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May 1 - May 10, 2025
From 1981 until 1988, the war between the Sandinistas and US-backed Contras devastated the Central American country. Both sides committed brutal atrocities, and tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died. The war was not primarily a religious war, but in the United States it was framed as such.
Many of these conservatives joined together in the National Council of Evangelical Pastors of Nicaragua (CNPEN), an organization that developed close ties with conservative evangelical groups in the United States, including the NAE.26
In 1984, Iran had secretly requested weapons from the United States to use in its war with Iraq. Despite an arms embargo, Reagan was desperate to secure the release of seven American hostages held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. With Reagan’s support, the administration arranged for the shipment of more than 1500 missiles to Iran.
Jerry Falwell led the way in lionizing North. In the spring of 1988, he had started a national petition drive to pardon North, and in May of that year he welcomed North to Liberty University as the school’s commencement speaker. When North arrived on campus, just one day after retiring from the military, Falwell compared him to Jesus. Reminding his audience that “we serve a savior who was indicted and convicted and crucified,” Falwell christened North “a true American hero.”
As the war began to wind down, he took up a position as instructor at Quantico. His subject: How to kill the enemy. North was a popular instructor, but he wasn’t without critics.
In the mid-1970s, his wife Betsy, “tired of living with a headstrong military leader” who was absent as a husband and father, had asked for a divorce. The two agreed to marital counseling, and while waiting in the lobby for their first appointment, North picked up a book: James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline. He credited it with saving his marriage. After his conversion, North joined a predominantly white, charismatic congregation of the Episcopal church that seamlessly blended patriotism and Christianity. An American flag graced the front of the sanctuary, and from the pulpit North was
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. . . you asked that Congress not cut off aid to the contras, for the love of God and for the love of country. . . . Please remember that others share that devotion and recognize that it is possible for an American to disagree with you on aid to the contras and still love God and still love this country just as much as you do. Although he’s regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics. And in America, disagreement with the policies of the Government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.11
North targeted key demographics: “anti–gun control, pro-life, school prayer, strong defense, anti-gay, and the like.” All told, North brought in around $16 million in a single year through direct mail alone, an unprecedented haul.13
“Part of politics is having the right friends, but an important part of politics is having the right enemies.”
Critics, however, warned of his authoritarian tendencies, and of his disrespect for the truth. But for his supporters there was “what’s right” and “what’s legal,” and the two were not always the same. If North lied, “it must have been necessary.” There was no doubt “he was a good soldier.”14
“Christlikeness and manhood are synonymous,” he insisted, and to be Christlike, to be a man, required “a certain ruthlessness.”
“I like a man’s man,” Cole made plain. “I don’t like the pussyfooting pipsqueaks who tippy toe through the tulips.” At one time people might have overemphasized toughness, Cole acknowledged, “but today it is the softness that is killing us.” Women, children, churches, and nations all needed masculine decision makers; America was great only when its men were great.
A few years later, Swaggart would again be caught with a prostitute, but rather than confessing, he would tell his congregation, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”23
The televangelist soap operas of the 1980s were catnip for a national media that seemed to delight in the hypocrisy of conservative Christians. Sex, church secretaries, fraud, intrigue, prostitution, conspicuous consumption of the most tawdry sort—the revelations tarnished the image of evangelicalism generally, revealing the dark side of a religious movement driven by celebrity.
At a time when religious leaders lacked the heroism that was so urgently needed, evangelicals found that heroism in a place where virtue and discipline still prevailed: the United States military.
Grinalds thought commanders ought “to present Christ” to those in their command, and he believed this to be mandated both by the Bible and by military regulations.
HAVING EMBRACED THE MILITARY, evangelicals would find it difficult to articulate a critique of militarism. If the military was a source of virtue, war, too, attained a moral bearing—even preemptive war.
In the 1987 book One Nation Under God, Christian Reconstructionist Rus Walton offered a robust defense of preventive war. Suppose a “thug,” a barbarian, a “depraved maniac,” threatened your wife or daughter. “What would you do? When would you move to protect her? Before the attacker made his advance? . . . When he began ripping the clothes from her body?” Yes, Jesus might have instructed his followers to love their enemies, but not His enemies.
By promoting preemptive war, Walton contributed to a “crusade theory of warfare.” In wars of Christian conquest, “righteous states” were justified in taking the offensive against their enemies. Crusade warfare made sense in the context of Cold War politics, where neutrality was not an option.
Yet even as the Cold War came to an anticlimactic end, the crusade theory of warfare endured. A flexible guide to combat, it could be employed to justify aggression against threats both foreign and domestic. Among Christian nationalists, it could effectively sanctify any engagement where the United States resorted to force.
On the home front, it could validate questionable or even ruthless tactics wielded in defense of Christian America. In heroic pursuits of a higher good, the ends would justify the means. Conservative evangelicals knew they were called to fight the Lord’s battle. It just wasn’t entirely clear what that battle would be.
THE MOST URGENT ORDER OF BUSINESS was to elect a new president, but there was no clear heir apparent, despite the fact that one of their own had thrown his hat into the ring. Sometime in the mid-1980s, God had told Pat Robertson to run for president, according to Pat Robertson.
On the campaign trail Robertson extolled the virtues of Christian America and railed against what he saw as an assault on Christian faith and values.5
For those who wanted access to the Oval Office for the next four years, backing the establishment candidate seemed a safer bet.
Evangelical support for Bush was tepid, and the feeling was mutual. Bush, too, lacked the rugged masculinity of his predecessor, but fortunately for him, he was running against Michael Dukakis.
The second year of Bush’s presidency, in the summer of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In response, the United States forged an international coalition to end the Iraqi occupation. Unlike Catholic bishops and Protestant mainline clergy, most evangelicals enthusiastically supported Operation Desert Storm. In this first major military engagement since America’s humiliating defeat in Vietnam,
Nothing if not creative, Pat Robertson led the way in identifying the requisite crisis. Having failed in his presidential bid, Robertson used the millions of names on his campaign mailing list to found the Christian Coalition. In 1991, Robertson published The New World Order, arguing that President Bush was being duped into thinking the threat of communism was over.
Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, suspicions fell squarely on the UN. And, in the case of Robertson, on the Illuminati, on wealthy Jewish bankers, and on conspiratorial corporate internationalists.
Under the leadership of Ralph Reed, Robertson’s Christian Coalition quickly grew into the most powerful grassroots organization of the Religious Right, building networks in all fifty states and claiming more than one million members by 1994.9
Concerned about Buchanan’s level of support, Bush reached out to the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention and began to more openly champion conservative social values. In this way, Bush ushered in what Reed termed “the most conservative and the most pro-family platform in the history of the party.” It called for a ban on abortion, opposed LGBT rights, and defended school prayer and homeschool rights.
War might have ended, but at the opening night of the Republican National Convention, Buchanan declared that a different sort of war had begun: “There is a religious war going on in this country . . . a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. This war is for the soul of America.”10
In a three-way race, Bill Clinton emerged victorious over Bush and Ross Perot. If Bush had been a disappointment for American evangelicals, Bill Clinton appeared to be a disaster.
A draft dodger, a marijuana smoker, and a Democrat, he represented everything they despised about the 1960s. And then there was his wife. She had advocated for civil rights and children’s rights and had campaigned for the antiwar liberal George McGovern and the masculinity-challenged Jimmy Carter. Even worse, as a feminist and a career woman, Hillary Rodham had provoked the ire of religious conservatives when she refused to take her husband’s name. (She later changed her name in an attempt to appease critics and smooth her husband’s path forward.)
In addition to the constant din of corruption allegations, of more immediate concern was the First Lady’s ill-fated attempt to reform American health care. Not only did this smack of socialism as far as conservatives were concerned, but the Christian Coalition insisted that health-care reform concealed a “radical social agenda,” ostensibly by promoting abortion, gay rights, and sex education.
On the military front, Clinton’s sins were legion. Early in his presidency he announced his intention to open the armed forces to people regardless of their sexual orientation. Facing immediate backlash, he settled for a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
1994, Clinton signed an order allowing women to serve on combat ships and fighter planes, a move that raised the ire of religious conservatives. This not only went against God-ordained gender difference, but by putting women where they didn’t belong it exposed them to the threat of sexual assault.
Making matters worse, Clinton further emasculated the military by sending troops on an array of UN peacekeeping missions.
Sending US soldiers as “UN mercenaries . . . on phony ‘peacekeeping’ expeditions” to places like Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda was unconstitutional and un-American. And unmanly.15
Some members of the military also found this change unsettling. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the Gulf War, marine fighter pilots reported that they were losing confidence in themselves.
IF CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALS needed one more thing not to like about the Clintons, there was the Lewinsky affair.
“Character DOES matter,” Dobson opined. “You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it.”18
“We care about the conduct of our leaders, and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.”
Perhaps, “behind the tongue-clucking disapprobation of some male commentators” there lurked “a thinly disguised envy.” Clinton’s job rating received a significant boost as the scandal unfolded—“the formerly feminized president had been resurrected as a phallic leader.”
Among Clinton’s evangelical critics, it appears that their concern with Clinton’s predatory behavior was more about Clinton than about predatory behavior. Within their own circles, evangelicals didn’t have a strong record when it came to defending women against harassment and abuse.
They opposed the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, on many counts. As Schlafly explained, the VAWA was just one more example of “the federal government’s insatiable demand for more power.”
Adding to the absurdity, feminists wanted to criminalize “all heterosexual sex” as rape “unless an affirmative, sober, explicit verbal consent can be proved.” Apparently jokes, too, were no longer allowed, because feminists didn’t have a sense of humor.
Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic style set the tone. Each day, listeners could tune in to a world where white men still reigned supreme in the public and private spheres.
Fox News quickly became a mouthpiece for American conservatism. With bombastic male commentators sharing the screen with women whose qualifications apparently included a sexualized hyper-femininity, throwback masculinity was at the heart of the network’s appeal.27
Fox News hawked a nostalgic vision where white men still dominated, where feminists and other liberals were demonized, and where a militant masculinity and sexualized femininity offered a vision for the way things ought to be. White evangelicals were drawn to the network, and the network, in turn, shaped evangelicalism.
