The Christian Right, like every other political sector, has its ups and downs and detours. And yet it is an oddity of contemporary instant punditry that every blip is treated as proof of the death of a movement that has been said to have died so many times that I have lost count. These days, the Christian Right is undiminished. But still, some of its leaders are freaking out that things are not quite going as planned.
Indeed, once upon a time, the likes of megachurch pastor Rick Warren were supposed to ring in an era of moderately styled Christian Righties. Oh, just as antiabortion and anti-LGBTQ rights of course, but they were thought to be better salesmen for the cause. Even Barack Obama got Warren to agree to give the invocation at his first inaugural, rightly causing many of those who had elected him to feel betrayed. It was a sour note at an uplifting moment in our history.
Fast forward to our corrosive political moment. Those who brought the Christian Right into the mainstream of public life generally, and the Republican Party in particular, may be wondering if they did the right thing. Here is an excerpt from my new post at Political Research Associates, titled, Trump, Cruz, & Dominionism: Some Christian Right Leaders Fear a Crack-Up:
The 2016 Republican presidential campaign has transformed American politics, likely forever. Everyone is making adjustments, but two recent illuminating episodes suggest that some Christian Right leaders are finding the changes to be unusually awkward and challenging.
The Christian Right, as a voting bloc, has never united behind a single candidate during the Republican presidential primaries (with the exception of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s unopposed second-term races). Still, we tend to forget that the movement has never been monolithic and that there have always been political tensions between rival candidates and factions. But the factional tensions are different this year. And there are two main reasons for this.
The first tension is related to the unique, and uniquely divisive, candidacy of Donald Trump. Evangelical think tanker Michael Cromartie, in a curiously overwrought speech, widely-discussed in the evangelical press, has gone so far as to call it a conservative “crack-up.” The second is the specter of Dominionism as it relates to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his campaign.
The Christian Post recently reported on the eyebrow-raising remarks of evangelical think tanker Michael Cromartie at a luncheon sponsored by the neoconservative Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington DC. (IRD is best known for its efforts to degrade the historic communions of mainline Protestantism.) Cromartie runs the Evangelicals in Civic Life program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) in Washington, DC.
Cromartie is upset that the “new branding” of evangelicalism and the Christian Right is being ruined by evangelical and conservative leaders who support Trump. He said the movement has benefited from the rise of Jim Daly of Focus on the Family, and megachurch pastors and authors Tim Keller and Rick Warren. He believes that they better “present” the movement’s goals than such founding Christian Right figures as James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Jerry Falwell, Sr.
But this rebranding, Cromartie says, has been undone because of the pro-Trump activities of noted Southern Baptists such as megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr., and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
The Christian Post continued:
“In the last six or seven or eight years, we now have new leaders to replace those leaders, so that it’s a new branding of evangelicals in our society,” Cromartie stated. “Now, that is all out the window, ladies and gentleman, when Jerry Falwell Jr. has the audacity to come out and endorse Donald Trump, when Robert Jeffress goes on and sells his soul every week on Fox News, encouraging the candidacy of Donald Trump.”
“If this is not a crack up,” Cromartie observed,” I don’t know what it is.”
Cromartie and his cohort in the neoconservative think tank community are freaking out. I think this is less because the movement they have nurtured all these years is cracking-up, and more that they are having problems with the realization that they cannot control everything. Or at least not as much as they thought they could. At least not when it comes to power and politics.
Even the best laid plans do have a way of going astray.
The Christian Right will undoubtedly continue to morph into new forms with new expressions and in ways that may shock the aging, business suited managers who thought they had it all under control.