AP® United States History · Unit 9 · Topic 9.2
The Religious Right and the Culture Wars
In the late 1970s and 1980s, evangelical Christians who had avoided partisan politics organized into the Religious Right, joining fiscal conservatives and anti-communists in a New Right coalition that remade the Republican Party and the electoral map, especially the South.
Before the 1970s, most evangelical Christians stayed out of party politics, treating faith and government as separate spheres. That changed fast. Alarmed by Roe v. Wade (1973) legalizing abortion, the Supreme Court's bans on school prayer, the spread of no-fault divorce, and the gay rights movement, evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell founded organizations such as the Moral Majority (1979) to mobilize Christians as a voting bloc. They found natural partners in the New Right coalition: economic conservatives who wanted lower taxes and less regulation, and Cold War hawks who wanted a harder line against the Soviet Union. Each piece wanted something different from government, but all three agreed Republicans, not Democrats, would deliver it.
This coalition transformed the electoral map. The South had voted Democratic for roughly a century after the Civil War, but the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights legislation in the 1960s had already pushed many white southern voters toward the GOP. The Religious Right's rise in the late 1970s and conservative economic messaging gave Republicans a durable new appeal there, and by the 1980s the once-solid Democratic South was turning reliably Republican in presidential elections.
Because the coalition's core goals, overturning Roe, restoring school prayer, limiting civil rights-era rulings, depended on the judiciary, the courts became the battlefield. A single Supreme Court nomination could decide decades of policy on abortion, religion, and privacy, so confirmation hearings turned into national campaigns with advertising, lobbying, and mass mobilization, visible clearly in the bitter 1987 fight over Robert Bork's rejected nomination.
Key terms
- Religious Right
- A political movement of politically mobilized evangelical and conservative Christians formed in the late 1970s to advance causes like opposing abortion and restoring school prayer.
- New Right coalition
- The alliance of religious conservatives, economic conservatives, and anti-communist hawks that reshaped the Republican Party from the late 1970s onward.
- Solid South
- The nickname for the South's near-unanimous support for the Democratic Party from the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century.
- Moral Majority
- A political organization founded by Jerry Falwell in 1979 that mobilized evangelical Christians to vote for conservative causes and candidates.
- Realignment
- A lasting shift in which groups of voters change their long-term loyalty from one political party to another.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through the New Right coalition and what each of its pieces wanted out of it.
- How it worksHow does the electoral map realign as the South moves from solid Democratic to solid Republican?
- Ties togetherHow does the fight over the courts turn a judicial appointment into a national campaign?
Check yourself
End of topic.