There has been much consternation about how Donald Trump gained and sustained so much support from White evangelical Christians during and since the 2016 presidential election. One of the reasons is that the movement is organized and has long played an outsized role in public life. Trump indicated that he would deliver for them in ways no one else had before. And in fact, he has delivered for them. I have maintained that it is the best organized faction in American politics, and that that is at least part of the reason for heavy Democratic electoral losses over the years.
In any case, if you want to understand the how something works, it is usually a good idea to consult the manual. That is why I was so intrigued when I obtained the Family Research Council manual for organizing church-based political committees. This is significant because the FRC is the leading Christian Right organization in Washington, DC, and has a national network of state level political affiliates it shares with Focus on the Family. So when we are talking about the base of the Christian Right, and indeed, a big chunk of the Republican Party, this is it. I tell the story of what I learned from that manual in the Winter issue of The Public Eye magazine. But if you can’t wait that long (or you are not yet a subscriber) you can read it online now. It starts like this:
In October 2017, I was perusing the exhibit area of the Values Voter Summit, the annual political conference of the Family Research Council (FRC), when I was buttonholed by John Méndez, national coordinator for the Christian Right giant’s network of church-based political committees. As a white-haired White guy in a blazer, I must have seemed like a good prospect, because he wanted to know if I was interested in forming such a committee in my church.
Originally published in 2011, the Culture Impact Team resource manual has served as the primer for church-based, Christian Right political action for the past seven years.
He reached under the display table and pulled out a box containing copies of Culture Impact Team Resource Manual: a 200-page three-ring binder of instructions and resources for setting up such groups in local churches. He gave me two copies: one for my pastor, whose buy-in would be essential for organizing a Culture Impact Team, or “CIT.” They were so bulky they barely fit in my conference tote bag. But I was glad I managed. Originally published in 2011, the manual—which includes, among other things, sample voter guides and instructions for church-based voter registration drives—has served as the primer for church-based, Christian Right political action for the past seven years. It certainly played a role in the 2016 elections, and will no doubt continue to be used for the foreseeable future.
While the manual has been promoted at other conferences and is available to download online, it’s gathered little notice beyond the Christian Right. Nevertheless, it has been an important grassroots playbook and ideological manifesto of lasting significance, serving as both the contemporary blueprint for a central element of the infrastructure of today’s Christian Right and an integrated historical and theological justifications for its political agenda.
After Donald Trump received 81 percent of the White evangelical vote in the 2016 presidential election, there was substantial polling and reporting on what issues concerned this demographic. But there was comparatively little reporting on the theological and historical justifications that underlie those issues and animate the movement more broadly. Similarly, there has not been much reporting on how the Christian Right has been organized, and how the church-based model encouraged by the manual may be playing a role.
But alongside this influence, the manual inadvertently reveals an underappreciated weakness. It illuminates the Christian Right’s dynamic political theology but also shows how its theological justifications rest in part on false historical interpretations. These assumptions, which generally fall under the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation, have become commonplace in conservative evangelical culture, even as the anti-democratic ideology and distorted historical narrative in the manual expose a cracked and vulnerable foundation that can’t support the movement forever.
There is of course, much more. But the story does not stop there. It happened that the weekend before Religious Freedom Day, Paul Rosenberg, writing at Salon and I discussed my then-forthcoming article.
we agreed that that the Christian Right generally, and the Family Research Council (FRC) in particular, is promoting the myth of a Christian nation that never was. I believe that this is a serious weakness in the justifications the Christian Right uses to advance its contemporary agenda. It is an effort to press the Framers of the Constitution into their service with the false claim that the Framers held to a certain “Christian worldview” –– and that they forged the Constitution and the First Amendment to establish and advance it.
This apparently sent the Family Research Council into rapid response mode, resulting in Family Research Council president Tony Perkins to devote the entirety of his Washington Update email to his supporters -- slamming us. Naturally, I had to reply, especially since
out of the fog of Perkins’ remarkable tangle of distortions and falsehoods, his essay inadvertently underscores my point about the weakness of the Christian nationalist claim.
Here is one example:
First, let’s note that the Christian Right generally avoids talking about the Constitution because of the well-established history that the Framers deliberately did not include anything about God, Christianity, or religion at all in the nation’s charter, except to state in Article VI that there shall be no religious tests for public office. But Perkins, writing “with the aid of FRC senior writers” rests his case with this:
Our own Constitution closes with the words, “In the year of our Lord, 1787.” That’s a reference to Jesus! The signers not only embraced Christianity, they anchored our most important document in it.
Common sense tells us that the style of the dating of a document does not define its contents or the intentions of the authors. However, historian John Fea of the evangelical Messiah College has written about this very point.
I am often asked about this reference when answering questions about my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction.
The phrase “Year of our Lord,” which is the only reference to God in the United States Constitution, was, of course, a standard eighteenth-century way of referencing the date.
Then he explains:
We know that the phrase “Year of our Lord” was not included in the draft of the Constitution that was approved by the Convention.
No one knows for sure how it got in there, but it is clear that it was added afterward, perhaps as some speculate, as a “scrivener’s touch.”
I was surprised that the FRC’s own organizing manual, a critical part of the development of their considerable electoral base, could also so illuminate the profound weaknesses of their ideology. But that, in fact, is the story.