The religious right-wing, made up largely of white evangelicals, holds a great deal of political power in the United States. They form a formidable voting bloc, with presidential candidates seeking and depending on their endorsement. As a dominant force among Christians, they fan the flames of the culture wars. As an organized political movement they have driven the surge of reactionary forces into the mainstream, and their support has made Donald Trump the noxious presence that he is on the world stage. They have even broken into the US Capitol and put their shoes on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.
But how did the Christian right come to have so much influence and power in US politics? And how does a movement that identifies with Christianity come to throw its support behind the infamously immoral non-Christian Trump so decisively?
The answers to these questions lie in a coordinated top-down movement that sought to organize and weaponize Christianity in defense of US imperialism and capitalism. In this article I will trace the creation of the religious right, discuss its power and influence, and also explore the uniquely American evangelical subculture that supports it.
Typically, an article about a religious movement would require some kind of theoretical framework around the nature of religion. However, the political movements discussed in this context aren’t really concerned with the doctrines, beliefs, or practices of the various forms of Christianity.
Rather, they are more to do with tightly associating a nebulous idea of any kind of Christian-adjacent religion to US capitalism and national chauvinism, enmeshing the two so deeply over time that it now seems almost impossible to pull them apart. What we are really dealing with here is the development and rise of Christian nationalism, which relies on Christian imagery and language, but outside of that has very little to do with Christianity at all.
Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting the Christian faith and propping up the idea of America as a country of white, culturally conservative, natural-born citizens. It relies on the mythological founding of the United States as a Christian nation, singled out for God’s providence in order to fulfill God’s purposes on earth, and demands a privileged place for Christianity in public life.
In order to understand how the religious right was revived and then shaped into the MAGA-style Christian nationalism that we see today, it is important to go back to the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. From there we can follow the trajectory to where we are today — fascist men wearing furry hats storming the nation’s capital, and neonazis gathering in Christian coffeeshops here in Denver where I live.
The wartime roots of Christian nationalism
After the war, religious practice and belief were on the decline globally, but in the US, the opposite was happening. As cited in British socialist John Newsinger’s 2020 article about Trump and US evangelism, in 1850 only 16% of Americans claimed membership to a church. It had risen to 43% in 1930, and was at 49% by 1940. In the postwar period, this percentage skyrocketed, and by 1960, 69% of Americans identified themselves as members of a church.
Alongside this revival in church membership was a rise in church revenue and profit, with billions of dollars spent on church construction across the country in the seven years following the end of the war.
Right from the beginning of this campaign to revive church membership, capitalism, imperialism and anticommunism were the driving forces. President Harry Truman declared in 1946 that the survival of the civilized world required Americans to fortify their spiritual strength through a renewal of religious faith. With the Cold War raging, he told the National Council of Churches that without a religious resurgence to win the moral fight against communism, “we are lost.”
Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting the Christian faith and propping up the idea of America as a country of white, culturally conservative, natural-born citizens.
Designating the Soviet Union the evil “other” allowed the Truman administration to shift America into permanent military, political, and economic intervention on a world scale. Bringing religious belief into it solidified the idea that America was on the side of morality. Citizens could participate in the moral defense of their country by becoming closer to their churches.
Truman couldn’t have done this without the help of a close advisor, Charles E. Wilson, who was also the president of General Electric. His involvement in the administration cannot be understated; in fact his position within the government became so powerful that the press began calling him the “co-president.”
In the early 1940s, Wilson served as chairman on the War Production Board, which converted companies from peacetime work to fulfilling war needs, and prohibited any production that wasn’t essential. This board rationed commodities such as gasoline, heating oil, metals, rubber, paper, and plastics. Factories that made silk ribbons produced parachutes, automobile factories built tanks, and typewriter companies converted to rifles. The messaging around this shift was one of patriotism; it celebrated going without in your own life and focusing your labor on war efforts. It primed the American public to believe that citizens on the homefront were also responsible for the defense of the country, something that has become a recurring theme within Christian nationalist thought.
With Truman in office, and the war over, Wilson turned to the moral homefront, creating the Religion in American Life (RIAL) campaign in 1949. This was a sustained propaganda campaign that championed Christianity as a way to strengthen the moral defense of the country, specifically against communism. The heart of the messaging was that returning to God via prayers and churchgoing was the patriotic duty of all Americans.
This propaganda push was financed by big business and endorsed by Truman and the government. The Advertising Council was also on board, making this a huge endeavor, well-financed and well-connected to capital and its imperialist interests. They covered the country with over 5000 billboards that screamed “Families That Pray Together Stay Together.” The campaign’s propaganda focused on tales of the religious foundations of the country, the Soviet threat to American prosperity, and the need for national unity in order to preserve the freedom of the American way of life. Americans could show that unity by supporting the expansion of American interests abroad, buying American-made products, and attending the churches and synagogues of their choice.
The Cold War and the growth of evangelism
When Dwight D. Eisnhower was elected president in 1952, the push toward equating Christianity with patriotism and positioning it against communism ramped up. Eisenhower himself was not a member of a church before running for president. As Newsigner points out, in a memoir published several years before his run for office, Eisenhower did not mention religion, God, prayer, or morality at all.
However, Eisenhower knew he had to bring religion into his campaign in order to win the election and show that he was on the right side in defending America. He came to rely on the famed evangelical preacher Billy Graham to be his spiritual advisor.
Throughout his six-decade career, Billy Graham hosted annual “crusades,” or large revival events. It was his annual crusade in 1949, held in Los Angeles, that rocketed him to fame, when William Hearst put his newspaper empire to work on Graham’s behalf, promoting and endorsing his religious beliefs and his right-wing politics. Over a period of six weeks, 350,000 people heard Graham preach at the LA crusade.
Graham was very much about positioning Christianity as the primary way to fight communism. As Newsinger says, “He warned his audience night after night that there were more ‘fifth columnists… communists’ in Los Angeles than in any other American city and that Los Angeles was the third target on the Soviet list for nuclear destruction after New York and Chicago.”
In one sermon Graham told his audience:
God is giving us a desperate choice, a choice of either revival or judgment. There is no alternative! If Sodom and Gomorrah could not get away with sin…neither can Los Angeles. Judgment is coming.
Conversely, Graham held that the power of prayer was the real reason the US avoided the levels of destruction experienced by other countries during World War II.
This doctrine of the American people — with their faith and prayers being integral to the success or failure of American freedom — is still at the core of the Christian nationalism that we see today.
Newsinger writes:
According to Graham, Eisenhower piously told him that he was running for president because the American people had got to “get back to biblical Christianity and I must lead them.” Once he had been elected, shortly before his inauguration, Eisenhower told the press that the Cold War was a “war of light against darkness, freedom against slavery, godliness against atheism.”
This is an indication of the work that Truman put into the foundations of Christian nationalism in order to win the election. Eisenhower knew that he would need to bring religious language into his campaign, regardless of his own religious beliefs, or lack thereof.
Eisenhower wasted no time in trying to associate the government with religion. He was the first president to lead the crowd in prayer at his inauguration; and the first president to be baptized in office, a move made explicitly to set a religious and moral example for the nation. He presided over the first National Prayer Breakfast, a now-annual event attended by members of Congress, business leaders, and even foreign dignitaries. Every single US President since has hosted the breakfast, and its expressed goal to this day is for top-level officials to assemble and pray together and reaffirm their commitment to the religious goals of the state.
In 1954, the words “In God We Trust” first appeared on postage stamps, and the following year it was printed on US currency and became the nation’s first official motto without a dissenting voice in Congress. Eisenhower was also responsible for the addition of “One nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
The evangelical backlash to desegregation
While the White House became more and more explicitly Christian, or at least started using more explicitly Christian buzzwords, there was also an economic boom in the South and Midwest as military weaponry became the heart of the economy. This catapulted many previously rural communities into the middle class.
Until now, religious and political leaders had been focused on defending America from what was outside of it. However as the country entered the 1960s and 70s, those same leaders started encouraging their congregations to defend their Christian-American ideals from people and movements within the country instead of solely existential, external threats like the USSR.
Designating the Soviet Union the evil “other” allowed the Truman administration to shift America into permanent military, political, and economic intervention on a world scale. Bringing religious belief into it solidified the idea that America was on the side of morality.
The “communist” threat that really activated the Christian right at this time was the desegregation of schools, and the movement against it was heavily supported by an evangelical preacher named Jerry Falwell.
Falwell, whose name is recognizable to many of us now, condemned desegregation as something Black people didn’t even want, saying he could “see the hand of Moscow in the background” and it was the work of the “Devil himself.” Falwell preached that Black people were cursed by God to forever be the servants of believers, and that if segregation were ended, God would surely punish America for it — the age-old religious justifications for slavery and Jim Crow.
As schools slowly and painfully started integrating, preachers like Falwell urged their white congregations to withdraw their children from schools that allowed non-white children to attend. This caused a huge expansion of private whites-only Christian schools across the South and the Midwest. Evangelicals and fundamentalists began constructing new, segregated schools, so that by 1979 there were approximately 5000 of these, serving more than a million white Christian students. Falwell’s own Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia was founded in 1971, and to this day that institution has been a hotbed of racism, sexism, sexual assault, and homophobia.
This migration shifted large numbers of the conservative, evangelical population into insular schools that taught creationism and abstinence-only sex education, and revolved around the conservative evangelical culture, away from the watchful eyes of the state education system.
The fight against equal rights for women
Another big issue that strengthened the religious right as a politically powerful sector was their fight against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the early 1970s. With strong bipartisan support in the White House and Congress, the amendment sought to guarantee equal rights regardless of sex. However, in order for an amendment to make it into the Constitution, it needs to be ratified by 38 states. The effort to block the amendment was led by Phyllis Schlafly, whose biggest hits to date included proclaiming the atomic bomb to be “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God,” and declaring herself to be a warrior in the fight against communism. Newsinger writes that Falwell eagerly threw his lot in with Schlafly and the Stop ERA campaign, stating that the ERA “strikes at the foundation of our entire social structure,” and was a “satanic attack on the home.”
Schlafly and Falwell’s arguments against the ERA appealed to conservative evangelical attitudes about gender roles. They argued that the ERA would make it more difficult for women to obtain custody over their children in divorce court, that unisex public bathrooms would become the norm (clearly an evergreen fear!), and that women would be subjected to the draft.
This partnership and campaign utilized a mixture of conservative social values, religious messaging and imagery, and the primal beginnings of the types of trolling that we see in the Christian nationalist movement today. In fact, Schlafly herself proudly spoke about how she loved to incite feminists and anger liberals up until the day she died. At Stop ERA campaign rallies she was known to start speeches by saying things like: “I’d like to thank my husband for letting me be here tonight — I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad.”
While the ERA was quickly ratified by some states, it lost popularity in large part due to this mobilization of the religious right, and to this day it has never been ratified.
The dawn of the culture wars
The win against the ERA inspired Falwell to get more into politics on the national stage. In 1976, he took the Liberty University choir on a tour of America, preaching the need for Christians to mobilize for political action against abortion and other social trends that he felt were threatening the future of the nation.
The tour was well-received by evangelicals around the country, demonstrating to Falwell that there was a need for a right-wing evangelical political organization. In 1979, he joined up with a number of right-wing Republicans and together they formed a lobby group called the Moral Majority.
The two main purposes of the Moral Majority were to enlist evangelical support to back the Republican party, which they did via voter registration drives; and to push a Christian-right agenda on the party. They did this by declaring “culture wars.”
The messaging from the Moral Majority echoed the messaging of the Cold War era. But now America was under serious attack from “secular humanism” and all of its evils — abortion, queer rights, environmentalism, and feminism all threatened to take down the great nation.
This doctrine of the American people — with their faith and prayers being integral to the success or failure of American freedom — is still at the core of the Christian nationalism that we see today.
Falwell’s favorite moral issue was homosexuality. The top-down nature of his culture war is illustrated by this quote from Robert Billings, a founding member of the Moral Majority, as cited by Newsigner: “We need an emotionally charged issue to stir up people and get them mad enough to get them up from watching TV and do something. I believe homosexuality is the issue we should use.”
Newsinger quotes one of Falwell’s many fundraising letters sent out to millions of evangelical Christians: “Last Wednesday, I was threatened by a mob of homosexuals. This convinced me that our nation has become a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah… Please send your $35 gift today.”
Falwell never gave up beating the drum on his warning of the evils of homosexuality. In fact he was the one who famously brought the Teletubbies into this mess by declaring in 1999 that Tinky Winky was part of the gay conspiracy against Christian America.
By 1986, Falwell’s face was beamed into one in four American homes. Televangelism had become a $2 billion per year industry, and religious broadcasters controlled more than 1,000 full-time Christian radio stations and more than 200 TV channels. Falwell’s programs even ran on some secular stations, expanding his reach out past the evangelical community.
A main theme present in the sermons was of course the imminent threat posed by secularization. His programs also offered ways that Americans could step up to the plate and defend their country from these attacks. Most of the time this meant donating to the preacher.
Falwell was not the only influential preacher that people were watching from the comfort of their living rooms in the 1980s. Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), was also airing daily sermons and other Christian content to millions of Americans. Although Robertson had established CBN in the 60s, it began shifting away from purely devotional content and into news and political commentary in the 80s — which continues to this day.
By this point in time the Christian evangelical right was more or less on the same page politically speaking. With leaders like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Phyllys Shalfly, and Pat Robertson leading the charge, the religious right was organized and considered a voting bloc that needed to be won.
Reagan Republicans and the Christian Coalition
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was running for president, he saw more than any previous candidate that getting the Christian right on his side was necessary in order to win the election. He met with the Moral Majority, who explained their platform, including endorsements of constitutional amendments to restore prayer in schools and prohibit abortion, as well as a denunciation of the Equal Rights Amendment.
It is a show of evangelical priorities that Reagan, who was not very religious himself, won the support of evangelical Christians over Jimmy Carter, who was in fact a born-again Christian and a Sunday-school teacher. However, Carter eschewed the culture-war issues that the Christian right was now wholly committed to, and that made all the difference.
In the George Bush, Sr. and Bill Clinton years, Pat Robertson established the Christian Coalition of America (CCA), a new lobby group, to fill the void left by the dissolution of the Moral Majority in 1989. By 1997, the organization had two million members and $27 million in the bank. Fortune magazine named it as the seventh most powerful political organization in America, so strong that it had decisive influence over Republican candidates.
By 2000 the CCA were powerful enough to secure the presidency for a genuine born-again evangelical Christian in George W. Bush. Since he was an actual part of the faith community and had technically lost the election but still became president, evangelicals celebrated his win as a miracle.
This belief in divine intervention was only reinforced after 9/11, when it became clear to evangelicals that Bush had been chosen by God to be the one to face this attack on America and defend the Christian nation from Islam.
While Bush was in office, he gave billions of federal dollars to chastity programs and moved many social-service providers into the hands of evangelical organizations. This effectively put the evangelical right in charge of services from prison programs and job training to teen pregnancy “protection.”
Despite the political power of the growing religious right, however, they couldn’t keep their party in office. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 led to a racist, reactionary backlash that was spearheaded by the Christian right.
The Christian cultural bubble
While all of this posturing and glad-handing was happening between the government and the likes of the Christian Coalition, the population that made up the Christian right was building up their subculture, which Newsinger calls a “peculiar mix of commercialism and superstition,” along with the culture war.
Because of the doctrine that American culture is steeped in sin and is actively attacking their Christian beliefs, evangelicals have created an insular bubble-like culture that mimics all the things that we enjoy in the secular world, but with a religious twist.
Christian children go to religious schools or are homeschooled, are offered abstinence-only education, are taught creationism, and are browbeaten into believing that the outside world is scary, dangerous, and filled with satanic “humanism.” This environment for young children has many of the same things that we enjoy on the outside of the bubble — theme parks, summer camps, books, movies, comics, museums — but they are all awash with evangelical propaganda and biblical stories. Some examples cited by Newsinger are the Holy Land Experience in theme-park capital Orlando, and the Creation Museum in Kentucky.
Until now, religious and political leaders had focused on defending America from what was outside of it. However as the country entered the 1960s and 70s, they started encouraging their congregations to defend their ideals from people and movements within the country instead of solely existential, external threats like the USSR.
From these childhood activities, evangelical Christians can then go to any number of Christian colleges and universities, and enter a world of Christian knock-offs that copy secular culture but with Christian themes. There is an endless variety of specialty Christian rock music, skateboarding organizations, fast food, pro wrestling, and dating apps.
Another source of cultural output for evangelicals is their extensive literature — both fiction and non-fiction. I must highlight the Left Behind novels — a 12-part series published between 1995 and 2004 that chronicles the rapture as told in the book of Revelations. Multiple volumes in this blatantly homophobic and antisemitic series have made it onto the New York Times Best Sellers list. By 2016, 65 million copies in a variety of languages had been published. The series has multiple spinoff books, graphic novels, and kids’ versions, as well as a 2014 feature-film adaptation starring Nicolas Cage.
In the series, the chosen ones are raptured and taken up to heaven while those on earth split into two groups: those who are ready to be born again, and the followers of the antichrist — who is also the secretary general of the UN and a test-tube baby fathered by two gay men. Jesus returns after seven years as a macho-man warrior, and horrifically kills all those who are not born again Christians, which includes queer people, most other Christians, Jewish people, and communists.
Donald Trump, champion of the faith
The evangelical base that needs to be won by any political candidate today is a population that has grown up with all of these cultural experiences, surrounded by the messages of books like Left Behind and sermons given by the likes of Falwell.
White evangelicals have been Donald Trump’s most steadfast and unwavering base throughout his time in American politics — from the first Access Hollywood scandal, through his scandal-plagued administration, and then his efforts to overturn the election that put Joe Biden into office. As we have seen over the course of this history, the Republican party was firmly in the hands of the religious right by the time 2016 rolled around. Trump was not the first non-Christian candidate that the religious right threw its support behind — however he was certainly the least “Christian” in his outward behavior.
What mattered to the religious right as they moved even further into Christian nationalism was that their chosen candidate could a) win, and b) deliver on their wishlist. As Newsinger writes:
He promised that he would hand over control of the federal judiciary up to the Supreme Court, give them the vice presidency, fill his administration with their people and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The Christian right believed that control of the courts was the key to victory in the culture wars, to rolling back gay rights, banning abortion, curbing environmentalism and so on.
Leading up to Trump’s election in 2016, it became clear that the religious right as a whole had embraced Christian nationalism, as a result of this decades-long campaign to merge American and Christian identities. Trump’s entire political career — from the time he started campaigning for office to the present day, has been marked by rallies and conventions where eager audiences of evangelical Christians are told over and over that America is and always has been a Christian nation, that the Bible is on the verge of being outlawed. More recently they are also hearing that the 2020 election was stolen. These gatherings are not open debates or discussions on policy or facts; rather, they are meant to be displays of loyalty to the message and the leaders who are professing that message to the crowds.
The threat of Christian nationalism today
The result is full-fledged Christian nationalism, which couldn’t be expressed more perfectly, or more loudly, than what we saw on January 6, 2021. The movement has followed a long, dark, and twisted path, from Truman urging the country to go back to church as a line of defense against communism, to what we saw that day: thousands of mostly middle-class white Americans attempting to break into the chambers of Congress, where the election results were being confirmed, in an effort to declare Trump president for a second term.
The January 6 rally to “Stop the Steal” opened with a prayer given by Paula White, a televangelist preacher and Trump’s longtime spiritual advisor. White called on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour” and to “let every adversary against democracy, against freedom, against life, against liberty, be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.” Once inside the Senate chamber, another prayer was held, which is worth quoting at length:
Thank you, our Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building; to allow us to exercise our rights; to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs. That we will not allow the American way of the United States of America, to go down. … Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you.
In these two prayers, we can hear echoes of Truman, of Eisenhower, of Falwell and Graham and Schlafly. The theme of protecting American freedom from perceived threats of communism and atheism has never disappeared from this movement. The notion of the country being “reborn,” and returning to a mythical past not based in history at all is a core tenet of the religious right, and is central to the identity of Christian nationalists.
In order to keep the Christian-nationalist population engaged in political matters, the leaders must keep the tension high. This results in contradiction: the US needs to be both a Christian nation, and also a nation overrun with evil forces.
This reactionary element is crucial to the power of the movement. In order to keep the Christian-nationalist population engaged in political matters, the leaders must keep the tension high. This results in contradiction: the US needs to be both a Christian nation, and also a nation overrun with evil forces. Supporters must simultaneously identify with the US, while recognizing that the nation is in the grip of secularism, the gay agenda, communists, and feminism. They, as true Americans, must fight back, and take back their country. This tension was visible through various symbols, speeches, and actions taken on January 6.
Today, there are countless other examples of Christian nationalism exerting its influence, from the violent Christian-nationalist and white-supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 to far-right militia groups like the Proud Boys, who weaponize Christianity in order to advance their nationalist aims. We can point to the Christian nationalist movement as a huge supporter of Zionism and the Israeli state, and a driving force behind the current wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and violence.
We can also look to the city of Denver, where I organize with the Denver Communists, and the Drip Café, a coffee shop that we have campaigned and protested against since last year. The Drip is owned and operated by Recycle God’s Love, a right-wing church that claims homosexuality is a “sin that leads to death.” Coffeeshop churches are a new tactic gaining in popularity that bring Christian nationalist ideas into local communities in an effort to make them mainstream. They often target progressive and LGBTQ+-friendly neighborhoods such as the Santa Fe Arts District in Denver where the Drip is located.
This particular location serves as not only a coffeeshop church, but also a local hangout for other Christian nationalists and assorted right-wing scum, including two neonazis who attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
So, the Drip Café represents a local case study — a nexus of many of the factors in the history and pathology of the evangelical right.
From the beginnings of the movement in the late 1940s and continuing on to this day, the religious right has positioned itself in (sometimes violent) opposition to everything progressive and all of our goals as communists, and has created a reactionary, nationalist brand of American Christianity that isn’t seen elsewhere in the world to the same degree.
As the Christian nationalist movement continues to grow and spread its message on new platforms such as Tiktok and YouTube, it is important for us to be able to identify it and confront it directly in order to drive it out of our communities.
Image from God and Country [film] by Oscilloscope Laboratories
