That depends on what you mean by "evangelical." American evangelical Protestantism has deep roots, going back maybe to the Puritans, certainly to the Great Awakening of the 18th century. The modern term "evangelical" applies to moderate theological conservatives -- people like Billy Graham, say. That only becomes common in the 1950s. So it depends on which type of evangelical you want to talk about. I think evangelicals, in the broad sense, have always been involved in politics. One of the oddest alliances in American political history was fighting against the British for independence. It consisted of Enlightenment deists -- people like Jefferson -- who were strongly pro-independence, and a lot of the heirs to the Great Awakening, who were also strongly pro-independence. They didn't agree on much else, but that they agreed on. It seems to me that the modern form of evangelicalism, broadly speaking, has its roots at about the same time as Jacksonian democracy, so-called. I think if Andrew Jackson came back in politics, and Charles Grandison Finney came back in evangelicalism, a lot of what they see now would be perfectly intelligible. The Democrats are the more secular party, of course. Evangelicalism in that sense is really kind of a creation of democracy. Each person can read the Bible and come up with his social conclusions, his cultural conclusions, and his political conclusions. That's something you get in 19th-century evangelicalism that you wouldn't have gotten from the Puritans, you wouldn't have gotten from Jonathan Edwards. Of course, this period in the 1820s, '30s, and '40s produces, with evangelical impetus, all sorts of reform movements -- from antislavery to temperance to the peace movement. It's all over the place. So in that sense, there is nothing new about evangelicals being active in politics.
I really think American policy toward Israel is determined primarily by the administration's geopolitical concerns and also the importance of the Jewish vote. Most of the coverage of President Bush and his administration in terms of religion is way off base. One of the national news magazines said that President Bush is the most religious president in modern times. Well, that would have to mean that modern times began either in 1981 or in 1989, because Carter and Reagan, in their ways, were at least as religious as President Bush.
Is it possible to be both liberal and evangelical?
It is possible to be liberal and evangelical. And if we use "evangelical" in the broadest sense and went back to the early years of the 20th century, there were lots of evangelical Protestants advocating what we would now call liberal issues -- economic issues in the progressive era. In practical terms, for a variety of historical circumstances, most evangelicals, and certainly fundamentalists, are now politically conservative. That's partly because liberalism has gotten to be culturally as well as economically more liberal -- with abortion, gay rights, and so forth -- and partly because political conservatives have really shrewdly courted the evangelical and fundamentalist communities.
Does the GOP have a lock on evangelicals, by and large?
I can't see anything that will change that in the foreseeable future, short of some extraordinary disaster, such as a Great Depression, for instance. If you go back to, say, 1928, when all really devout Protestants opposed Al Smith, to one degree or another, you find that some people we would now call evangelicals voted for that Catholic candidate because they were more concerned about the price of wheat, or preserving segregation. And it's not impossible that some heavy secular issue would trump moral and religious concerns. But I don't see that occurring in the near term.
For many people, the spokesmen of evangelicals would be Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. But do you think it's more complicated than that -- that there are evangelicals who don't think they are good spokesmen at all, or don't represent their views?
In a lot of polls, many evangelicals are skeptical of polarizing figures like Falwell or Robertson. We've also got to remember that leaders come and go; organizations come and go. The key organization of the Christian Right in the early '80s was Falwell's Moral Majority. Then, after his presidential effort fizzled in '88, Robertson built the Christian Coalition. That's pretty much down the drain. But there is still a grassroots, evangelical, fundamentalist culture out there that has a strong conservative political tilt. And even in those years when national religious issues don't make the front page of THE NEW YORK TIMES or the network news, there still are these battles going on all over the place about sex education, about condoms in schools. That was even going on in the 1950s about some different issues (though sex education was there), before the Christian right was fully built.
The evangelical congressman I spoke with also said that it has become almost an obligation for evangelicals to become involved in politics. Do you think that's an overstatement?
It depends on what you mean by "involved in politics." Certainly, most evangelicals, like most other people, are not intensely active between elections. Many evangelicals and fundamentalists just don't vote, as a lot of the rest of us just don't vote. I think there's no doubt that leading evangelical and fundamentalist figures would like the whole rank and file to be particularly active, but I don't think there's much sign that they're more active than the population as a whole, and maybe even a little less.
Would it be fair to say that evangelicals represent the core constituency of the GOP?
I think we can now say that evangelicals are as solidly a core constituency of the Republican Party as blacks are solidly a constituency of the Democratic Party. Twenty-five years ago, we would have said that labor was a solid Democratic constituency, but it's not anymore. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are much more solid as Republicans than the white working class is solidly Democratic. That's been quite a change in a quarter century.
What would be required to get the evangelicals to switch to the Democratic Party?
A quick shift, I think, would require something cataclysmic. Political evolution happens. We would not have expected so many theologically moderate Republicans to switch to the Democratic Party on cultural issues, but that has happened, bit by bit, over the last 20 to 25 years. I have a number of evangelical students, no fundamentalists, at a cosmopolitan, secular university. It strikes me how much they are as complicated as anybody else. They go out on dates and sometimes drink beer, but they are considerably more reflective than the stereotype of the evangelical. And a new generation is going to develop, as new generations always develop. My guess is that the cultural shouting matches are going to get a little less loud, unless there is some extraordinary apocalypse.
Should John Kerry spend much of his time courting evangelicals?
I think it would be a political waste of time for Kerry to try to court evangelicals. Clinton, on the basis of his style, did much better among evangelicals than did Michael Dukakis, for example. But I don't think Kerry can manage to do that at all, particularly with southern evangelicals. There was the joke that Michael Dukakis could not have carried the South with Robert E. Lee on his ticket. I think that probably will also apply to Senator Kerry.
Do you think that politics has in some ways watered down the evangelical theology?
I think American culture has watered down the evangelical theology. Let me give a specific example. If you went back to the advocates of Bible prophecy in the 1920s, they almost all would have said that very few of us will be saved, and lots of us will have to suffer through the tribulation. If you look at the prevailing versions of Bible prophecy now, it's [that] the best of us will be raptured up, and we won't have to suffer. That's a softer view of the end times as the society is softer, more lax in general, than it was in the 1920s.
How did evangelical Republicans become a solid bloc?
It happened for a variety of reasons: the '60s drove all of these cultural issues to the fore -- sex, drugs, rock and roll, and that helped to mobilize evangelicals and give them a sense of threat. Ironically, they were also mobilized by Jimmy Carter, who thought he could win that constituency and keep it. He won it in '76, to a larger degree than Democrats usually do. Carter was the first Democrat since Harry Truman to carry the Southern Baptists. But the evangelicals discovered soon enough that, though Carter had an evangelical style and called himself an evangelical, he was theologically and politically much more [liberal] than they had hoped. So there was this constituency out there that could be drawn over to the Republicans. And Reagan worked on it very hard. So, by the time we get to 1984, we get roughly the same voting percentage we have now of evangelicals and fundamentalists for Republicans. And if something has been part of a constituency for 20 years, you have to say it's pretty solid.
Will evangelicals stick with President Bush perhaps longer than the rest of the country on the war in Iraq?
I think evangelical leaders will stick with President Bush much more firmly than the rest of the country. The evangelical rank and file, where you have a lot of families with troops in combat, may begin to ask questions about the merits of the war that would transcend any theological predispositions.
What impact did President Clinton have in the history of evangelicals in politics?
In the medium term, say 25 years, Clinton didn't play much of a role. He certainly angered evangelicals and other cultural conservatives. Falwell came up with all sorts of peculiar conspiracy theories. But I don't think [Clinton] affected the pattern of their votes over the medium term. He was just a target. Both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were favorite targets for evangelicals because, without question, they were the culturally most liberal president and First Lady ever -- much more so than the previous Democrats, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. Carter was personally opposed to abortion. Clinton said so, but that didn't ring true. Hillary Clinton was much more a feminist wife than Rosalyn Carter. So I think Clinton provided an extraordinarily apt target, even before the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But I don't think that's changed the general trend of evangelical-fundamentalist voting.
So he didn't draw that many evangelical voters, even though he is one himself?
Is Bill Clinton an evangelical? I doubt very much that Bill Clinton is an evangelical. "Born again" has become such a throwaway term; it doesn't mean very much. People who say they are born again surely would have not passed the test of Jonathan Edwards, let alone Cotton Mather.
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