Conservatives Without Conscience

45.

Steve Bruce, “Zealot Politics and Democracy: The Case of the New Christian Right,” Political Studies, vol. 48 (2000), 263–82.

46.

Religion scholar Laurence Iannaccone reported that an “enormous multi-year study, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Science, and directed by religious historians Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby… enlisted over a hundred researchers to describe and analyze dozens of ‘fundamentalist-like’ movements across five continents and seven religious traditions” to explain fundamentalism. Yet this “Fundamentalism Project,” as it is known, came up with “no clear definition of fundamentalism, no objective criterion for deciding which religious movements are ‘fundamentalist,’ and nothing approaching a theory of fundamentalism.” Laurence R. Iannaccone, “Toward an Economic Theory of ‘Fundamentalism,’” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 153 (1997), 100. The Fundamentalism Project, to the chagrin of evangelicals, labels them as a fundamentalist religion.

47.

Corine Hegland, “Special Report: Values Voters—Evangelical, Not Fundamentalist,” National Journal (December 3, 2004).

48.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation, 83.

49.

Special Report, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” Economist (June 23, 2005) at http://www.economist.com/world/na/PrintFriendly.cfm?story_id=4102212.

50.

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Bush’s Gains Broad-Based: Religion and the Presidential Vote (December 6, 2004) at http://people-press.org/commentary/pdf/103.pdf.

51.

Special Report, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” The Economist (June 23, 2005).

52.

Joel Rogers, “Devolve This!,” The Nation (August 30–September 6, 2004), 20.

53.

Mark Noll explained evangelicalism as the “belief that lives need to be changed”; the “belief that all spiritual truth” is found in the Bible; dedication to active lives in service of God, or to “evangelism” (spreading the good news) and “mission” (taking the gospel to other societies); and conviction that Christ’s death on the cross provided reconciliation between a holy god and sinful human beings. See Ethics & Public Policy Center, “Center Conversations: Understanding American Evangelicals, A Conversation with Mark Noll and Jay Tolson” (June 2004) at http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2115/pub_detail.asp.

54.

Ethics & Public Policy Center, “Center Conversations,” 18.

55.

Ibid.

56.

Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3.

57.

Smith polled over twenty-five hundred church-going Protestants in a 1996 telephone survey that he reproduces in the book. He acknowledged the weakness of this type of polling, and the results are now dated. Nonetheless, the surveys have some rather alarming findings. For example, a survey focusing on the South revealed that 87 percent of self-identified evangelicals believed that the United States was founded “as a Christian nation”; 92 percent saw “a serious breakdown of American society”; 68 percent believed “morals should be based on an absolute, unchanging standard”; 69 percent disagreed with the notion that religion is a private matter “to be kept out of public debates over social and political issues”; 55 percent believed “Christian morality should be the law of the land even though not all Americans are Christians”; 68 percent believed the “federal government should promote traditional values in our society”; and 77 percent believed “the mass media is hostile to [evangelical] moral and spiritual values.” (Ibid., 200.) In a survey of religious identity and influence, only 35 percent of the evangelicals disagreed with the statement “Everyone should have the right to live by their own morality, even when it is not Christian morality.” This, of course, suggested that as many as 65 percent of evangelicals wanted to tell others, regardless of their beliefs, how to lead their lives. (Ibid., 201.) This poll also showed that 90 percent of the evangelicals believed “Public school instruction should include Christian views of science and history,” i.e., intelligent design and creationism. (Ibid. 204.) A more encouraging result was in the Religious Right Survey (a nationwide poll of over a thousand conducted by Gallup in 1996) that revealed that only 4 percent of all polled, including evangelicals, admired David Duke, who was then running for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Smith and his collaborators also interviewed evangelicals face-to-face from select locations, but it was a very small sample that had not been selected randomly; in addition, these kinds of interviews are not always as candid as anonymous responses. In short, this is not a scientifically representative selection of all evangelicals, but rather a largely anecdotal collection of information gathered from evangelicals willing to talk with sociologists. As another social scientist, familiar with this work, explained, “The sampling procedure is critical, since Smith says his interviews tell us what evangelicals really think and want. That is a big claim and it means he has to have a representative sample. The evidence strongly suggests he does not. This team apparently did two studies using face-to-face interviews. One involved 130 church-going Protestants in six different locations around the U.S., and the second involved 187 evangelicals and others in 23 states. Neither of these is a national sample. If you look at the map in the book, you can see that most of the interviewees (in the second, larger study) came from places near large universities. You can even guess the academic affiliation of many of the sociologists involved by looking at the