How the Christian Right Got It So, So Wrong

The Secular Left didn't lure Americans away from church; the Christian Right drove them away.

There’s a common narrative on the Christian Right that the “de-churching” of the United States can largely be credited to the efforts of the Secular Left. It started with the hippie movement in the 1960s, throwing off the old, repressive strictures of moral and social convention, was exacerbated by the drug-addled, ‘anything goes’ 70s, and persists through the present day. 

The church I grew up in fell neatly into this mindset. Despite the relative comfort and ease in which most of our congregation lived – solid jobs and large-ish houses amid rolling farmland connecting our dear-yet-wayward New Jersey with its much godlier neighbor state, Pennsylvania – the message we heard each Sunday was one of victimhood and marginalization. The church, the family, the Christmas holiday… all were under attack by “The Culture.” Our only refuge from the onslaught was our little, hilltop bunker of a Bible chapel. 

The tenor was one of near-constant panic. We panicked about evolution, rap lyrics, heavy metal, Satanism, Madonna, Bill Clinton, political correctness, the Gay Agenda, Mortal Kombat… the list goes on. 

It seems there’s even more to panic about today: pop lyrics, marijuana legalization, the Woke Agenda, the Trans Movement, Grand Theft Auto, the War on Christmas, and the “Rise of the Nones,” i.e. the steadily increasing number of Americans who do not attend church and claim no specific religious affiliation. 

“By the early 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t associate with any established religion (AKA ‘nones’) had doubled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of atheists, agnostics, and spiritual dabblers had tripled in size,” writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. What more evidence do we need that the secularization that the Fathers of the Christian Right — the Falwells, Robertsons, and Dobsons — warned us about has indeed come to pass? 

But what if the Secular Left didn’t lure people away from Christianity as much as the Christian Right drove them away?  

Conservative Evangelicals like those mentioned above would trace the rise of the nones back to the 60s and 70s counterculture, or further to Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, whose writings worked together to get the wheels of our secular age turning. According to Francis Schaeffer, we were already living in a “post-Christian world” in 1968.¹

But Thompson challenges that narrative. “Stubbornly pious Americans threw a wrench in the secularization thesis,” he writes. “Deep into the 20th century, more than nine in 10 Americans said they believed in God and belonged to an organized religion, with the great majority of them calling themselves Christian. That number held steady—through the sexual revolution ’60s, through the rootless and anxious ’70s, and through the ‘greed is good’ ’80s.”

The real decline in belief didn’t begin, Thompson says, until the 1990s, when the association between the Christian Right and the Republican Party was cemented.

This tracks with my own experience. I can remember our pastor in the '90s invoking Rush Limbaugh on Sunday mornings, declaring the man prophetic despite his unbelief, as he diagnosed the sins of our culture the way Jeremiah did for Jerusalem or Jonah did for Ninevah. If we didn’t listen up, our wayward nation would surely be headed for a fate akin to that of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Conversations among our congregants generally consisted of three parts: How’s the family? How about this weather? And, can you believe what the liberals are trying to do now?

In those years, I worked summers painting houses with a pair of men from the church who would subject me to Limbaugh’s bloviating monologues every afternoon on their boombox. I was repulsed by his sneering, condescending ire, regardless of the topic.

Today, the general tone with which Limbaugh found so much success is common among right-wing pundits and is, of course, the signature rhetorical style of our former and quite possibly future president, Donald Trump.

In another article for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner suggests that many conservative Christians don’t simply tolerate Trump's polemic, they revel in it. They want to see enemies eradicated, “vermin” expunged, and “libs” “owned” all along the way. 

Too many Christians partake of this vitriol. It is, frankly, the pornography of anger: an indulgence, a release, and a shame.

Is there sneering and condescension coming from the Left? No question. But Christians are the ones called to love their enemies and turn the other cheek.

I want to be clear. I am not suggesting that turning to more liberal political positions is the solution. The Progressive Left has its own outrageous orthodoxies, ill-defined heresies, and unjust methods of excommunication. It has its own glaring hypocrisies and is simply, to be blunt, no fun anymore.² 

I’m fairly convinced these days that our tendencies toward liberalism or conservatism are in many ways hard-wired. Some of us are more inclined to want to celebrate and preserve what we think is great about our culture and traditions; others are more inclined to identify shortcomings, challenge conventions, and agitate for change.

I’m not asking anyone to perform some kind of intellectual 180. Instead, I am asking the Christian Right to acknowledge the log in its own eye, to reckon seriously with the fact that its general mode of discourse is, and has been for decades, such a massive turn-off to so many people in our society that it repels them not simply from the Republican Party but, so much more importantly, from belief in God altogether. 

If heaven resembles a Trump rally, an episode of the 700 Club, or a Limbaugh radio show, I and millions of others would gladly choose the other place.

The way to win back the “nones” is not to dig heels in ever deeper until eventually people come around to seeing things your way. It’s to meet people where they are, approach them with humility, try to understand and respect their perspectives, which are generally come by sincerely and thoughtfully, and strive to demonstrate Christ-like love not just in personal interactions, but in public discourse too.

Some conservative Christians seem to be grasping this. Whatever its shortcomings, the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign attempts to elevate Jesus above the culture wars (I like this spot much better than their Super Bowl ad). Carl Trueman recently exhorted the notoriously conservative readership of WORLD Magazine to shift its focus: “When the cultural stakes seem so high, the immediate priorities of the present can lead the church away from her true priorities,” he writes. “Politics and elections are important. But they are not as important as the things of eternity.”

American Christians would do well to remember this observation from celebrated atheist, Christopher Hitchens: “The greatest contribution of Christianity in my life is the reminder of the complete ephemerality of human power, and indeed of human existence—the transience of all states, empires, heroes, grandiose claims, and so forth.”³

Rather than wallowing in fear and anger, we Christians are called to demonstrate the joy of Christ to our neighbors; a joy that should transcend politics and culture because after all, don’t we believe that there is only one Kingdom and one Culture that really counts?

1. See Schaeffer’s Death in the City.

2. I intend to get into the shortcomings of mainly left-leaning, secular worldviews in more depth in the near future, so hang tight!

3. See Peter Wehner’s excellent Easter essay for The Atlantic, “The Greatest Contribution of Christianity.”