Snapshots of Change on the Right

The search for radical tools to save a culture.

Save this culture? Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash

In the spring of 1986, my family went to a political fundraiser for the first and only time.

A man we knew was running in the Republican primary for the California Assembly. That spring was the peak of Reagan Republicanism, with conservatives taking over the party across the nation. People thought California would have Republican governors until Jesus comes. And our guy from church was headed to the state legislature. So, even though we were bystanders to evangelical political activism, we joined the die-hards to support him in a tall Victorian mansion straight out of Anne of Green Gables.

Abortion had been Topic A for a long time. But, as a teenager listening to these Republican true believers, I was struck by a new development—Operation Rescue, the latest fad to blow through our church. Since abortion is murder, they said, Christians were obligated to commit civil disobedience to prevent it.

I was listening to church people compare their arrest records between sips of lemonade. Middle-aged men in pale blue sport coats and women in flowered dresses with floofy shoulders were acting like they finally had a reason to do sit-ins like hippies. They were leaving the mainstream pro-life movement behind, these avant-garde evangelicals surrounded by country wallpaper and Victorian chairs from Penney’s.

Looking back, Operation Rescue was a portent of what would happen when overconfident political evangelicals realized their impotence. They would search for ever more radical measures to save American culture. The religious right would get larger, and the number of bystanders at church would shrink. But one question would never be answered: What exactly was this culture the religious right wanted to save?

Over the next twenty years, evangelicals’ political confidence would go on several rounds of steroids before collapsing.

One round was the launch of Rush Limbaugh’s national career out of KFBK in Sacramento. He was funny with an edge. Evangelicals liked that edge. He went to New York in 1989. By 1994 Rush was considered a leader in the Republican party. This mobilization of media for conservatives would continue with the establishment of Fox News and an ecosystem of websites.

Evangelicals didn’t have to watch the mainstream media anymore. Our guy would tell us the news. Still, how did we know Rush was “our guy?”

I noticed two things in those days.

First, Rush’s style previewed edgier preaching in churches, mostly in the resurgence of Reformed theology—Calvinism, for those of you in Rio Linda. Conferences in this movement got a little rowdy. In 1996, I went to one in Wheaton, IL, where John MacArthur called out J. I. Packer in absentia for endorsing a book that was charitable toward Muslims. The room erupted in cheers. Finally, someone was telling the truth! (A rising young Alistair Begg defended Packer, to murmurs of conciliatory but not quite repentant assent.)

At the end of the first day, eminent preachers were seated at individual tables throughout a large room so attendees could meet them. The line to meet MacArthur stretched the length of the room and out the door. Meanwhile, you could have a lengthy one-on-one conversation with James Montgomery Boice. Which I did.

A hard, radical edge now equaled courage—another way of saying that celebrity had become self-validating among evangelicals.

But secondly, I saw something that should have shaken evangelical confidence. Rush’s celebrity was blending audiences that were not really compatible.

The summer before I was married, I got stuck in my landlady’s living room talking with her relatives at some birthday party. This was a fairly rough crowd. Another tenant in the house worked at the processing plant down the road pulling the guts out of dead chickens. He got scared when he was caught in flagrante with the boss’s wife. The landlady herself had frequent overnight guests who would grin at me in the hall the next morning. That kind of thing.

So, when the relatives showed up with beer, they started talking to me about Rush. Between swigs, with censorable language and progressively louder voices, they recited their favorite parts of that day’s monologue and improvised a few bits of their own: feminazi jokes, slams against democrats, rants about how the nation’s family values were going down the tubes.

Family values?

Except for the slurred vulgarities, they sounded a lot like the guys in pale blue sport coats at church. But for them sex had more to do with Penthouse than marriage. I was looking at the phenomenon Charles Murray would later document in Coming Apart. Whole sections of America extolled traditional marriage but didn’t live it. Like Rush himself.

If Rush’s two audiences ever met, who would yield to whom?

Would the porn-and-patriotism bunch clean up their act around the church people? Or would the church people drop their standards? Which culture would be saved?

I knew the answer that evening in 1991. Celebrity would continue to draw people together, and evangelicals would yield to celebrity. When I went into ministry three years later, this memory warned me that the battle for Christian discernment was already lost. Nobody knew what culture they were trying to save, much less how to save it.

The confidence of political evangelicals suffered a blow when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. They were appalled. Clinton could be the end of America. The religious right grew, while the bystanders shrank. But with the growth of the politically active, evangelicals’ sense of their own impotence only became more pervasive.

I began hearing about militias. Business owners would go to meetings and talk about their weekend weapons training, which would enable them to defeat the Chinese who would soon attack in black helicopters. In meetings with Reformed pastors, over bad coffee and worse doughnuts, some were passing around biographies of Stonewall Jackson and giving little homilies saying the South had been the bulwark of Christianity against the godless North. When I became pastor of a church in California at the end of the Clinton years, the adult class on Sunday mornings had become a political gripe session—with declining attendance.

The religious right did get another round of confidence steroids from George W. Bush’s administration. But it was short-lived.

At one level, evangelicals were on top. Bush was the most evangelical Republican around, speaking openly about his faith in Christ in a way that Reagan or George H. W. Bush never did. After 9-11, the ethos of the military and first responders fit perfectly with that of most churches. Further, evangelicals were electorally victorious on issues like gay marriage—at least in 2004.

The dominance of the megachurch was a key part of this political success. With good entertainment and a low bar of commitment, a megachurch could assemble a couple thousand people to hear a candidate, sign petitions, or mobilize for a cause. It featured elaborate, close-knit networks that wielded regional influence. By 2006, Mark Halperin and John F. Harris in The Way To Win documented that Bush 43 and Karl Rove had built national campaigns using megachurches both as a model and a base.

For many believers, with our culture being saved, it felt natural to project the cross and the American flag together on the megachurch’s big screen.

A little too natural. Under the surface, I saw problems.

I was a pastor in one of the zip codes that sent young people to the military. I saw how they left for Afghanistan and Iraq. I also saw how they returned. They left patriotic. They returned suspicious of American institutions. Many expressed contempt for political leaders of both parties, cynicism about the Pentagon, cold hatred of reporters, and a certainty that dark forces were at work. Their loyalty often became strictly horizontal: I’m with my people. Full stop.

When I listened to their stories, I couldn’t blame them.

They had seen one reality on the streets of the Middle East, another in the orders they got from top generals, and still another in TV and print journalism. They knew somebody was lying. Maybe everybody. When they returned to civilian life, they found Americans almost completely unaffected by the wars. They often saw civilians as selfish, soft, and corrupt. Alternate realities assaulted them everywhere they went—church, business, college—but no one was open to the reality they had just been through, either the bad or the good.

The flag and the cross still glowed on the same screen as the megachurch party reached its climax. But while the band played, men stood silent with their hands in their pockets.

Another problem under the surface for political evangelicals was the economy.

My church was rural. A future archaeologist will be able to track the history of American recessions just by digging up the neighborhoods in Orland, CA. Our town was the last to see new housing developments during the boom times, and the first to see foreclosures during the busts. You can see street after street where the nice houses stop and subsidized houses start.

There were few thriving businesses, few jobs that paid a living wage, and fewer that didn’t require hours on the freeway watching your earnings go up in smog. If you were a trucker, you were being regulated out of business. If you were a farmer or rancher, you had to diversify your income streams. If you were a contractor, you were at the mercy of lenders.

And we know how that went.

As the real estate bubble started to burst in 2008, the building industry and all its associated jobs were decimated. In the coming years, a new multi-level marketing scheme called ACN swept through our town. You could become rich selling phones. But to learn how to get rich this way, you had to fly to New York and attend conferences. You could afford to put the expenses on your credit card because of how rich you would get. The celebrity at whose feet you journeyed to sit?

Donald Trump.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, many at church were beset by a sense of doom. The number of political bystanders shrank again. They started attending local Tea Party gatherings. Men would lean forward in restaurants and tell me about the concentration camps for Christians that Obama was setting up through FEMA. The women would say that the State of California was going to outlaw homeschooling, so they wouldn’t allow their kids to play outside during school hours.

We were losing our culture. It was time to fight back. But none of the politicians would fight. The churches wouldn’t fight either. Glenn Beck, who auditioned to be the new Rush for a while, said we needed “black robe regiments,” preachers who would mobilize the churches politically like they did during the Revolutionary War. The fact that Beck was Mormon didn’t bother many evangelicals. At least he would fight against gay marriage and abortion.

And that was how the stage was set in 2015, when pastors began confiding to each other that something in their churches had changed but they couldn’t figure out what.

It was simple. Believers in the religious right felt impotent. They had wanted to save the culture, but they could not find a way. They had been sure that some hero would overcome the encroaching darkness. But the heroes had all failed—the presidents, Supreme Court justices, swaggering generals, funny radio hosts, slick cable TV anchors, beloved megachurch pastors.

Instead of falling on their faces before God, confessing that in fact they had become part of the very culture they hated, and praying for the wisdom to repent, they sought a more radical hero. When people who lack agency become desperate, they will believe anything.

As it happened, our guy didn’t win the nomination for Assembly in 1986. Some RINO got in. And last time I saw it, the paint on that old mansion was peeling.