as well, reverting back to the early fundamentalist teachings of the 1970s that encouraged the avoidance of secular society and politics altogether.
In a New York Times article entitled “Putting Faith Before Politics,” David Kuo outlines a few reasons that many evangelicals are becoming hesitant to take political action and associate themselves with the Religious Right. Kuo observes that the GOP has failed the Religious Right in certain areas over the past few years, particularly in abortion legislation. This has caused some evangelicals to reevaluate their role on the political stage and their spiritual priorities (Kuo 1). David Kirkpatrick found similar rustlings in the evangelical community in 2007. In his New York Times article, “The Evangelical Crackup,” Kirkpatrick interviewed Southern Baptists who desire a “crackdown on unorthodox doctrine and a corresponding expulsion of political moderates” (Kirkpatrick 7). Kirkpatrick’s findings deepen the evidence that evangelicals in the American south are becoming more conservative and more fundamentalist. He also found that cynicism is taking root in the southern evangelical community regarding their political potential. The fundamentalist Rev. Carlson whom Kirkpatrick interviewed said, “When you mix politics and religion, you get politics” (qtd. Kirkpatrick 11). Carlson also felt that “the Religious Right peaked a long time ago… as a historical, sociological phenomenon, it has seen its heyday. Something new is coming” (Kirkpatrick 12). The something new that Carlson envisions for the evangelical movement is centered theologically around the tenets of fundamentalism, and while he is looking forward to an evangelical future without the Religious Right, others, such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, assert that the Religious Right is far from dead and is growing in strength (Kirkpatrick 14). Perkins is in the minority, however. Most Conservative Christian leaders do not feel that the Religious Right is furthering the Christian gospel (Kirkpatrick 14). Kuo quotes John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute: “Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings, has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it has lost its spirituality…Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches” (qtd. Kuo 1). Evangelicals have taken note of the secular reaction to evangelical involvement in politics and the activities of the Religious Right. Kuo notes that a Beliefnet poll demonstrated that “60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view of Jesus as a result of Christian political involvement” (Kuo 1). Just as evangelicals are placing their Christian identity before their southern identity, so now some are calling for Christians to place their Christian identity before their political identity. There is fear in the evangelical community that the Religious Right is actually harming the movement. Some are “worried that the (evangelical) movement might ‘fragment because it is more identified by a political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to Jesus and his kingdom’” (Kuo 1). Priorities are being shuffled in the evangelical community, and personal evangelism is coming out on top of political action.
The Christian evangelical community in the south is at a crossroads. Hill points out that “fundamentalism’s great achievement thus far has been to make southern religion less southern, that is, less culturally influenced or even less culturally captive” (Hill 7). Modern evangelicalism is, in Hill’s words, “prying (Christians) loose from their comfortable link with traditional southern culture” (Hill 8). The national GOP continues to seek a core constituency among conservative Christian voters at the same time that many evangelicals are calling for a reorganization of spiritual priorities and a stronger emphasis on personal evangelism with less effort given to political activism. The south used to be the Bible Belt of southern civil religion and mainline Protestantism; today it is becoming the Bible Belt of fundamentalist evangelicals with presuppositionalist views of the world and ambivalent attitudes toward politics. An outcry for political and religious definition is rising in the south today; conservative evangelicals are disillusioned with GOP candidates who claim conservative social stances in primaries and wade toward moderate waters in general elections while much of the secular and newly religiously diverse south is uncomfortable with evangelical rhetoric in the political sphere. The relationship between religion and politics in the south is changing, and this is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the 2008 elections.
A survey conducted from 18 June-1 November 2008 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released by the Pew Forum on 3 November 2008 revealed that Republican candidate McCain had a two-thirds or better lead over Democratic candidate Obama among white evangelical protestant registered voters for the duration of the campaign. Among white mainline protestant registered voters, however, McCain led by approximately ten percent until September, when mainlines protestants began shifting to support Obama. Ultimately, mainline protestants were evenly split on election day. Obama maintained a nearly two-thirds lead over McCain among registered voters unaffiliated with any religion throughout the campaign (“Trends in Candidate Preferences Among Religious Groups”). Confirming what the Pew Research Center’s survey predicted, exit polls released by the Pew Forum on 10 November 2008 demonstrated that evangelicals voted 73% Republican, down 5% from 2004 and that non-evangelical protestants voted 55% Republican, with no significant change from 2004 (“How the Faithful Voted”). While this data is based on national exit polls and does not necessarily reflect the regional voting of the southern states, it can still provide insight into how the changes that are occurring in southern Christianity today are affecting politics.
It is clear from the results of the 2008 elections that there is, as Bullock and Smith found, a core constituency of evangelical voters for the Republican Party. What is interesting about these results is that mainline Protestants are shifting to the middle of the political spectrum; the churches that historically supported GOP candidates most avidly are now politically split. This illustrates that Christianity in the south is experiencing a polarization, in which evangelical fundamentalists are distinctly separate from mainline Protestant Christians. The 2008 elections also demonstrate that traditional secular conservatism persists in the deep south; CNN exit polls demonstrated that in all the states of the deep south (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee), McCain gained every electoral vote (“Election Center 2008”). Importantly, the evangelical Republican vote was a national phenomenon in 2008, rather than a strictly southern one. The national nature of GOP support within the fundamentalist evangelical movement supports Hill's hypothesis that modern evangelicalism is causing the dissolution of a distinctive southern culture as evangelicals prioritize their Christian faith over their culturally southern identity. However, the southern civil religion of the twentieth century is preserved in the south in mainline Protestant denominations and in southern conservative secularists who also contribute to the faithful voting base of the GOP. The 2008 elections demonstrate that political and religious polarization is on the horizon in the south. The Republican Party cannot simultaneously become more socially conservative to appease Christian fundamentalists and maintain political moderation in order to appeal to the general population. The modern GOP in the south is split between Christian fundamentalists and conservative secularists and the modern Christian church in the south is split between evangelical fundamentalists and mainline Protestants. A deepening of exclusivist fundamentalist theology in the evangelical community is likely to weaken their links both to the GOP and to the mainline protestant population of the south.
This study has been an attempt to demonstrate that Christianity and politics became linked in the southern mentality as a result of an historically pervasive politico-religious agenda surrounding the Lost Cause of the Civil War, the subsequent development of a hard-right status quo society rooted in southern civil religion, a dramatic shift of southern political allegiance to the GOP in the late twentieth century as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of evangelicalism, and the role of the Religious Right in ushering in Reconstructionist and presuppositionalist theology in the political sphere. The modern day ramifications of this Christian Right mentality in the south are somewhat unexpected. As it turns out, the fundamentalist evangelical community is contributing to the dissolution of an identifiable southern culture as they denounce secular society as a whole and take on national faith-based political agendas. Many evangelicals are calling for a return to emphasis on personal evangelism as they become disappointed with the political foundering of the Religious Right. The traditionally hard-right protestant mainline denominations of the south are shifting to the moderate zone of the political spectrum as conservative Christian southerners become wary of fundamentalism. The confluence of Christianity and politics in southern life in the future is likely to determine the future of southern culture; will it be retained as a distinct culture within the United States, or will it blend theologically and ideologically in with the rest of the country? Charles Reagan Wilson asserts, “Religion continues to define the U.S. South as a distinctive part of the United States. It contributes to defining debates on public policy issues and provides on-going organizational bases for political campaigns across the ideological spectrum…It offers a still compelling worldview to the majority of the South’s Christians, giving meaning in troubled times and empowering the poor and marginalized” (Wilson, “Overview” 15). Christianity is indeed an ineluctable aspect of southern culture and history has shown that it has the potential to politically define the region. Joel Martin suggests that if “Southern white Christians (can) reimagine their southernness and their faith in non-exclusivistic ways appropriate for and supportive of a pluralistic democracy… they could give southern distinctiveness a vibrant future” (Martin 4). The south has always been a region defined by the struggle between tradition and progress, and my guess is that as tradition has always found root in southern society, so it will continue to bear a blending of Christian ideology and political ideas in a region where both religion and politics matter a great deal apart, but perhaps matter even more combined.
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