The Religious Right movement is a misunderstood phenomenon. It has been dead for more than a decade, and few are now comfortable defending it. But most evangelical leaders haven’t yet come to terms with the most important reasons it failed. That’s why we haven’t discovered a satisfactory model of political engagement for the twenty-first century.
The rise of the Religious Right was not as dramatic a change from previous history as it may seem. Evangelicals did change the strategy of their political activism in the late 1970s. The new strategy was markedly better in some respects, and markedly worse in others. Both the good and the bad changes received much attention and convinced people that something fundamentally new was happening.
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