The Christian Right Is Dead. The Religious Right Killed It.

There have been two competing narratives about the rise of the Christian right in the United States.

The first story is the one we conservative evangelicals told ourselves: Religious conservatism arose as a force in the United States in response to the hedonism of the sexual revolution, the cultural intolerance of the New Left and the threat of the Soviet Union, an explicitly atheistic, Marxist empire.

According to this narrative, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was the seminal domestic event that inspired Christian conservatism. It represented a deadly corruption of our Constitution in service of a culture of sexual convenience in which human life was subordinate to sexual pleasure.