In autumn 1980, I was a senior at a Christian college in California taking a course on the history of American evangelicalism. One November day, a fellow student brought a copy of the New York Times to class. With a dramatic flourish, he opened the paper and pointed to a story—“Falwell Warns Jersey Liberals at Capitol Rally”—accompanied by a picture of Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell on the steps of the Trenton State House surrounded by American flags and a church choir.
The story began:
“The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority movement, brought his mixture of church meeting and political rally to the New Jersey State House steps today. He proclaimed that his church was a ‘sleeping giant’ that was ‘standing again across this nation.’”
That class remains etched in my mind.
California in the late 1970s was a place and time in which a more radical evangelicalism, one refracted through both the Jesus-counterculture and liberation theology, held sway. Most of the students at the college read Sojourners magazine, had our consciousnesses raised by Christian feminism, and listened to evangelical rock-and-roll with lyrics that attacked capitalism and the military industrial complex and bore no resemblance to today’s praise songs. What did my friends and I do when we saw the photo of Jerry Falwell? We laughed. He seemed a buffoon, and we couldn’t believe that anyone would ever take him seriously. We had no idea what lay ahead.
This all came back to me because of another article in the New York Times—a piece published on April 6—“The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’”—that begins by describing a crowd at a political rally praying and singing praise songs. “This was not a church service,” intone the authors, “It was worship for a new kind of congregation: a right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose, whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action.” They go on to explain:
The infusion of explicitly religious fervor—much of it rooted in the charismatic tradition, which emphasizes the power of the Holy Spirit—into the right-wing movement is changing the atmosphere of events and rallies, many of which feature Christian symbols and rituals, especially praise music.
With spiritual mission driving political ideals, the stakes of any conflict, whether over masks or school curriculums, can feel that much larger, and compromise can be even more difficult to achieve. Political ambitions come to be about defending God, pointing to a desire to build a nation that actively promotes a particular set of Christian beliefs.