Our Evangelical Age

The rise and fall and rise of the Christian Right. Terry Eastland reviews “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald.

Ms. Fitzgerald dates the Christian right to 1979, when Jerry Falwell, the pastor of a Baptist church in Virginia, founded the Moral Majority, an organization that was designed, as she puts it, “to register conservative Christians and mobilize them into a political force against what he called ‘secular humanism’ and the moral decay of the country.”

Falwell vowed to fight a “holy war” and outspokenly condemned abortion, homosexuality and sex education.

.. high-profile sex scandals that undermined any sense of moral authority: think of the Bakkers, Jim and Tammy Faye, and of Jimmy Swaggart.

..It gained new leaders—among them Pat Robertson and James Dobson—and sought to elect like-minded politicians from the top of the ballot down.
..since the emergence of the Christian right, two-thirds to four-fifths of evangelical voters have voted for the Republican candidate.
..define religious liberty as the right “to carry religious objections from their private lives into their public roles as small business owners, service providers and even government officials.”
.. To her, it appears, religious liberty as the Christian right defines it is itself discriminatory.
.. the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, a series of revivals
.. introducing, as she puts it, “a new idea of conversion as a sudden, overwhelming experience.”
.. the teaching of the church became less important than the life of the individual believer.
.. Bible institutes like Dwight Moody’s in Chicago  .. centers of militant anti-modernism and the training grounds for the evangelists of fundamentalism.
.. called themselves evangelicals, she says, to escape “the associations of bigotry and narrowness” that were attached to militant separatists.
.. Billy Graham .. called himself an “evangelical.” By that he meant a conservative Protestant who had been “born again.”
.. Fundamentalists then became a subset of evangelicals, and most of them were separatists who had left their denominations.”
.. Graham, she also says, thought “that America had a moral and spiritual mission to redeem the world.”
.. Mr. Graham became “a pastor of the national civil religion.”
.. many prominent evangelicals began to distance themselves from the Christian right, including the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, best known for “The Purpose-Driven Life” (2002). The central concerns of the “new evangelicals” have been poverty and climate change, and their churches have paid less attention to politics than did the “old” Christian right
.. she is obviously aware of its persistence and the obstacle it still presents to an “enlightened” or liberal agenda

Why It’s Become So Hard to Get an Abortion

Considering that nearly sixty per cent of women who have abortions have already given birth at least once, and so know something both visceral and emotional about pregnancy, fetal development, and childbirth

.. We have been aware that women tend to imagine something more like a miniature baby and this may be partly due to the images spread by antiabortion organisations. Since most abortions are carried out in the first trimester, often no more than a gestational sac is seen and many women find this reassuring.”

.. When someone applies for a marriage license, the state does not require her to read an analysis of divorce statistics first, or listen to a speculative recitation of the health risks of marriage. What is supposed to be protected, Sanger says, is not only the resolution a person comes to but the deliberative path she takes to get there.

.. about a third of these women did not have parents or legal guardians who were alive and could be located.

.. The judge is supposed to decide in the course of a hearing whether a petitioner is sufficiently mature and well informed to make her own decision. If the judge concludes that she’s not mature enough to have an abortion, that means that she is mature enough to have a child, or, in any case, will have one.

How Democrats could bring down Obamacare repeal

Senate Democrats want House conservatives to think twice before supporting Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare repeal bill — because Democrats believe they can strip out key provisions used to woo the right when the bill comes over to the Senate.

.. They plan to argue to the Senate parliamentarian that language that allows states to impose work requirements for Medicaid coverage and prohibits tax credits from being used on insurance coverage of abortion is not allowed.

.. the so-called “Byrd Rule” that restricts reconciliation bills from “extraneous” matters and provisions that don’t affect the budget.

.. The Family Research Council has already warned Republican lawmakers that the abortion prohibition is likely to get eliminated by Byrd rules because it does not have a pure budgetary impact.

.. Key House Republicans say it will be much more difficult to support the legislation without the work requirements and the abortion restriction.

.. Ted Cruz of Texas and Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), argue that the Senate should ignore any ruling from the parliamentarian that limits red meat additions to the repeal bill. But Senate leaders appear unwilling to consider such an explosive move, which could essentially eliminate the filibuster.

.. Anti-abortion groups raised concerns that there was no way to restrict the HSA money from covering abortion and comply with Byrd rules.

How CPAC Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

Trump didn’t wing it entirely. He shrewdly picked issues ― abortion, guns and Obamacare ― to appeal to the GOP base, earning standing ovations when he pledged his conservative orthodoxy on these matters. The crowd (at least the non-Ron Paul-supportive elements of it) ate it up, while out in the halls there was palpable buzz.

.. Trump almost didn’t make it to CPAC that year. The gay-conservative group GOProud, which was waging its own battles with conference organizers, initially invited him.

.. GOProud’s former chairman Chris Barron thought of the idea of getting Trump to attend. He reached out to Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime confidant, about the possibility. They collectively agreed to the idea.

.. “When Trump walked into the building, it was like Michael Jackson coming out of a Japanese airport. There were throngs of people around him,” he added. “From the moment when he walked into the door, I knew this was different.”

.. “The mere fact of showing up ultimately makes you more acceptable, because being nice to people and talking to them beats the hell out of calling them names,”
.. “Though he does both.”

.. “Here’s a person who’s willing to expand the party, the movement. Him being accepting to gays … is one of the biggest reasons why I thought young conservatives would accept him,” she said.