When the Religious Right Almost Turned Left: Born-Again Activism before the Moral Majority

Prior to the formation of the Moral Majority and the construction of the Reagan coalition, evangelical Protestants lacked both definition and coherence as a bloc of the electorate.  Many in the North comprised Nixon’s Silent Majority, a group that by its very name was amorphous, and by which some Nixon aides hoped to attract evangelicals in the South.  Yet, as natural as the historical progression seems from the Billy Graham and the Silent Majority to Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, much of the visible political energy among evangelical Protestants during the 1970s was actually more liberal than conservative.  The most successful evangelical politician of the decade was Senator Mark Hatfield, who attracted a following among evangelicalism’s college students and Christian college faculty to forge, though much subdued, the born-again Protestant equivalent of campus radicalism. 

This paper explores the 1970s interlude of evangelical political experimentation on the liberal side of the American political spectrum.  It does so to raise serious reservations about identifying evangelicals as a part of the conservative constituency.  The style and substance of the evangelical left—a marked reliance on Scripture and the example of Jesus—would also become staples of the Religious Right’s rhetoric.  Meanwhile, whether conservative or liberal, evangelicals paid little attention to the traditions of American politics, from federalism and constitutionalism to the Great Society and supply-side economics.  Instead, evangelicals preferred to persuade in the name of biblical morality and ideals.  For this reason, evangelical Protestants were an odd fit in the Reagan coalition and the recent rise of figures like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Richard Cizik to take the spotlight from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson is not surprising from the perspective of evangelical political engagement between 1968 and 1979.