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Jacob's Ladder to the White House
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14597 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1988 |
4,232 Words |
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Carl F.H. Henry
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Is America moving toward a conservative social revolution?
Yes, say Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, students of the contemporary religious scene and of the New Christian right.
The authors of Televangelism, Power, and Politics are respected sociology professors, Hadden at the University of Virginia and Shupe at the University of Texas, Arlington. Hadden is former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Both have focused their efforts on studies dealing with the duration or ultimate intensity of the conservative movement in America.
The conservative political and religious surge is more than a reaction to the liberal social forces that have dominated the American scene for more than two decades, they say. It arrests to the national and regional power of patriotic concerns, like the need for private and public virtue, to motivate the masses to energetic political engagement.
Whatever becomes of Pat Robertson's campaign for the presidency--and the two sociologists do not rule out a major political surprise--the New Christian Right coordinates elements powerful enough to shape a cultural revolution that is already "pulling America back to religion and traditional values." The social movement that makes possible Robertson's quest for the White House "will not soon recede. Robertson's bid for the presidency may be premature, but there will be other evangelical candidates, perhaps even better qualified, to do battle with the secular political establishment in America."
The liberal Left, not the conservative Right, Hadden and Shupe emphasize, is out of touch with the American mainstream.
Building on the widespread loss of confidence in liberal philosophy, Ronald Reagan legitimated the conservative alternative, and religious leaders brought national momentum to its emphasis on family values, school prayers, strong national defense, and free enterprise as "the economic system most compatible with Christianity."
Liberal social critics portrayed America as a liberal mainstream flanked on one side by conservative fanatics and on the other by underprivileged "other Americans." The liberal wing identified itself as politically centrist, and depicted vocal conservatives as victims of paranoia, and as extremist "fundamentalists" out of touch with the real world, given to outmoded beliefs and peculiar lifestyles, hostile to science and intolerant of progress. The "other Americans," liberals contended, are the neglected poor blacks, and other minority victims of prejudice.
But the real American mainstream adheres to the conservative movement's belief in absolute values, in a supernatural God, and in the relevance of sin and repentance to national life.
"Perhaps the greatest mistake of liberal commentators," say Hadden and Shupe, is "the myth" that the conservatives are "a tiny but vocal remnant of a rear-guard movement eventually destined to wither away." To the contrary, Gallup polls indicate that Americans who consider themselves born again increased from thirty million in 1980 to thirty-five million in
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