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May 2007

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The Distored Populism of the Christian Right

By Chip Berlet
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May 2007
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B efore and after the midterm elections in 2006, our oligarchic pundocracy declared that white Christian evangelicals had abandoned “moral values” for other issues such as the economy, jobs, political corruption, and the war in Iraq. What nitwits. For Christian evangelicals—both black and white—concern over poverty, pilfering, and peace are part of their “moral values.” So are health care and the environment. The vote shift in 2006 instead represented a transformation of their order of priorities of moral values concerns.  

Steven Waldman on BeliefNet wrote about this shift: “Keep in mind, this is not ‘religious right’ voters who shifted. It’s moderate and liberal evangelicals who were concerned about the war and corruption. They’re also conservative on gay marriage and abortion but were more worried about these other issues.” 

What I find interesting is the evidence that there is a block of white protestant evangelical voters who are swing voters who can be teased out by looking at the shift in the “God Gap” from election to election. Ideally, in the chart below, the 2000 figures would be the House Congressional vote, but I just couldn’t find them. Between 2002 and 2004 there was a plus 4 percent shift in the God Gap. Between 2004 and 2006 there was a minus 7 percent shift in the God Gap. Some analysts dismiss these numbers as too small to matter, but I disagree, especially given the importance of voting shifts in specific states that help swing national elections. 

The votes of the swing shift white Protestant evangelical voters are up for grabs in 2008. There is no reason they might not swing back to Republicans if the Democrats fail to find a message that resonates with white Protestant evangelical voters. 

A lot of these folks are working class whites who have been mesmerized by right-wing rhetoric—both religious and secular. How is this done? Thomas Frank, in his book What ’ s the Matter with Kansas , nimbly navigated the conservative scene in Kansas, but slipped when he implied that people in the white working class who vote against their apparent economic self interest did so because they didn’t really understand the complex issues. Also some, we are led to believe, are simply addled. 

There is no evidence that white evangelicals are any more stupid or crazy than the rest of us—at least in terms of percentages of the populations being studied. Nor are they simply the manipulated puppets of a Karl Rove strike force. Large groups of white evangelicals are mobilized through the rhetorical style of right-wing populism. Jean Hardisty refers to this process as “mobilizing resentment.” The common styles and frames used by a wide range of right-wing political organizers include: 

  • Dualism 
  • Apocalyptic style 
  • Conspiracism 
  • Populist anti-elite rhetoric 
  • Authoritarian assertion of
    dominance 

All of these appear across wide segments of the Christian right. Populist anti-elitism as a rhetorical style often takes the form of attacks on liberals, secularists, intellectuals, the news media, and Hollywood. Allegations that these elites are part of a vast conspiracy against the common people are frequently interwoven into the fabric of the stories that are told—sometimes with references to satanic End Times plots tied to prophecies in the book of “Revelation.” Linda Kintz, discussing dualistic apocalypticism, argues the “resonance of traditionalist conservatism, both religious and secular, is the apocalyptic narrative whose influence on the myths of American history is not new,” and she adds it “depends on fear and because fear is undependable, it must be sustained.” 

Right-wing populism often is based on racialized, patriarchal, and heterosexist narratives that buttress a sense of privilege and entitlement among a targeted audience of straight white Christian men. It tends to frame economic questions in terms of hard working producers pitted against parasites above and below. This technique was used to mobilize poor and working class whites against newly-freed black former slaves after the Civil War. It was utilized by George Wallace in his first presidential campaign and later borrowed by Richard Nixon and the Republican Party to create the “southern strategy.” It exists in stories of “welfare queens” where race need not be mentioned. Ironically, today racial anti-elite populist rhetoric is used by Republicans to invert the historical account and claim that the Democratic Party is the enemy of true civil rights. 

There is also a natural historic congruence between the Calvinist-based theology of many white evangelicals, and the ideology of free markets and less government regulation fostered by the Republican Party. Doug Henwood points out that  the work of historian Richard Hofstadter (despite accurate criticisms of some of his overly-broad conclusions) helps explain this connection: “Hofstadter underscores the radical departure of the New Deal from the individualist roots of historic American social and political movements for something much more collective. That kind of collectivism, which lasted into the 1970s, is exactly what the New Right has been trying to reverse all along and they’ve accomplished a good bit of the task. 

“Hofstadter’s emphasis on the individualism of American white Protestantism is highly relevant now—it illuminates what’s the matter with Kansas, since American white Protestants love ‘the market’ as an instrument of reward and discipline. That love is not some recent confidence trick perpetrated by Karl Rove, but has deep roots.” 

Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block identify this as part of the growth of “market fundamentalism” as an ideology promoted by conservatives. They studied two examples of legislation—in 1834 and 1966—in which “existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones.” They concluded that, “Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by ‘the perversity thesis’—a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poor’s condition from ‘poverty to perversity.’ 

“…[S]tructural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfare’s perverse incentives on poor people themselves—they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop longterm dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology.” 

Many white working class voters, and even white middle class voters can be persuaded at times to vote against their arguable economic self interest by appealing to their sense of morality and casting “family values” and “moral values” in terms of societal struggles over issues such as gay rights, gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, and pornography. 

In any election, sometimes social issues trump economic issues, sometimes economic issues trump social issues—and how Republicans and Democrats are perceived by Christian evangelical voters who are weighing the pull of those two sets of issues can determine the outcome of an election. 

According to sociologist S. Wojciech Sokolowski: “What is at stake here is not reason vs. irrationality or stupidity but different cognitive frames that manifest themselves, among other things, by a preference for bucolic rural life or for urban diversity. Both are pre-rational, that is, they frame and direct the rational thought process. 

“So if we drop the charge of irrationalism, Hofstadter’s thesis that traditional American culture tends to be anti-urban and rather local, with all the accoutrements of that localism—navel gazing, suspicion of outsiders, suspicion of high culture, suspicion of big organizations and government, love of small business, religiosity, etc.—still stands.” 

S okolowski stresses the interplay of factors with a basic right- wing frame, the “perception of imminent danger,” which creates a need to organize for “safety and protection.” According to Sokolow- ski, this fear factor activates a strong response when added to the constellation of other beliefs of the right: “The Manichean dualism of good and evil, right and wrong, us and them; the vision of apocalyptic battle between good and evil; the need for vigilance and unquestioned support of ‘our’ side and a militant posture toward ‘them.’” Sokolowski explains that “only within the context of their perception of an imminent threat do their activities and rhetoric appear as rational defensive reactions rather than wanton aggression.” 

It is this very unique way of perceiving the world that drives the Christian right to engage in a guerilla culture war against mainstream society—seen as increasingly sinful, secular, cynical, and threatening. 

What we see from the detailed studies of polls is that a small, but important, segment of the white Christian right can rise above this frame. The inside-the-beltway brains advising the Democratic Party, however, have decided that caving in to white right-wing evangelicals is a better way to attract votes than doing actual grassroots organizing. As you read this, they are crafting messages that signal a willingness to barter away basic human rights tied to abortion and GLBTQ equity. This is morally wrong, Constitutionally unacceptable, and totally unnecessary. 

Instead, we need to reframe the debate to focus on crafting equitable, ethical, and effective approaches to poverty, health care, the environment, war, and education in a way that appeals to the already existing moral values shared by most Americans. In this way we can continue to shift the God Gap in our favor while gaining an opportunity to talk face to face with Christian evangelicals about our disagreements over abortion and gay rights—without backing down on these issues. 

Z  


Chip Berlet is senior analyst at Political Research Associates. The views expressed here are his own. This article grew out of his research for “Running Against Sodom and Osama” written with Pam Chamberlain (www.publiceye.org). 

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