Shaping the GOP: The Evolution of Evangelical Influence

Welcome to the

Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, for a wonderful, cooler evening, meaning it's like 85 instead of 95.

And I am just sitting out in my yard listening to the crickets and enjoying a very slight breeze and it doesn't get any better.

Maybe 10 degrees lower would be a little better, but at least I don't have sweat dripping from my face as I make this, which is an improvement over what it would have been earlier if I had come out here and done it.

But I've been inside. I've been working on a number of things. I know I've been putting out a lot of content lately and I don't want people to get used to that because I can't sustain that with some of the other projects.

But I thought it was important enough for me to make this video because today

I've been keeping my ear to the ground. I've been looking at what people are saying online and I've been posting some of my own stuff and I'm actually going to share with you some of what

I've been posting. But I've noticed that there's a lot of discouragement out there. There's a lot of anger.

I think there's some righteous indignation, sure, to be had about what happened at the GOP convention last night.

But I want to put it in perspective. I want to give you some encouragement because I think that it's a little surprising and maybe

I shouldn't be. It's a little surprising given what we've seen over the last 10, 20, 30, even 40 years to be looking at yesterday and to think, you know, man, it's just, it's so bad in the

GOP. And I'm thinking, well, yeah, yeah, it's, I've been watching the RNC convention my whole life.

And I mean, at least since I can remember, since I was interested in politics and it's always been pretty cringey.

And yesterday was no exception to that. So, you know, thank you, Captain Obvious. Right.

But I want to point out some of the changes that I do see because there are some changes and where I think

Christians are making a difference, can make a difference. And I want to make the argument to you that the conditions are really ripe right now for a second moral majority, second religious right,

I guess I should say. Moral majority is more specifically Jerry Falwell's organization. So I don't really mean that, but a religious right.

And I think we're seeing that to some extent. And I think it can be a smarter, more effective religious right in some ways, given what we've learned over the last few decades.

And I'm going to share with you what I think we should be learning. So this is something that I wrote on X and then

I posted it to Facebook and Gab and YouTube. And I understand American Reformers going to create an article out of it.

So I don't know if that's out yet or not, but you can try to go there and see if it's there in a more cleaned up form.

But the title that I gave to this article is Shaping the GOP, the Evolution of Evangelical Influence.

And I want to give a shout out before I even write this, William Wolfe actually made a really good thread too that is somewhat along these lines.

This is a longer historical explanation, but William Wolfe really gives a good kind of bare bones.

This is the position Christians find themselves in. Set your expectations accordingly. I want to flesh out a longer understanding of why

I think we are in a position where, let's just face it, our

Christian leaders have led us to believe they have, I think, more influence than they really did for a number of decades.

And because of that, maybe for some of us, our expectations were set a little higher than they should be.

And so I want to set them where they should be while giving the hope that, look, we can make a huge difference here.

So let's start at the beginning. And the beginning for me with this story is the early 1970s.

To understand how evangelicals with their social concerns fit into the GOP establishment, you need to understand from the 1970s forward what's taken place.

The relationship you are used to between the religious right and the Republican Party did not always exist.

In fact, in the early 1970s, West Gramburg -Michelson reported that, quote, And he wrote this in 1976.

This is before, this is on the eve, really, but this is just before the religious right comes into prominence.

And that was in Sojourner's Magazine. Mainstream evangelicals like Carl Henry, the founding father of New Evangelicalism, Paul Reese of World Vision, and Foy Valentine of the

Southern Baptist Convention. He was actually in charge of the forerunner of the ERLC. They all signed the leftist

Chicago Declaration. And if you want to see something truly social justice, go read the Chicago Declaration. And you'll be surprised.

You think 1973? This seems like 2020. Yeah, yeah, it's been going on for that long. Valentine even helped the

SBC pass a resolution that maintained abortion was permissible in some cases. In 1976,

Jim Wallace predicted that more Christians would come to the view that through Marxist eyes, to view the world, rather, through Marxist eyes, due to young evangelicals and their zeal for social change.

Now neither abortion nor homosexuality were that much of a concern for these people.

And a contemporary observer at the time, Richard Kubedo, believed young evangelicals were trending left.

Now, does that sound foreign to you? Because it should a little bit. Like, if you haven't studied this, evangelicals were trending left?

Yeah, in the early 70s, some people thought evangelicals are going to the left. The Republican Party, or the conservative movement,

I should say, doesn't have a monopoly on them. Now, it's important to understand that these progressive evangelicals were primarily made up of aspiring elites and a different group from non -elites who mobilized politically in the 1980s.

So there's two groups I'm trying to say. There's what made up the Moral Majority and the 700

Club and all that stuff. The evangelical right, you know, the forerunners of that.

That's one group. That's a populist group. But then you have a group of more elite -minded evangelicals.

And David Shorts reports that well over two -thirds of the evangelical left held education, social service, and religious jobs, meaning they were in elite positions.

They were in influential positions where they were on their way to those positions. And I've made the argument in my first book on social justice,

Social Justice Goes to Church, that that crop of evangelicals, those young evangelicals, those elites from the early 70s, had a big impact on the people like Russell Moore and David Platt and others who have pushed the needle left in more recent years in evangelicalism.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I just want to point out in the 1970s, late 70s, and then really the early 80s more so, there were two groups.

And the group that had the upward mobility, the strength, and eventually became known as the religious right was the populist group.

Now the ideological narrowness of the first movement I mentioned, the evangelical left, made it hard for them to appeal to working -class people, which eventually composed the populist religious right.

So they had identity politics tearing them apart. You had Jimmy Carter's failed presidency.

And then the replacement of what Aaron Wren calls positive world with neutral world, meaning we went from Christianity being the influential default setting to now supposedly a neutral setting for all religions.

I would say that's where the Republican Party still is. And they've been there since that time. The Democrat Party was first to embrace the neutral world.

But when the Republican Party really started to embrace that, I would say was probably more in the 90s, but they both went that direction.

And the reality of this is what gave us the religious right. Now in reaction to the

Equal Rights Amendment and issues that began filtering into local communities such as ending school prayer, abortion, homosexual adoption, equal protection, and religious tax exemption, rank and file evangelicals started organizing groups to represent their concerns.

Throughout the 1990s, religious right populism was institutionalized and integrated into the

GOP machine where their concerns were acknowledged, even while they were kept out of elite ranks where Roman Catholics mainly dominated.

The unofficial arrangement between these two groups represented a deal that must be understood if one is to make sense of current conditions, which is what we're trying to do.

So the Christian Coalition led by Ralph Reed, I think became the quintessential organization to represent this fusion.

They were influential. They were very political. It was different than the moral majority, which was more of a coalition of pastors like this.

This was they were helping with campaigns. They were putting mailers out there. Some of it was actually quite sophisticated, taking surveys in churches, finding out where people align, sending them unique, tailored to them messages so that they could mobilize them for their cause.

Now, Reed offered Republican campaigns, evangelical resources, mailing lists and volunteers in a cooperative effort to elect candidates.

The Christian Coalition, backed by establishment George Bush in 1990, instead of the populist

Pat Buchanan. So the Christian Coalition ends up making a deal. And I think a lot of stuff comes down to what happened in 1990, because throughout the 80s, it's a it's a groundswell of populist support.

That's what the religious right is. It gets institutionalized in the 1990s. And that's where we get these organizations that are well staffed and they can they can fundraise well and they have galas and all this kind of thing.

That's that's where we start to see this. And I think the Christian Coalition is one of those first organizations.

But they make this mistake, in my opinion. They choose George Bush over Pat Buchanan. They choose an establishment figure over a populist figure.

And this strategic error set the religious right on a course away from its initial populist instincts and toward the pursuit of recognition by powerful elites.

Now, in return, Bush and Dan Quayle signaled to the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention that they would include social issues in their platform.

And Ralph Reed, the head of the Christian Coalition, called it the most conservative and most pro -family platform in the history of the party.

So if you want to know how some of the stuff that is being watered down now on language in support of traditional marriage and anti -abortion, how that got into the

GOP platform in the first place, that's where you need to look. There was a deal cut between these these large group of Christians, evangelical voters who are represented by groups like the

Christian Coalition and then the establishment Republicans. And the establishment said, you know, we'll carry your concerns.

We'll we'll make sure that we we will recite back your talking points at times.

We'll include this. And you need to vote for us. That's that's the deal that was made. And I think one of the things you need to ask yourself is how did that deal work out for us?

How did that deal work out? Abortion was never a top concern for voters nationwide, but it did come to characterize and motivate the religious right.

One of George Bush's advisers told The New York Times in 1990 that the president would ultimately profit from sitting out the abortion fight because even if Roe v.

Wade was overturned, most states would move to restore abortion rights on their own. Sound familiar?

This is in 1990. Therefore, distancing Mr. Bush from the fallout from such a Supreme Court decision.

So this is the posture I'm going to tell you up until Trump, this is the posture I think Republicans have had.

They're going to stay out as much as they possibly can of that abortion fight. They're going to say what they need to get your votes to get elected.

And I'm not saying they didn't do some good things along the way. Mexico City policy and there are little limitations they could put in.

But they did not do what Trump ended up doing in appointing the justices and even symbolically signaling his support by going to the

March for Life, the only president to have done that. He he put, I think, the religious right in a good position to achieve that goal.

But but that's that's the ironic part, you might think, well, he's the one that's now wanting to soften abortion language.

Yeah. And I can explain to you why. But but but this gets into the difference between the establishment and the populists.

The establishment wasn't. I don't know that they were ever really that interested in doing what they said other than using the talking points to get votes.

Doesn't mean there weren't good people that were doing some good work in anti -abortion organizations or in politics, especially down ballot.

But I'm saying by and large, the elites in the party, they were embarrassed by evangelicals. They were embarrassed by pro -lifers.

Rush Limbaugh actually tells a story quite often when he was alive. He told the story of being at a meeting with a bunch of establishment

GOP types and they just kept talking negatively about evangelicals and how we got to get rid of all these

Christians. They're making us look bad and that kind of thing. And you could sense it. You didn't even have to hear it.

You just you could you knew that was going on if you were involved in politics. When Republicans pushed the 1994 contract with America, which hardly mentioned homosexuality and only called to end partial birth abortion, the

Christian coalition supported it. Ralph Reed said our movement is now in many ways thoroughly integrated and meshed into the machine of the

Republican Party or the machinery of the Republican Party. In the next year, he stated, we have gained what we have always sought.

Now, listen to this, a place at the table, a sense of legitimacy and a voice in the conversation.

Now, I will tell you, having a place at the table is important for one reason, really, to get things done.

That's why you want a place at the table, a sense of legitimacy, a voice in the conversation.

These are therapeutic things. These are this is that evangelical quest, which

I think Mark Knoll captures. Is it Mark Knoll? I think it's Mark Knoll who wrote a book in I think it was like mid 90s about this, about evangelicals.

And, you know, basically they're just not intellectual enough. And we we just we need to get our act together because we're not accepted in the elite institutions.

And it's our own fault and that kind of thing. And I just think that I think it's called the scandal of the evangelical mind or something like that.

But I just think this is what evangelicals have always been about. This is what I've seen in seminary. Every institution

I've been at, to be honest with you, I've seen glimpses of this where there's just this desire to be loved by other institutions that have influence and power.

And it's like you don't even maybe get your agenda passed. You don't get anything done.

But if you feel that you've been heard and you've you've your talking points are being used and you got that pat on the head, you feel good about it.

And you see this even today with evangelical elites in the political world who are now mostly veering left, it seems, or a lot of them,

I shouldn't say mostly, but a lot of them like Russell Moore, they just love when The New York Times or The Washington Post says something about what they're doing or has them on or does an interview.

It's just it's disgusting to me. So anyway, enough about that. You all know about that.

Pat Buchanan rightly observed, and this is a quote from him, quote, The coalition has given away any boldness in search for popularity and consensus.

Unquote. I think that's accurate. That's exactly what's going on and it's been going on forever.

It's that seeking the favor of people in the world, seeking the favor of people in these elite institutions.

As the 90s were on, the Christian coalition broadened its net by including Jews, Catholics and endorsing religious pluralism.

A generally watered down anti -abortion stance, coupled with a vague notion of family values became the religious rights unique trade as their leadership pursued an ever diminishing feeling of importance and influence.

Most Christians remember the history past this point. So most of you know what happened from George W.

Bush onward. I'll give you a little bit of a synopsis in my mind of what the last two decades meant.

But this is what happened before that. And it's important to know that because if you don't know what happened in the 90s, then

I think what's happening right now doesn't quite make sense. And it will when you understand that, when you understand there was a deal cut, essentially unofficially, but there was a deal cut between the religious right, this populist movement and it will wed you to the

Republican Party, will give you our votes. You just need to give us a feeling of importance. And this has been a frustration with people who have voted

Republican, who are Christians for decades. Why can't we seem to make progress? Why do we elect these people and then they don't keep their promises?

Trump was one of the first ones to somehow try to keep his promises in the minds of many. Evangelical organizations, regardless of how principles, tended to focus exclusively on certain social issues while gaining commitments from presidential candidates who do little to move the needle their direction.

The GOP conventions featured prayers from Christians along with Muslims, Sikhs, Jews and Mormons long before 2024.

In fact, on the Sikh thing, someone sent me, I think it was 2012. There was the opening prayer was by some

Sikhs. And it's like, I'm encouraged. This is one of the silver linings.

I'm encouraged that so many people today are really upset about what happened last night. There was a benediction that was a

Sikh prayer. And they're saying this is ridiculous. I can't believe we did this. Well, it's really not anything that new for the

GOP. You just didn't really care or notice before. Now you are. That's actually an improvement.

That's an improvement that this is even controversial, that this is even a discussion. So I want to point that out.

I think that's important. But this has been going on, this religious pluralist thing, and Christian leaders had their place in this arrangement, but not a monopoly on this.

Other religions also had people of faith, Judeo -Christian, these very broad terms, they all had a place.

Meanwhile, the country slid socially left, eventually leading to the election of the populist Donald Trump. How did that happen?

Well, evangelical leaders were weak on social issues that ignited Trump's campaign, including immigration, outsourcing and corruption.

You didn't hear evangelicals talk about this stuff as far as the leadership class is concerned. They talked about abortion and they would talk about sexual ethics.

They didn't talk about these other things, really. In fact, they started to talk about, especially after the evangelical immigration table, they started to talk about some of them from the left.

Throughout the 2000s, they had largely either continued to ignore or steadily softened on issues such as gun rights, globalism, immigration, the surveillance state and welfare.

Trump was never their guy, but he moved the needle for them in ways previous establishment Republicans failed to do on abortion.

So in other words, in return for their votes, Trump actually took seriously their agenda.

He took them seriously and he went ahead and he did what he did to try to end

Roe v. Wade by appointing the Supreme Court justices that he did. And he carried their,

I mean, he was the one in 2016 that even said, yeah, a woman should be punished if she seeks an abortion.

I mean, he was, and I didn't believe him at the time in 2016.

I mean, you're used to being lied to by politicians and you knew Trump. Trump's a New Yorker and he's been socially liberal his entire life.

What reason is there to think that he's changed? And I think one of the things with Trump and JD Vance that people like is, and this is more of a reflection of how bad it is, how bad the other options are,

I suppose. But there seems to be a willingness to actually deliver for the people that you represent.

And I think that last part's especially key. Trump seems to think he actually represents real people, not interests.

It's the American people, those tangible American people. Even the ones who aren't that influential, he seems to care about them.

He seems to want to do something for them and help them in some way. That's kind of a big deal. That's different.

That's not something that we're used to. We're used to empty platitudes and so forth. And I think that's why many evangelicals decided to vote for him in 2020 who had not in 2016.

But this goes back to an identity thing and natural loves. You have a bunch of establishment

Republican figures who are wedded to evangelical votes and that deal was cut and they're going to say evangelical talking points.

They'll even have the platform of the Republican Party to reflect these things, I think, which is a good thing.

But where was the follow through? Where was the love for the people that you actually represent? Where was the, how did this ever confer identity in them?

Did they even see themselves as sharing the same destiny as the people that are voting for them? Is the question.

Trump seems to do that. J .D. Vance seems to do that with some of the things that I've seen him say. He wants to dismantle the deep state and people are pointing out he said some things that are,

I think he's had his own trajectory, we'll say, over the last few years. He's said some things that maybe aren't the best, but I mean, who says things like,

I don't really care what happens in Ukraine. I care about America. Who says that kind of thing? That's the kind of thing that people,

I think, want. They want to know that you're in it with them and that you're for them and that you're part of them.

They're your people, you're their people. And that hasn't been the case. So they don't fit into that managerial elite mold.

Simultaneous to the waning influence of the religious right, what we often saw was also an ascendance, and I talk about this on the podcast, of evangelical left figures.

They were once defeated in the 1970s and they came back. So figures like Russell Moore, David Platt, Tim Keller joined other institutional elites to oppose

Trump, even watering down their pro -life commitments by incorporating other life issues prioritized by the left.

They set themselves up against populism by condemning it in strong terms. Seeing little alternatives, the vast majority of evangelical voters supported

Trump in 2016 and 2020, but their leadership started giving up the influence they previously enjoyed on the political right.

After politically defeated, after the establishment was politically defeated at the 2024 convention, that was yesterday, with the selection of Vice President candidate

J .D. Vance, Trump altered the character of the Republican Party. One of the changes he brought was watering down the party platform on marriage and abortion.

And this is key. This is a reversal of the deal cut in 1990. That's what you're seeing happening.

There was a deal between the establishment and the evangelical organizations, elites making deals with each other.

We'll deliver the votes. You just say these talking points. You carry our water for us.

That deal's gone. And I think it doesn't mean that there's not Christian influence still there, but it means that now that the populists are in charge, and I would say with Trump, you have a more of a secular populist than you would have gotten with a

Pat Buchanan, even though he's Roman Catholic. Trump is more of a, he's not as serious about his faith as even

Pat Buchanan is about his. And that is who is running the show.

And he was, for I think most of what are being called by some barstool conservatives, people who are looking at their lives and they want to grill and they want to live their life the way it was, and they don't want

Dylan Mulvaney on their beer, and they don't want the taxes too high and they want to be able, you know, inflation too high.

They want to be able to afford things for their families. They don't want their jobs taken away by migrants, that kind of thing.

They don't want the character of their town changed. And they got mad when all these monuments were taken down. The Republicans did nothing and the evangelicals did nothing and even joined in taking them down.

I mean, I could go on and on and on, but these are real issues that they're looking at for their families.

And this is very hard. I understand this is very hard for some evangelicals to get, and I'm not saying it's right, but for a lot of those, these sort of common folk, even though many of them are pro -life, especially on the

Republican side, it's not their main issue. And part of it is it's because it's what the pagans do with their children.

The same thing with gay marriage to an extent. You know, this is what those people do over there. If they don't bother me, whatever.

That's how they feel about it. Now, obviously, we know that this degrades your country morally and, you know, it does eventually affect you.

But in their thinking, many of them, they're looking at that and they're saying that doesn't affect me.

But then when you have illegal migrants come into town and all of a sudden the jobs are taken up.

I mean, I've talked to a bunch of people in the last few months, and the effects of this are just incredible economically and just in so many ways.

Culturally, we don't have the infrastructure to deal with this in some places, and they're just being dumped. And people, that affects their lives in a very real, tangible way.

And it's serious. So that's what they resonate with to some extent.

And Trump was able to speak that language. Evangelicals have been, I would say, mostly absent on these things and engaging in over the course of decades, these talking points, but with little follow through, united with these establishment

Republicans. I think that's what the abolitionist movement, a lot of that is, to be quite honest with you, the abortion abolitionists, is they're calling that bluff.

They're saying, hold on, we see this dance you guys have been doing for years. Enough.

Enough already, especially in red states. Enough. Like, just get it done. You come to us every election and you talk about how you're going to do this, do it.

So the evangelical industry could no longer expect the large vacuous rhetoric establishment

Republicans offered them or the feeling of importance that came with it. What they could still expect was a seat at the table, but it was a smaller seat in some ways, but it was an actual seat, not a symbolic overture.

And I think that's where we are. I think Trump takes evangelicals seriously, more seriously than the establishment did, but their seat at the table is smaller.

They're going to have a little bit less influence in some ways. And let's face it, we don't field really strong leaders for him to probably even respect.

There's a few, but it's pretty thin, the ranks on our side. And here's the encouragement.

What remains to be seen is how traditional Christians handle the social changes over the next few years. The outcry online against a

Sikh prayer at the 2024 convention and the overtly moral and religious language, Christian language, used to describe the left's agenda for corrupting children and liquidating

America's future are the breeding grounds for another authentic religious right. One that actually is serious, populist, and realistic.

Americans have not really seen this in full bloom since the 1980s, and it's time for it to return.

So that's the piece that I wrote along with some of my own comments. I believe, obviously, what I wrote.

I think we are in a stretch where new leaders are being raised up, and it's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

I think there's going to be more aggressively populist young guys who are also evangelical, and they're going to be pro -life, anti -abortion, pro -traditional marriage, all of that stuff.

And the question is, you know, where does that go? Where does that energy go into tangibly? What kind of winds come from that on local level, state level, or federal level?

I noticed last night there was one of the speakers started talking about how

God protected Trump, and it was very Christian. I mean, it was very overtly Christian, and people were just, it was resonating with the crowd in ways that that Sikh prayer just was not.

You know, people, they didn't know what they were doing. They stood, they clapped, some of them, but it was, you could just see that people, the actual delegates resonated much more with this

Christian understanding of what happened, that this was God saving the president, or the former president.

So, I just, I'm encouraged because of that. I think that, you know, it's still, there is something to work with there.

I think that the fact that people are, that the Sikh prayer is even controversial is encouraging that, hey, this is actually shifting the conversation, that this kind of stuff wasn't controversial years ago.

I don't remember ever there being controversies about this online. You'd hold your nose, or not hold your nose, but you'd look at it and you'd say, this stinks, right?

You'd say, this is, ah, man, I can't believe they're doing this. Muslim prayer, really, you know, whatever.

But now, this is actually something people want to see changed. And if you go to info at GOP .com,

I messaged them and I said, you got to change this. So, a number of others have as well. That wasn't,

I don't think, directly Trump's call. Some people, this is another thing I've noticed online. A lot of people, for bad or for good, they really want to blame

Trump for, like, everything that happened at the GOP convention. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, it is, he is the effective leader of the

Republican party. I don't know, he's not the one, like, calling all the shots on these things, though.

And, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if he's gonna be more liberal on some of these things, given his background.

But I wouldn't be so quick to just jump to those conclusions. What I saw last night when

I was looking at Trump and watching him, especially during the prayer of the Lutheran pastor, was, that's a man that's shaken up.

He is still thinking through what happened. And I think we need to pray for him. And I've seen nothing that would persuade me to withdraw my support for President Trump.

In fact, I see more that tells me that he needs to be supported. I need to vote for Trump.

And that's fine, by the way. I'll say this, too. It's fine if your conscience doesn't allow you to do that, fine.

But don't bind my conscience. I'm not gonna bind yours. You don't bind mine. I think that there's opportunities that, especially on the local level, but I think there's opportunities that are coming up in the next few years.

And there's some real energy with this, if you want to call it Christian nationalism or the dissident right or whatever it is, the fact of the matter is, the secular right, the pagan right, they don't really have much going for them.

They don't have many good leaders. I'm talking about the dissidents. Those who are more populist, who aren't establishment.

They don't really have great leaders. They don't have a moral foundation. And the Christians, I think, are going to be the ones to supply this kind of thing.

We actually have those things. I think there's great opportunity. And if we go populist, which

I think is what the Christian nationalism thing really is, that's a good interpretation of it. This is a rejection of that establishment

Republican deal that was cut with elites who kind of institutionalized the gains of a populist movement in the 80s.

If we move past that and we go back to more of a populist stance that isn't cutting those kind of deals and actually wants real wins and loves the tangible people that actually live in this country,

I think we can do well. So that's my opinion. More coming. I'm going to do some

TruthScript Tuesday tonight. So look forward to that. We're going to talk more about this stuff, I guess. TruthScript Tuesday coming up in probably about an hour or so on the

TruthScript channel. If you haven't subscribed to that, by the way, you should. There's a lot of good things going on with TruthScript right now.

I actually was having a conversation with someone about a conference for next year that we want to plan, and it's going to be on church history, the founding of America and church history.

So stay tuned for more announcements on that. And the men's conference, obviously, is coming up as well.

You can go to fundamentalsconference .com for more about that. And we would love to see you. God bless.