Wonder-Working Power

The roots and the reach of the religious right.

Daniel McCarthy from the December 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 11)

p class="CRlargetext c3"> The Christian span class= "CRbreakgrafline">Coalition was instrumental in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, but before long its power seemed to be waning. In 1996 Bill Clinton—the draft-dodging, pot-smoking, abortion-rights-supporting womanizer who embodied everything Christian conservatives abhorred—handily won re-election against Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Two years later, Republicans lost ground in Congress as they prepared to impeach Clinton, and Paul Weyrich, the man who had first suggested to Jerry Falwell the name “Moral Majority,” adapted a phrase from Timothy Leary: It was time, he told Christian conservatives, to “turn off,” “tune out,” and “drop out.” o:p> /o:p>

Weyrich wasn’t the only influential Christian conservative driven to rethink his movement’s prospects in the late ’90s. In the year of Clinton’s re-election, a federal district court ruling to permit physician-assisted suicide shook the editors of the Catholic journal First Things so violently that they began to ask whether judicial tyranny had destroyed democracy itself. This led to the magazine’s November 1996 symposium, “The End of Democracy?,” in which contributors concluded that civil disobedience, even revolution, might soon be justified. “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany,” editor Richard John Neuhaus wrote, “but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.” o:p> /o:p>

Times have changed. You won’t find much sympathy at