The Christian Right's New Soul-Searching: Politics vs. Culture

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

The Republican-bashing by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins in our interview last week suggests the religious right has entered a period of soul-searching over its role in American politics and within the GOP. This reflective posture follows the end of a 25-year ascent for the movement that began with the launch of Moral Majority and the election of Ronald Reagan and culminated with the re-election of George W. Bush.

This isn't the first time the religious right has found itself in the wilderness and wondering about the way forward. In the late 1990s, after the Democrats picked up seats in the 1998 election despite the Monica Lewinksy scandal, the movement started wondering aloud if it should withdraw from politics and focus more on changing the culture around issues like abortion and gay rights.

A few lines from my Perkins interview evoke that same question, including when he said:

The change is that social conservatives are still committed to the issues and still involved in the political process, but don't see the GOP as the only means to affect things in this culture.

Perkins also emphasized on culture over politics in a couple of lines that I cut from the initial interview:

It's more about changing and impacting the culture. We'll see more sustainable change through impacting the culture.

Christian right granddaddy Paul Weyrich advanced a similar argument in the 1999, including in a widely circulated letter to fellow conservatives:

...[P]olitics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.

    That's why I am in the process of rethinking what it is that we, who still believe in our traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, can and should do under the circumstances.

Of course, the Christian right returned to politics with gusto, and to great effect, in the 2000s, suggesting that the movement's current politics vs. culture quandary represents the continuation of a boom/bust cycle rather than the dawn of a new era.

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