Although it wasn’t obvious at the time, 1988 would turn out to be a pivotal year in reshaping the conservative assault on white liberals and eventually pushing it to ridiculous extremes. In that year, President George H.W. Bush’s antiliberal campaign met up with two other forces also using the specter of “1960s liberalism” as constitutive glue: the religious right and the emerging conservative media. Together, these three forces would cement the image of the white liberal in the conservative imagination for decades, making the return of the liberal a fruitless crusade.
For the religious right, it didn’t take long to home in on “secular liberals” as its primary target. Where once Catholics and Jews stood as a demonic specter, from the 1980s onward the enemy was the white liberal.
Although the so-called Moral Majority began in 1979 as an evangelical Protestant lobbying group, the political and cultural direction of evangelicalism was still up in the air through the late 1970s. Indeed, it had been plagued by factionalism since its inception. In the first decades of the twentieth century, when fundamentalism first emerged in the United States, evangelical Christians fought over increasingly thorny understandings of the Bible, most especially the extent of biblical literalism and accounts of the last days. In the aftermath of the Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925, when big-city newspapers mocked antievolution fundamentalism as the backward belief of rednecks, conservative Christianity went relatively quiet for the next fifty years, generally taking pride in being isolated from the American mainstream. When it reemerged in the public eye in the 1970s, it had a singular claim: secular liberals had pushed an atheistic agenda onto America and were damning the country to hell. Christians needed to fight back.
At first, the political manifestations of this notion were hard to envision. Evangelicals initially placed their hopes in Southern Baptist president Jimmy Carter, but he disappointed them when he seemed to condone the legitimacy of homosexual relationships. The movement took its modern shape in 1980, when evangelical leader Jerry Falwell published a hard-hitting jeremiad called Listen, America! that set the tone of the evangelical movement for the next four decades.
Like all good jeremiads, Falwell’s book was written in the spirit of “the end is near, the time is now.” Falwell saw moral decline and creeping socialism everywhere in 1980s America. “America has been great because her people have been good,” he wrote. But things had changed, he claimed, alleging that “sin has permeated our land.” Pornographers, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, and secular humanists had been given free rein to adulterate American culture, he contended. How had these miscreants come to acceptance in the United States when the “people have been good”? Liberals. Yes, “liberal forces … have made significant inroads” into Christian America, Falwell preached. This was no time to parse scripture. Now was the time to wage war, to take the country back, he exhorted. Americans “are sick and tired of the way amoral liberals are trying to corrupt our nation.”
As Falwell’s popularity grew, so did the vitriol against secular liberals. The point was to terrify. In his standard “Moral Majority jeremiad,” Falwell often included a story about a student of his who opened a church on Long Island. When the young pastor went grocery shopping with his family, an employee told him, “Listen, don’t let this little girl walk around this store. Blond, blue-eyed, four-year-old girls are going at a very high price at the kiddy-porn and the prostitution market. And your child will disappear instantly. You hold that child.” Without pausing to investigate the veracity of the story, instead relying on a nationwide panic about child safety to attest to its truth, Falwell simply repeated the story hundreds of times. Liberals were, he argued, waging “a global war against the little children.”
Falwell repeated the canard that “blond, blue-eyed, four-year-old girls are going at a very high price at the kiddy-porn and the prostitution market.”
Gauntlet thrown, nearly every force in the emerging religious right picked it up, echoing the theme that a liberal secular elite had seized power from everyday citizens and was using the government to enact its amoral, atheistic vision. Sam Francis, a conservative intellectual advising the likes of the televangelist minister Pat Robertson (before moving in increasingly white-nationalist directions), argued, in an influential 1982 essay, “Liberalism flourishes almost entirely because it reflects the material and psychological interests of a privileged, power-holding, and power-seeking sector of American society.” Francis alleged that liberals were attacking core American values by portraying “the small town, the family, class, religious, ethnic, and community ties as backward, repressive, and exploitative; the values of work, thrift, discipline, sacrifice, and postponement of gratification (on which, as values, the moral legitimacy of the older elites rested) as outmoded, absolutist, puritanical, superstitious, and not infrequently hypocritical.”
If liberals were as omnipresent as Falwell and Francis imagined, and if they were hell-bent on making those who opposed them seem “backward, repressive, and exploitative,” then the arenas to defend were numerous: schools, the family, businesses, and more. The war would be long. “We’ve got a long way to go, there is much to be done,” said Falwell. “But we have bottomed out of those dark ages, the two decades of the sixties and the seventies.”
Tim LaHaye, a prolific writer later known for his coauthorship of the Left Behind series, took the lead in trying to expose all the arenas liberals had supposedly ruined, producing books with titles like The Battle for the Public Schools (1983) and The Battle for the Family (1984). He was clear on the terms of the fight: “What we have is a minority of liberal secularists leading our country astray and we have to come back as the conscience of the nation.” LaHaye leaned on the religious right’s imagery of the dreaded “liberal secularists” as a way of conflating “liberals” with nonbelievers, thus sidelining any person of faith who might be on the political left. “We are the victims of a secularist society,” he wrote.
LaHaye took special joy in taking on John Dewey in the realm of public education. It was Dewey’s “liberal education philosophy” that opened the door for schools “to be anti-God, antimoral, antifamily, anti–free enterprise and anti-American,” LaHaye wrote. It was all, he thought, “educrat propaganda.” LaHaye argued that liberals used the idea of “neutrality” to eliminate religious perspectives from the public realm, including targeting public schools where they could brainwash generations of young people. LaHaye’s entire Left Behind series, an international bestselling franchise that spawned numerous spin-offs, was little more than an apocalyptic call to arms against secular liberalism: Join us now or be left behind in a blistering hellscape.
James Robison, a prominent televangelist, was among the many evangelicals to attack homosexuality, seeing it as a liberal allowance. “I’m sick and tired of hearing about all the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet,” he said, thus feminizing his opposition. “It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet.”
The notion that liberals were behind every evil built momentum throughout the 1980s and 1990s. During Pat Robertson’s failed presidential bid in 1988, he railed against “the Eastern liberal establishment” that controlled not only American foreign policy but also the country’s finances, utilizing the conflation of liberalism with Jews that Spiro Agnew had developed. Robertson said the root problem in America was a “moral decay” that expensive liberal policies would not solve. Spending money on AIDS research, for instance, wasn’t going to make AIDS go away. Instead, all you had to do was tell “male homosexuals or intravenous drug users” to “stop,” and then, if they didn’t, let them suffer their fate. Despite their varying origins, it was not a far leap from Robertson’s impulse to frame issues in terms of individual “merit” to that of the neoliberal order.
In 1992, it was Patrick Buchanan’s turn to make much the same argument. Most famously, in a speech at the Republican National Convention, Buchanan sought to unite the religious right with the Republican Party through a collective hatred of liberals. He referred to the Democratic National Convention as “twenty thousand radicals and liberals … dressed up as moderates and centrists,” which he called “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.” But, he said, these liberals actually sought to open the door for all sorts of pluralism—feminism, equality of the races, kindly social programs, gay rights. That is, he saw the broadening of human rights at the heart of liberalism as nothing short of moral rot. Again, this was war, and the religious right needed to “take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” Siege-mentality politics are effective when you portray the enemy as everywhere, and a loose definition of liberals allowed them to be omnipresent.
Historian Jason Bivins has shown how the modern religious right has remained unified primarily by positioning itself against a supposed liberal elite. As Bivins writes, the religious right has “mobilized under the perception that liberalism has become all-encompassing and that it is hostile to public expressions of religion,” whether it is or not. It was never any single issue—abortion rights, preserving racial purity, opposition to queer rights—that brought together the religious right. Instead, as James Dobson, a prominent member of the Moral Majority, put it, it was the cultivation of the “perceived threat” of liberalism that allowed them to unify.