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May 1 - May 10, 2025
General Walker may have resigned, but he did not go quietly. He was later arrested for “inciting rebellion” among segregationists as federal marshals attempted to desegregate Ole Miss, and in 1963 he took up with Hargis to lead anticommunist “crisis crusades,” persisting in his charge that the government was soft on communism and hamstringing the military.
Wells thought it crucial that Americans “not be deceived about all of this talk about peace and safety”; disarmament would imperil both American sovereignty and Christianity.
Reagan defended Goldwater’s promise of peace through strength and denounced those who sought a utopian peace without victory, proponents of “appeasement” who thought the enemy might “forget his evil ways and learn to love us.”
In 1968, Richard Nixon knew that conservative evangelicals could hold the key to his victory. A lapsed Quaker, Nixon wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he understood that anticommunism abroad and “moral values” and “law and order” politics at home could woo this coalescing voting bloc.
Nixon won by appealing to his so-called Silent Majority, capitalizing on the political realignment signaled by Goldwater that would come to shape the next half century of American politics. White evangelicals were a significant part of his majority; 69 percent cast their vote for Nixon.22
Connections between the Nixon White House and conservative Christians went beyond ceremony and spectacle. When Nixon came under fire for his secret bombing of Cambodia, Colson tapped the Southern Baptist Convention to pass a resolution endorsing the president’s foreign policy. Graham, too, worked to promote the president’s foreign policy agenda—including the escalation of the war in Vietnam—with talk of patriotism and unity.
With an eye toward reelection, Nixon had been looking for ways to reach evangelical youth. At Graham’s urging, Nixon aide (and ordained Southern Baptist minister) Wallace Henley reached out to Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade, to convince him to join in a media strategy to advance the conservative cause. By “media strategy,” Henley meant “doing things like syndicated news columns, developing evangelical-oriented radio and television spots, undertaking a specific effort to land some of the big names on Christian talk shows.”
As Henley’s strategy suggested, the expanding world of evangelical popular culture would offer an ideal conduit for the dispersal and reinforcement of conservative politics.27
Fundamentalists were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the war—a war to prevent “godless communism with its murder and torture and persecution from taking over other lands which ask our help.”
When word of American atrocities began to filter back to the home front, conservative evangelicals minimized the violence and advanced moral equivalencies. In a 1967 Christianity Today editorial supporting intensified bombing in North Vietnam, Carl Henry employed sanitized language dismissing any “civilian damage” as “regrettable,” adding that it paled in comparison to the damage inflicted by the communists.
To Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, the US soldier in Vietnam remained “a living testimony” to Christianity, and to “old fashioned patriotism.” A defender of “Americanism,” the American soldier was “a champion for Christ.”31
The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness.
American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe. Evangelical support for the war seemed to grow in direct relation to escalating doubts among the rest of the public.
In 1973, progressive evangelical leaders issued the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern. Like members of the emerging Religious Right, they saw politics as an expression of their faith, but on nearly every issue they parted ways with their conservative brethren. They denounced racism and called for Christians to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed. Confessing that Christians had “encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity,” they called instead for “mutual submission and active discipleship.” And they challenged “the misplaced trust of the
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Conservative evangelicals would find they had more in common with conservative Catholics, Mormons, and with other members of the Silent Majority who were not particularly religious.
Elements of class conflict also helped define these emerging coalitions. As children of blue-collar workers gave their lives in Vietnam, children of the elite protested the war on college campuses across the nation.
Still, many were only one generation removed from humbler circumstances, and in the 1960s and 1970s, as patriotism took on a populist dimension, conservative evangelicals were drawn to the values of the white working class. For these new allies, nostalgic celebrations of rugged masculinity would come to symbolize a shared identity, and a political agenda.
The failure of American soldiers to defeat a ragtag enemy testified to serious problems of American manhood, and no group felt this crisis more keenly than American evangelicals.38
It was up to Christian parents to rear a new generation of men, and to this end they should make boys “play with boys and with boys’ toys and games,” with “guns, cars, baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.” Boys who engaged in “feminine activities,” he warned, often ended up as “homosexuals.” A boy must be taught to fight, to “be rugged enough” to defend his home and those he loved.
He instituted a dress code—men wore jackets and ties and close-cropped hair, and women skirts below the knee—and he commanded women to “be in complete and total submission to their husbands and to male leadership.” Whereas boys must be trained to be leaders, girls should be trained to submit. They “must obey immediately, without question, and without argument.” By enforcing submission, parents would be doing a future son-in-law “a big favor.” Hyles also advocated corporal punishment of children, even infants.
If an evangelical could be defined as anyone who liked Billy Graham, by the 1970s a conservative might well be defined as anyone who loved John Wayne.
War was a place where boys became men and men became heroes, where America was a force for good, and where American ends justified any means.
Wayne himself had secured a deferment in order to avoid serving in a war with a far more clear-cut division between good and evil.
To begin with, Wayne’s masculinity was unapologetically imperialist. All of Wayne’s greatest hits involved valiant white men battling (and usually subduing) nonwhite populations—the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans. Like Teddy Roosevelt, Wayne’s rugged masculinity was realized through violence, and it was a distinctly white male ideal.
In a 1971 interview in Playboy, Wayne was particularly harsh in his assessment of “the blacks”—“or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves: they certainly aren’t Caucasian”:
Nor did Wayne feel a need to apologize for America’s actions overseas. He downplayed “the so-called My Lai massacre” and instead highlighted atrocities committed against “our people” by the Vietcong. With all the terrible things happening all over the world, he saw no reason “one little incident in the United States Army” should cause such uproar.
Wayne’s crassness was part of his appeal, if not the key to it—and this would become a pattern among evangelical heroes, religious and secular.
That Wayne never fought for his country, that he left behind a string of broken marriages and allegations of abuse—none of this seemed to matter.
“The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul; but John Wayne will save your ass.”
Morgan achieved celebrity status in American evangelicalism, and her book became an iconic expression of conservative evangelical femininity.
To begin with, it was important for women to keep up their “curb appeal,” to “look and smell delicious,” to be “feminine, soft, and touchable,” not “dumpy, stringy, or exhausted”—at least if they wanted husbands to come home to them.
If a father was absent, a boy might start to identify too much with his mother “and begin to develop certain feminine qualities on a subconscious level,” opening the door to homosexuality.
The Total Woman offered Christians a model of femininity, but it also presented, along the way, a model of masculinity. To be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido. Men were entitled to lead, to rule, and to have their needs met—all their needs, on their terms.
In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had invited a generation of women to examine “the problem that has no name,” prompting many housewives to reconsider their circumscribed lives.
Making yourself sexually available to your husband seven nights in a row, praising his whiskers, calling him at work to tell him you craved his body—none of this came easy for many women. But thousands if not millions deemed it an easier path than the one offered by women’s “liberation.” For many housewives, the new opportunities feminism promised were not opportunities at all. To those who had few employable skills and no means or desire to escape the confines of their homes, feminism seemed to denigrate their very identity and threaten their already precarious existence.
God gave husbands their “rank” and a “virile drive for domination” necessary to fulfill their duty to rule. Self-denial, meanwhile, was at the heart of Christian womanhood; marriage and motherhood required
The very notion of hierarchy came from the Bible, Elliot contended. In short, equality was “not a Christian ideal.” A hierarchical order of submission and rule descended “from the nature of God Himself.” God the Father exercised “just and legitimate authority”; the Son exhibited “willing and joyful submission.”
Motivated to defend “traditional” femininity and masculinity, evangelical women would play a critical role in the grassroots activism that launched the Religious Right.
In 1964, Schlafly burst onto the national stage with the publication of A Choice Not an Echo, a small book promoting Goldwater’s campaign. Goldwater, she insisted, was the leader America yearned for. He would solve problems at home and beat the communists abroad. The book was a sensation, selling an estimated 3.5 million copies and helping Goldwater secure the nomination.11
When Schlafly came across conservative critiques of the amendment’s potential implications, however, she quickly changed her mind.
rights’ fanatics” threatened to undo all this. All of a sudden, “aggressive females” were everywhere “yapping” about how mistreated they were, equating marriage to slavery, suggesting that housework was “menial and degrading, and—perish the thought—that women are discriminated against.” This was “the fraud of the century.”13
What feminists failed to understand, she argued, was that women liked to be housewives and homemakers.
But most evangelicals were far less certain. The Bible didn’t offer specific advice on the topic. Many evangelicals disapproved of “abortion-on-demand,” but not in the case of rape or incest, where fetal abnormalities were present, or when a woman’s life was at risk. In 1968, Christianity Today considered the question of therapeutic abortion—was it a blessing, or murder? They gave no definitive answer. As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion.
But with the liberalization of abortion laws, and as abortion proponents began to frame the issue in terms of women controlling their reproduction, evangelicals started to reconsider their position.
Given Schlafly’s “lifelong hobby,” this isn’t entirely surprising, but it reveals that conservative Christian anti-feminism in the 1970s was intimately connected to a larger set of political issues—to anticommunism, Christian nationalism, and militarism, among others.
First and foremost, “The Positive Woman starts with the knowledge that America is the greatest country in the world and that it is her task to do her part to keep it that way.” She must oppose bureaucratic government and creeping socialism (with its “destructive goal of equality”) in order to protect the American family and the greatness of private enterprise.
In fact, the ERA was the first issue conservatives rallied around after they lost the legal battle for segregation.
This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around.
Almost singlehandedly, Schlafly sabotaged the ratification of the ERA. In doing so, she also helped put gender at the center of an emerging evangelical political identity.
Gothard got his start in 1961 by founding Campus Teams, an organization that aimed to address the problems of “wayward youth.” Inspired by research he had conducted for his master’s thesis in Christian education at Wheaton College, Gothard sought to apply Christian principles to solving conflicts between parents and teens. He later changed the name of the organization to the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts to reflect this focus. (He would later change the name again to the more general Institute in Basic Life Principles, or IBLP.)
