The Social Issues

The 1960s first made America aware of the so-called social issues and introduced the argument that these issues would become the new basis for political alliances and conflicts. The term has embraced quite a range of issues having to do with social order, civil liberty, morality, sexuality, race, gender roles, family, education, and quality of life. The emphasis shifted substantially from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the important social issues focused on blacks (racial inequality, civil unrest, civil rights, busing, affirmative action) and youth (premarital sex, marijuana use, political dissent), to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the issues of gender, the family, education, and the relationship between church and state rose to prominence. Of the latter, those having to do with women's rights, especially abortion and the Equals Rights Amendment (ERA), were most important.

Why the Social Issues Emerged

Many theories can help to explain the emergence of the social issues, but two have been especially prominent—one emphasizing the transition of America from an in-

dustrial to a postindustrial society, the other stressing uneven changes in gender roles. To these I will here add a third, which focuses on changing patterns of religious affiliation.

The first approach examines how postindustrialism has transformed American politics.^[4] According to this theory, the central features of a postindustrial society include growing affluence, greater education, and an expanding tertiary sector embracing government, universities, communications, and other service and information functions. Increasing affluence mutes the economic issues that once divided a conservative upper middle class from a liberal working class, and a broad consensus develops on an expanded role for government in economic life. With economic issues put aside, noneconomic issues, on which the lower socioeconomic strata have traditionally been more conservative than the higher strata, become prominent.

Postindustrialism reinforces this division on social issues by partially transforming both classes. The growth of education and the expansion of the tertiary sector create a so-called New Class of college-educated professionals, whose work emphasizes trained intelligence and creativity and thus changes the upper middle class from primarily business and managerial to professional. This New Class is concerned with postmaterialist values like self-fulfillment, quality of life, and personal freedom and is open to cultural change. Hence its members are likely to be especially liberal on social issues. At the same time, growing affluence gives large segments of the working class a foothold on economic security and intensifies their opposition to further social change, thus making its members even more conservative on social issues. In this way Postindustrialism, according to this theory, creates a new kind of class struggle—what pollster Louis Harris once called "Karl Marx upside down"—in which the upper middle class becomes the proponent of change and the working class the defender of the status quo.^[5]

A second and very different kind of argument roots the rise of the social issues in the partial and often contradictory transformation of gender roles in America.^[6] This transformation, some feminists argue, has been due partly to various long-term trends: the increasing percentage of women in the paid work force; skyrocketing divorce rates and sharp increases in the number of female-headed households; later marriage age and smaller families; and changing sexual mores

along with an enhanced capacity to control reproduction. It has also been due to the emergence in the 1970s of a women's movement that criticized the traditional role of wife and mother as oppressive and asserted women's needs for economic independence from men, for control over their own bodies, and for equal rights generally.

The net effect of these changes has been to weaken the traditional place of women without fully establishing a new one. On the one hand, for example, increasing marital instability reduces the security of the housewife role, and the growing tendency of middle-class women in particular to choose paid work outside the home diminishes its status. On the other hand, women in the paid labor force still face barriers to equal status with men—occupational segregation and income inequality, a workplace geared to the needs of traditional families, and a persistence of the gender division of labor at home.

Both the magnitude of the changes and their unevenness provoke political conflict and make a series of family- and gender-related issues important in American politics. Specific issues like abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment often take on broader meaning, symbolizing the woman emancipated from her traditional roles, focused more on education and work than on marriage and childbearing, sexually active without being married, and financially independent of men.

These issues, the argument continues, often pit against each other groups of women with different visions of women's ideal place. If women with college educations, good professional jobs, and independent incomes (or prospects of acquiring them) flock to the women's movement and embrace abortion rights and the ERA as ways of furthering their independence, housewives with less education, few good employment prospects, and little personal income resist abortion and the ERA as destructive of women's protected place in the family and provide an attentive audience for antifeminist movements and their appeal to reinforce the traditional role of women.

In one view, then, social issues pit the middle class against the working class; in the other, they pit professional women against housewives. Both images of the social divisions in which the social issues are rooted contain some truth, but they do not complete the picture. In fact, different social issues are class-linked to varying degrees, and each of the measures of socioeconomic position (income,

education, occupation, relationship to the production process) bears a unique relationship to the social issues. The professional/housewife division may fit contending groups of activists on issues like abortion and the ERA, but that line of conflict is much less visible on these same issues among the general population.^[7]

Indeed, the factor that most strikingly distinguishes the opposing sides on the social issues is neither of these but rather religiosity or religious involvement. The more often people attend religious services, the more importance they give to religion, and the more involved they are in church-based activities, the more likely they are to take conservative stands on abortion, ERA, or the other social issues. A national study of abortion activists in 1980, for example, found that 86 percent of pro-life activists attended church at least once a week, whereas only 9 percent of pro-choice activists did. Similarly, a California study found that 80 percent of pro-choice activists never attended church, whereas only 2 percent of pro-life activists never did so.^[8]

Similar results emerge from surveys of the general population. To be sure, other factors ostensibly distinguish conservatives and liberals polled on the social issues. The social conservatives generally tend to be less educated, less affluent, of lower occupational status, older, rural, and from the South and Midwest. These differences, however, do not show up consistently from study to study; they are often quite small; and, most important, they are often reduced significantly or wiped out in multivariate analysis. By contrast, the effects of religiosity (typically measured by church attendance) are found in virtually every study, are usually quite large, and are rarely wiped out in multivariate analysis. When the variable of religiosity is controlled, the effects of most other variables usually are reduced significantly, but controlling for these other variables does not diminish the impact of religiosity as much.^[9]

Religiosity has an impact even within specific denominations. Opposition to abortion, for example, increases with religiosity for Catholics and for liberal, moderate, conservative, and fundamentalist Protestants alike. The differences are more marked for Catholics than for Protestants, and for the more conservative Protestants than the less conservative ones, but they are present across the board.

Thus the influence of religiosity on attitudes toward ERA and abortion cannot be understood purely or primarily in terms of differ-

ences in church doctrines. If doctrine were the major factor, one would expect a socialization effect: in liberal churches the more religious would be more accepting of abortion and ERA than the less religious; in conservative churches the opposite would happen. This, however, is not the case: religiosity has a conservative effect no matter what the denomination or its doctrines (though the magnitude of the effect varies). Clearly religiosity itself is important.

This finding suggests a third explanation of the rise of the social issues, one centered on the growing polarization of the United States between the more religious and the less religious, the traditional and the secular, the churched and the unchurched. This polarization, in turn, reflects several related changes in America's religious landscape.^[10]

Since at least the 1950s boundary lines between the various religious denominations, particularly within Protestantism, have become more fluid because rising levels of education and higher rates of geographical mobility along with declining generational continuity in denominational affiliation have helped to erode the distinctive class, ethnic, and regional identities that previously unified specific denominations. At the same time, the religious world has become increasingly polarized as the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated, at one end, and those of the more theologically conservative churches, at the other, have swelled while those of the moderate and liberal "mainline" Protestant churches have declined. The once low-status conservative churches have flourished because of a growing ability to hold onto their more affluent members as well because of relatively high birth rates. The higher status liberal and moderate churches have declined because of relatively low birth rates, less influx of the upwardly mobile from the conservative churches, and, above all, a loss of higher-status members to the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated. Finally, the growth of religious nonaffiliation reflects the development of so-called religious individualism, the tendency to treat religion as largely a matter of personal choice and belief independent of any institutional or community commitment.

The fluidity of the religious world has reduced the relative importance of denominational differences while its polarization has diminished the religious center and the spiritual consensus for which it was the base. These factors have led to the increased importance of traditionalist/secularist cleavages (i.e., differences in religiosity) within

denominations and in society at large and have made religiosity a major axis of conflict. It is not surprising, then, that issues on which public opinion divides along this axis should become more politically salient.

What the Social Issues Have and Have Not Done

However one explains the rise of the social issues, one needs to have a clear sense of how much they have risen, that is, how politically important they have become. In fact, the social issues, despite predictions and claims to the contrary, have never become the dominant focus of American politics; they have not played a central role in shaping the voting behavior and political allegiance of the electorate at large, nor were they crucial in moving American politics to the right in the early 1980s. Their influence must be seen as more limited: the social issues gave immediate political currency to certain basic issues of values addressed by the traditionalist element of conservatism. As a result, they played a big role in the mobilization of cadres of conservative activists and contributors, and they provided the terrain for the politicization of evangelical Christians and the rise of the New Religious Right.

Rather than becoming increasingly important for Americans over the course of the 1970s, the social issues receded in importance in the public mind. At one point in 1970 more than half of the American public identified one or another social issue as the most important problem facing the United States whereas only 10 percent identified economic issues. By 1979, however, the figures were reversed: nearly 70 percent identified economic issues as important whereas less than 10 percent chose social issues. In addition, public opinion on such issues as abortion and women's rights, despite the influence of powerful, contending social movements, did not become firmer or more polarized in the 1970s, nor did these issues consistently have a large or growing impact on whether Americans called themselves liberal or conservative, or Democratic or Republican, or on how they voted. Moreover, to the extent that social issues influenced political behavior and allegiances in the 1970s and early 1980s, it is unlikely that they did so in a conservative direction. Public opinion on many social issues remained relatively liberal, and one study of single-issue voting found that issues like abortion, affirmative action, the environment,

and gun control moved more persons to vote in a liberal direction than in a conservative one.^[11]

Conservatism on social issues certainly was not central to electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. Reagan's campaigns in the primary and general elections did not stress them, and voters did not often mention them in exit polls as a reason they voted for Reagan. More important, voters who switched to Reagan in 1980 (after voting Democratic or not at all in 1976) were not consistently more conservative than traditional Republicans on social issues like ERA and abortion or more liberal on economic issues like government domestic spending. They were more conservative on social issues than those who did not switch to Reagan, but they differed even more on economic issues and more strikingly still in their opinions of President Carter and his administration. Ultimately the 1980 election was a plebiscite on an unpopular incumbent, not an ideological contest.^[12] (I shall return to the character of the 1980 election in Chapter 6).

The social issues, in short, are not the key to American politics and the successes of conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, but they did play a significant narrower role. Issues like abortion and the ERA evoked broader themes that fit nicely with the traditionalism of the Right. Consider two examples. First, surveys of the general population suggest that the abortion issue involves basic beliefs about freedom and constraint. Those who oppose abortion are also very likely to disapprove of premarital, extramarital, and homosexual sex and to oppose looser divorce laws, provision of birth control information to teenagers without parental consent, sex education classes in public schools, voluntary sterilization, and the legalization of marijuana, euthanasia, and suicide. This seems like quite a disparate list, but there is a clear common theme here—opposition to too much freedom from constraints imposed by traditional roles and norms, too much emphasis on individual self-determination and self-fulfillment, and too much play for personal drives and whims. This opposition implies a worldview in which individual freedom on a range of personal matters is perceived negatively as mere license and in which constraint and order are inherently valued. The antiabortion position thus invokes a worldview that resonates with the traditionalism of the conservative movement, preoccupied as it is with the decay of the social bond.^[13]

Second, studies of pro- and anti-ERA women activists suggest that underlying their angry political conflict in the 1970s and early 1980s are very different assumptions about the conditions under which women can survive and prosper in a male-dominated world and about the role of the family. Pro-ERA activists implicitly assumed that what women need is equal access to education, jobs, and other resources that would allow them to be economically independent of men. Traditional family roles, which limit such access, appear from this perspective as inimical to the interests of women. Anti-ERA activists, however, saw things differently. They believed that the only effective safeguards for women in a male world are the privileges and protections that they can claim from men within the family. From this perspective the family, when it works, requires men to support women and thus protects women from having to compete in a working world dominated by men and male values. Consequently, as a survey of ERA activists in Massachusetts showed, pro- and anti-ERA activists differed most sharply precisely on the value to women of those things that most directly attacked traditional family roles—abortion, government-funded day care, paternity leave, and increased sexual freedom. Anti-ERA activists interviewed in North Carolina were quick to accuse pro-ERA activists and feminists of being traitors to the female sex for wanting to require women to give up their family-based privileges and to compete on equal terms in the male-dominated world of work. The anti-ERA position thus tended to invoke a worldview in which the protection of the family from attack and the affirmation of traditional gender roles is central. This perspective, too, resonates with the broader defense of traditional institutions that is central to conservative traditionalism.^[14]

One result of the resonance of the social issues with the traditionalist element of conservatism was that these issues helped to mobilize a new cohort of conservative leaders, activists, and contributors. Evidence of this is abundant. Certainly the opposition to abortion and the ERA constituted two of the largest, most active countermovements of the 1970s and early 1980s. To some extent they mobilized persons already active in the conservative movement or in some conservative causes, but they also attracted some with no such background. Antiabortion activists typically were new to conservative politics. A study of committed antiabortion activists in California found that they had virtually no prior political experience. "They

were not members of the League of Women voters, they had no ties with professional associations or labor unions, they were not active in local party politics, and many of them had not even voted in previous elections," writes sociologist Kristin Luker of this group. Many of the antiabortion activists in a North Dakota study had had previous political experience, but in local Democratic party politics or on liberal causes. Anti-ERA activists often had prior experience in conservative Republican politics, the John Birch Society, or other right-wing groups, but the movement attracted political novices as well, especially in its later years.^[15]

Similarly, social issues seem to have played an important role in the dramatic movement of ministers of the Southern Baptist Convention into the Republican party, about which I shall have more to say shortly. Over half of those ministers who switched political affiliation from Democratic to Republican in the early 1980s cited a social issue as the most important problem facing America whereas only a third of those who still called themselves Democrats did.^[16]

Finally, social issues have been of special interest to the more religiously active contributors to right-wing political action committees and to supporters of Pat Robertson. In a survey of religious and secular contributors to a range of political action committees in the early 1980s, religious right-wing contributors were more likely than others to cite the social issues as the most important set of problems facing the country. Thirty percent named social issues—far from a majority, but as many as mentioned any other set of issues—in comparison to 5 percent of secular conservative contributors, 11 percent of religious liberal contributors, and 7 percent of secular liberal contributors. The religious conservatives also proved more conservative on social issues than on others and differed from other groups on these issues more than on any others. Similar findings emerge from a study of contributors to Pat Robertson's presidential campaign in late 1986 and early 1987. In comparison to other Republican contributors, Robertson supporters were more likely to be new to politics and the GOP. They were also more likely to cite a social issue (especially abortion, pornography, and school prayer) as the most important national problem or as the most important influence on their vote and to take conservative stands on these issues.^[17]

The great importance of social issues like abortion to a cohort of conservative leaders, activists, and contributors helps explain why

social issues seem so important in America's move to the right while actually having little impact on how most Americans vote and think about politics. Because social issues have special significance for many of those most active in the conservative movement, they are disproportionately visible and contentious; thus they get disproportionate attention from politicians and the media. But even if they do not have a direct impact on the general public, they may have an indirect one: without influencing how the average person votes, they may help mobilize the activists who get people out to vote and help shape who they vote for.

The second effect of the broader moral resonances of the social issues was to provide fertile political terrain for the rise of the New Religious Right. Several of its founding fathers gave them great importance. Recounting the issues that led him to work with the Conservative Caucus and later to found the Religious Roundtable, Ed McAteer stressed busing, issues having to do with public-school curricula, and the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion. Among the many issues that Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell listed as having drawn him into politics were abortion, pornography, the rights of Christian schools, and school prayer. Among the general population, as well, opposition to abortion and the ERA and support for school prayer increased markedly with religious fundamentalism while conservatism on other issues did not. Social conservatism, moreover, had the greatest impact on presidential voting among the most fundamentalist segment of the population.^[18]

Yet if the conservative position on the social issues was strong among the more religious, why did these issues lead to the rise of a religious Right that was rooted primarily in evangelicalism and fundamentalism? The answer to this question and the key to the interface between the social issues and the New Religious Right lie in the transformation of the evangelical and fundamentalist world.