FermanMonteRae

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

Steven Flaeck shared this article, together with an apt critique: “Liberty University is a good example of a problem with institutions on the right: they were built largely as a response to classically liberal institutions but the model wasn’t those institutions themselves, it was the conservative caricature of them. So it’s unsurprising to find that Liberty University runs like a communist country, since the people who founded it and run it sincerely believed that’s how mainstream universities operate.”

The article is well worth reading, but with an understanding that it isn’t about Trump in particular so much as it is about the profound disconnect between the “religious right” and the “populist right.” While these groups have been forced into an uneasy marriage within the Republican party, they have profound and fundamental differences. This is especially true in the younger (Millennial) generation, for whom there is no automatic relationship between religion and segregation, and many of the whispered truisms which kept that marriage going in previous generations start to sound more like what they are — anathema to the Christian tradition.

There was a similar shotgun marriage between the religious right and the “business right,” forged between the late 1940’s and the late 1960’s on a basis of shared anti-Communism. This relationship started out no less strained, as Brad Hicks’ famous essay “Christians in the Hands of an Angry God” (http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/118585.html) details, because many of the core ideas of the business right are fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.

If that last sentence makes you immediately want to interject that this isn’t true, and that Christianity can (for good or for ill) accommodate ideas such as the positivity of the accumulation of wealth, or the evil of providing social services, then what you’re responding to is the profound shift in American Christian teaching in the decades since this marriage — for example, a profound shift in emphasis from the “red letter” (the personal word of Jesus) to the Pauline epistles, with their focus on ideas like grace and resurrection, and on the organization of the Church. A reading of the Gospels (especially the earlier ones) with a focus on Jesus’ own preaching would suggest that placing him in a room with most modern business leaders would lead to overturned tables at the best and a riot at the worst.

This marriage was far harder to accomplish than the one with the populist right, and for several decades church and party were extremely wary partners. What changed it was the observed public reaction to Roe v. Wade, which was really the sum of a built-up reaction among what would become the religious right to the social (especially sexual) changes of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The focus of both Republican party and Evangelical political discourse on “social issues” like abortion and homosexuality (as opposed to “social issues” like poverty or war) ever since is not a coincidence: it was something which the religious right could be passionate about, and which the business right was compatible with, which could thus energize the base without splitting the party.

In fact, it’s fair to say that the “religious right” didn’t exist as a group prior to this. The original deal chronicles in Hicks’ essay wasn’t between existing political ideologies; it was between a coalition of business-friendly and anti-Communist groups in control of the Republican party and a number of churches and theological institutes (like DTS) about cooperation during elections. But these churches didn’t see themselves as a unified “cultural ideology” so much as Christian institutions, in the world but not of it. The post-Roe world saw the creation of a group which referred to itself as the “religious right” (and formal groups like the “Moral Majority”), largely defining itself as an antithesis to the “social left” which emerged during the 1960’s.

The religious right, however, became increasingly associated with both a regressive-seeming intolerance (around sex and gender, for example) and with the racism of the populist movement it had involved itself with. (There was a profound mixing of the two, not just because of their alliance within the Republican party, but because of things like the “segregation academies;” it was in fact this early mixing which made the fusion of the populist right into the Republican coalition such a workable strategy in the late 1960’s) This has led to a real shrinkage of its political clout in recent years, as a younger generation sees it as increasingly hostile and outdated.

If the “social issues” which it has used to unify itself cease to hold, we may end up seeing a schism between the religious and business wings of the Republican party comparable to the schism currently seen between the pair of those wings and the populists, as Trump has made clear that his followers support Republicanism only insofar as it supports him.

This has all the ingredients of another “great reshuffling” of American politics, much like the breakdown of the Democratic coalition after FDR’s famous swing towards economic populism in 1932.