The Christian Right -- Betrayed by Democracy

American political demographics have changed dramatically within a human lifetime. The problem for conservative American Christians is that they haven’t figured it out yet—or what it means for them and for some of their most cherished positions. It happened too fast.
Like millions my age, I grew up listening to democracy glorified off the pulpit. Preacher after preacher would tell us how blessed we were to live in a democracy, what a wonderful thing it was to live in a democratically Christian nation.
They could view it as a blessing because, forty and fifty years ago, they had the votes. It was inconceivable to them that a day might come when democracy became a two edged sword, slashing at virtues, mores and morals no longer supported by a majority of the voters.
The term “moral majority” in the early 1980s was really a plaintive question – aren’t we? It hasn’t really changed, has it? The majority of Americans still support the same positions that we do – don’t they?
To prove that things had not changed, televangelist Pat Robertson declared himself a candidate for president in 1988. I remember the fervor with which many of my fellow Christians enlisted in his cause. Then came reality. Right here in Michigan. Robertson’s wing of the Republican Party was smashed beyond retrieval at the state party convention. George H.W.Bush hammered them into the ground.
Stunned, they fell back, licking their wounds—never to be the self-confident same again. But they still could not admit that the world had changed so drastically. After all, in the 1950s, a vast majority of the body politic – however hypocritically—claimed themselves adherents to and partisans of the conservative Christian point of view. Billy Graham was a national hero.
One small case in point—in 1952 and 1956, conservative Christians made a point of not voting for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, because he had been divorced. This contributed in no small part to the Eisenhower landslides in those years.
Today, it is the Republican candidate who once upon a time walked away from “the wife of his youth” and married an attractive and rich younger woman. Not even a whisper of criticism on the point. Too many of the rest of us have been divorced and remarried.
In the 1950s if I knew any homosexuals they were well closeted. I never heard anyone speak of it. I think I reached twenty-one, the age of legal maturity, without every hearing the word “abortion”. I certainly never knew of anyone who had one. We drank enough beer to keep the Monitor afloat, but no one I knew ever used narcotics.
We had the votes. In Grand Rapids there was only one drugstore open on Sundays—and it rotated throughout the city. When we went to the movies, even married couples slept in double beds and kissed chastely. (Some foreign types were sneaking in movies with subtitles and naked women in them—but you had to hunt to find them.) We had the votes.
No department stores, hardware stores, supermarkets or clothing stores were open on Sunday. Professional football was a fairly minor sport – possibly because it was played on Sunday when many of us were forbidden to watch it. We had the votes.
“Suddenly” it’s changed. We don’t have the votes. We seem to be back in some kind of pre-Christian era where there is no accepted standard of (Christian) morality. Now democracy bites. We simply do not have the votes any more—and Christians don’t know how to adapt to this.
They deny it. They talk of majorities that simply do not exist any more. They demand of (largely Republican) candidates adherence to standards that cannot command a winning margin in general elections. They become furious when those candidates make the least concession to reality.
The political American world has changed. Democracy is no longer automatically our friend. So how do we function as a minority in a world that no longer espouses our most cherished beliefs? That is the great question facing conservation American Christendom.
I’ll write more on that tomorrow.