The New Religious Right

The New Religious Right entered the Bush years as a still potent source of Republican votes, conservative activists, and institutional power. It remained, however, not a religious Right, or even a Christian Right, but an evangelical-fundamentalist Right. In the 1988 presidential election, white evangelicals and fundamentalists confirmed their Republican leanings by giving 81 percent of their votes to George Bush. They were thus one of the very few groups from whom Bush got a higher vote percentage than Reagan had in 1984. By 1988 too, the remaining pulses of conservative grass-roots activism were coming primarily from the New Religious Right. In states as diverse as Michigan and Arizona, determined evangelical activists gained control of local Republican party organizations. At the same time, the focal point of the antiabortion movement shifted from conventional political activity to Operation Rescue, an effort to block access to abortion clinics by using civil disobedience tactics. The national leader of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, and the majority of participants are evangelicals. Thus the antiabortion movement, like the anti-ERA movement before it, has drawn progressively more on the efforts of evangelicals; important elements of the New Religious Right have come to see abortion as the central issue in their political agenda.^[8]

Another striking example of the staying power of the New Religious Right has been the fundamentalists' continued dominance over the Southern Baptist Convention. By 1989, fundamentalists had been in power long enough to control nearly every major seminary, publication, and agency. Moderate Baptists vigorously contested national elections and regained control of a number of state conventions, but they began to concede their defeat. In 1987 some moderate Baptists broke away to form the Southern Baptists Alliance; in 1988 moderate faculty members at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, faced with a board of trustees committed to hiring only theological conservatives for future posts, began planning to start another seminary.^[9]

The influence of the New Religious Right, however, remained limited in scope: the vision in the early 1980s of an ecumenical religious Right had not materialized as the decade ended. The failure of Pat Robertson's well-financed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 to gain more than scant support among nonevangelicals is certainly prime evidence of this limited appeal.^[10] That the

New Religious Right will expand its scope in the near future seems unlikely, because the major television preachers who provided visible leadership have been mired in financial trouble. As the audience for televangelism became saturated in the late 1980s and the number of religious programs increased, all the major television preachers saw their revenues fall dramatically, even before the Gospelgate scandals involving Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Where once the ministries had expanded confidently, retrenchment became the order of the day. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network laid off more than 10 percent of its staff, cut its budget by a similar amount, and abandoned a new nightly news show. After substantially cutting his staff and borrowing millions to maintain the academic accreditation of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell began a phased retreat from active politics, culminating in the disbanding of the Moral Majority in 1989. In the wake of the Gospelgate scandals, revenues fell faster and the popularity of television preachers declined markedly.^[11]

To be sure, in the long run some of the television ministries will retain the support of the faithful, reestablish solvency, and generally sort themselves out. In the short run, however, the major television preachers will be preoccupied more with getting their houses in order than with leading a political movement. This will not mean the death knell of the New Religious Right; the epitaphs by some observers are premature. It does mean, however, that opportunities for expansion are limited: the New Religious Right will remain a powerful force within distinct limits. The interesting questions are how long the leadership vacuum will continue and how much it will affect the vitality of the New Religious Right.