The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

by Angie Maxwell

Thus, support for “family values” melds into support for all things Republican, including a hawkish foreign policy, and all somehow get wrapped in scripture. It also melds into an opposition to Democrats so intense that the Christian faith of Democratic candidates is denied or rejected.

The economic positions taken by the GOP in the decades after the Civil Rights Movement, such as welfare reform, are racially loaded, meant to regulate or eliminate money for those deemed “undeserving” while railing against regulation on capitalism for inhibiting the accumulation of wealth. Southern Baptists had long been “complacent about the exploitation of the economically disadvantaged,” contends David Stricklin,75

And so the myth of social conservatism is that it is limited to “family values” politics, but it is so deeply and deliberately entangled with southern identity and its historic baggage, that now it is about a lot more than taking a stand against feminists and abortion and homosexuality.

Just as the religion of the Lost Cause functioned both spiritually and culturally as a means of massive resistance to a changing way of life for southern whites, so too did Christian conservatism become a shield against a diversifying American landscape.

But the Christian Right learned an important lesson from these obstacles. Religious authenticity of a politician paled in comparison to a commitment to the policy positions that aligned with the values of the Christian Right—or against the values that they denounce.