Mere Republicanity? How Millennials Are Changing The “Christian Right” (Pt. 1)

[This article has been adapted from a paper delivered at the 2014 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, 24th Nov. 2014]

Following Bush’s consecutive victories in 2000 and 2004 the Christian right have been labeled the ‘backbone’ and ‘base’ behind the Republican Party’s electoral successes.[1] Evangelical born-again Christians constitute around 26% of the US electorate according the latest Pew Research poll, of whom three-quarters consistently vote Republican.[2] For forty years the considerable convening power of these faithful conservatives have made them an attractive constituency for Republicans to court. Aligning with their social and cultural concerns, this relationship has generated a distinguishing feature amongst Western politics, the American ‘values voter’. The issues that stir Christian conservatives are well known as they are often at odds with the secular-liberal trend of American society, generating the “culture-war”. These hot-button social, cultural and religious issues, or as Senator Danforth labels them ‘wedge issues’, cleave American society into one camp and another. They include opposition to abortion, stem-cell research and homosexual marriage, efforts to make Christianity ‘visible’ in courthouses and schools with attempts to display the Ten Commandments, teaching intelligent design and creationism in public high schools and universities as equally valid theories to evolution, opposing ‘Big’ government, most notably the 2010 Affordable Care Act (or ‘ObamaCare’), deficit spending and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), demanding a ‘righteous government and judiciary’, opposing the decline of the traditional nuclear family amongst many others.[3] Equally well versed (amongst academics who follow the social movement) is the narrative of GOP-Christian right relations.

As Meacham, Putnam and Campbell, Domke and Coe, Dochuk and others note, since Reagan in the 1980s, Republicans have pitched themselves as the ‘religion friendly party’ of America, with a Christian nationalist narrative, reaching out to a predominantly Protestant evangelical base by promising to enact moral legislation in return for evangelical votes and support.[4] Christian conservatives in response picket, strategize and vote Republicans to power to push their countercultural moral Christian agenda into the public square, to ‘turn America back to God’ to ‘reclaim America’ from their liberal and secular-humanist opponents.[5] In the 2000’s under Bush, an avowed evangelical, this relationship—or as Domke and Coe term it, ‘God Strategy’—appeared to reach its apogee; with the fusion of the spiritual and political blurring the lines of Christian theology and conservative ideology.[6] Linker and Laderman saw the legislative agenda and actions of conservative evangelicals and GOP as hybrid, that America was witnessing a form of ‘republicanity’ or ‘theo-conservatism’.[7] As Arnal comments the result of this ‘R’evival of religion in American politics spawned ‘a cottage industry, busy fretting about the Christian right’ ranging from the inquisitive and scholarly, to the fear-mongering diatribe and the polemical ‘hatchet-job’.[8] (Good examples of the latter include Hedges, ‘American Fascists’ and Kaplan’s ‘With God on their Side’.[9])

Whether the Bush era should be cited as another religious awakening in American politics as Linker and Laderman argue is debatable. Given the rise of the ‘Nones’, America’s declining religiosity and embrace of secular mores, aligning the Bush years to previous awakenings such as the Fundamentalist 1920s seems to stretch a point. Less contested is how the GOP and Christian right’s co-dependency is inflated by the academy’s boilerplate repetition, a noise that gives the constituency’s narrow vision for America credence, legitimating in part the increasingly dualistic nature of America’s religious politics, furthering the simplistic partisan binary, and the lexis of cultural warfare.

Commonly overlooked in this narrative however, is the generation game, that GOP-Christian right relations are based on the interactions of baby boomers. As the millennials (or Generation Y) take the wheel, so too should we update our views on this relationship that many have taken for granted.[10] Taking inspiration from Lindsay’s seminal work, ‘Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite’ (2007), that traced the rise of evangelical power in government through their Republican partners, and their increasing command and control of business, entertainment and law;this paper looks to developments within Christian higher education.[11] In particular it looks at the views of fifty millennial students in 2013 from five Christian conservative colleges in America’s Mid-West and North-East, to discover their politics, and to review whether republicanity amongst millennial Christians is quite the foregone conclusion it is made out to be.

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Mere Republicanity? How Millennials are Changing the “Christian Right” (Pt. 1)