Iva Ellen Deutchman, Department of Political Science
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York

Abstract

This article argues that fundamentalist Christians are losing the political battle to transform the larger political culture in America. I suggest two primary and interrelated reasons why the Christian Right is losing the culture war. The first such reason has to do with the values of post-industrial capitalism. While not directly hostile to Christian values, capitalism believes in whatever sells (like pornography or non-marital sex). The second reason has to do with the vast changes in American sexual behaviour and attitudes as a result of the 1960s. The current sexual culture, combined with U.S. market culture, makes it virtually impossible for the Christian Right to win any of its political fights against pornography, gay marriage, sex education in public schools, etc.

[1] The modern American conservative movement, and its political arm, the Republican Party, are made up of a number of factions. The Christian Right is widely considered to be one of the most powerful factions within the party. Many people would agree with John Danforth that the Republican Party has been transformed “… into the political arm of conservative Christians” (Danforth 2005, 17), with the Christian Right seen as having virtual veto power over potential presidential nominees. The popularity of non-Christian Right candidate Rudy Giuliani (who led all other Republican nominees in nationwide polls among registered Republicans through November 2007) is but one reason why the Christian Right remains distinctly unhappy even in the face of its apparent success. While many political analysts see the Christian Right as a dominating force in American politics, fundamentalists in general do not see themselves as having been able to usher in the changes in modern American culture around their core issues of sexual behaviour, divorce, drug use, etc. Moreover, they are distinctly unhappy with their treatment within the Republican Party.

[2] In this paper, I identify two major factors that I argue are primarily responsible for the Christian Right’s apparent lack of success in changing American culture. I do not believe that the Christian Right necessarily understands how either of these factors has worked to hamstring their success. Indeed, in explaining their political failures the Christian Right primarily tends to blame the Republican Party itself, or some group or faction within it. But neither the party itself nor some other faction within it really explains why the Christian Right has been unable to succeed.

[3] The first factor that has stymied the success of Christian fundamentalism can be found in the values of post-industrial capitalism. The most important such value is that any product or behaviour that brings in a profit will be supported by the free market. Put simply, the free market promotes any number of products (pornography, sexy clothing, X or R rated movies, etc.), which fly in the face of Christian values (or the values of many other groups), because free market values are based on profitability whereas Christian values are not.

[4] The free market, as the basis of the American economy, is believed to be the “best” economic system by most Americans. I would venture to say, however, that many of capitalism’s supporters have never thought deeply about the value-free nature of the economic system of which they think so highly. While most Americans support capitalism in a somewhat passive way, its virtues are particularly championed by another Republican faction, the libertarians. Libertarians support an anti-statist, get the government off my back philosophy and trust that individuals can and should make their own choices about consuming the variety of questionable products available in a free market society. Their support for the value-neutral free market obviously will sometimes put them in partial conflict with their fellow Republicans, Christian fundamentalists.

[5] But the success of post-industrial free market capitalism is not the only reason that explains the failure of Christian fundamentalists to realize their aims. The second problem that has made it difficult for fundamentalists to bring about changes in the larger popular culture stems from the fact that the majority of the American people have changed both their sexual beliefs and behaviours over the past fifty years. Modern American sexual values and behaviours sharply conflict with the beliefs espoused by most Christian fundamentalists. Between the economic power of values-free post-industrial capitalism and the fact that American sexual attitudes and behaviours have changed over the last fifty years, Christian fundamentalists face nearly insurmountable problems in their efforts to transform the larger American culture.

[6] The 1980 elections cemented the political relationship between the Christian Right and the Republican Party, which persists to today. 1980 represents the first election where the party depended upon a bloc of fundamentalist voters to secure electoral victory. Although they have stood by the Republican Party for many years, by 2007 many in the Christian Right felt ill treated by the party. In his book In Defense of the Religious Right, Patrick Hynes is highly critical of mainstream Republicans for their treatment of their fellow conservatives when he notes that “[s]ome Republican bigwigs regard Christian conservatives to be a useful part-time ally, good for churning out votes, but hardly worth placating” (Hynes 2005, 27). Indeed, he believes the party places “the agendas of its corporate financiers and its neoconservative think tank allies” (Hynes 2005, xi) above the needs of its most loyal, Christian base. Thus it is no surprise that the Christian Right remains unhappy, as the Republican Party ignores their primary issues to focus on immigration, Iraq, etc. This, of course, is not merely a recent complaint. As far back as 1995, when the Republicans controlled Congress, David Kuo recalls James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) lamenting that Congress wasn’t “fulfilling their desires” (Kuo 2006, 76).

[7] John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge compare the Christian Right’s relationship to the Republican Party under President Bush to that of a troubled marriage. They say it consists of “… tantrums and tearful apologies, long sulks and periodic fireworks, trial separations and loving affirmations that they can’t live without each other” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2004, 183). Conservative Christian voters are too important to the electoral success of the party, no matter how angry the other Republicans become about the direction in which the Christian Right wants to take the party, to seriously consider losing them.

[8] If the Republican Party needs the Christian Right votes in order to win elections, fundamentalists also need the party. To the extent that they want to influence this world, and not concentrate solely on the next, they have no where else to go. As angry as they may get at other Republicans, and vice versa, the Democratic Party at this point in time is hardly a realistic alternative. This is why the troubled marriage analogy is a good one. It is a rocky marriage in a state where it is hard to get a divorce. And what would you do and where would you go, even if divorce were readily available?

[9] The core Christian Right issues focus primarily on sexuality and include abortion, sex education, gay marriage, and pornography. That these issues are all sexual issues is not accidental. As Luker notes, “Rosalind Petchesky … argued as early as 1983 that issues over sexuality could well serve as the glue to bind a new generation of conservatives together, with opposition to changes in sexual and gender roles taking on the role that anti-communism once played in binding diverse conservative constituencies together” (2006, 223). The Christian Right’s position on these various sexual issues argues that all of these behaviours (e.g., having an abortion, being homosexual, watching pornography) are harmful both to the people who engage in them as well to the larger culture. Thus, members of the Christian Right favour banning abortion, gay marriage and pornography. The kind of sex education they would favour teaching would stress abstinence only (Luker 2006; Regnerus 2007). The Christian Right supports what it terms proper or appropriate sexual behaviour, meaning premarital and nonmarital chastity as well as marital fidelity (Hendershot 2004). Such behaviours can be taught (through schools) and/or regulated by the government by restricting marriage to male and female unions and even making divorce harder to obtain.

[10] But Americans live in a culture that the Christian Right (and many others) would term sexually permissive at best. Andrew Taylor refers to work by Stanley and Anna Greenberg when he suggests “Americans are not as conservative on social issues as they once were. As Democratic pollsters Stanley and Anna Greenberg observed in early 2004, ‘It is hard not to be struck by America’s growing diversity, tolerance of different life-styles, social flexibility and openness to change, new roles for women, and skepticism about absolutes and religious truths’” (Taylor 2005, 98). But the cultural changes in America are not merely about attitudes; behaviours have changed as well: “[T]he divorce rate is more than double what it was at the start of the swinging sixties while the proportion of single-parent families is triple” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2004, 380). A recent CNN report states that “more than nine out of ten Americans, men and women alike, have had pre-marital sex, according to a new study” (www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/19/premarital.sex.ap/index.html). What this means is that the Christian Right confronts a larger society whose behaviours and attitudes are ever more hostile to many of its core beliefs. In his excellent and exhaustive history of modern American conservatism, George Nash sums up these changes: “Particularly in the area of social issues and lifestyles—of drug use, sexual mores, acceptance of pornography, and taste in entertainment—elite and popular attitudes had veered sharply in a permissive, even neopagan, direction in recent decades” (Nash 2006, 582).

[11] Ariel Levy (2005) uses the term raunch culture to describe the current America of on-line pornography, Girls Gone Wild, rainbow parties and wet tee shirt contests. All of these products and behaviours were once censored, and people engaged in them secretively, if at all. Now we live in a culture where young college educated women are proud to boast that they won a wet tee shirt contest and where they compete to star in Girls Gone Wild videos. It is hard to imagine how fundamentalist Christians will see their positions on abortion, sex education, gay marriage, etc. adopted any time soon in a culture which sexualizes women at younger and younger ages.

[12] Levy identifies raunch culture by the predominance of certain kinds of sexual behaviours. You know you are living in a raunch culture when women have come to adopt what were once considered male sexual behaviours, including the objectification of women. It is now common to observe women going to strip clubs, women dressing in increasingly scanty outfits, women consuming pornography. And when they are questioned about this, such women argue that their behaviour is feminist, by which they mean that going to strip clubs or getting breast implants is empowering to them as women. Levy quotes pornographic film star Jenna Jamieson’s publisher, Judith Regan, who aptly defines raunch culture: “… if you watch every single thing that’s going on out there in the popular culture, you will see females scantily clad, implanted, dressed up like hookers, porn stars and so on, and … this is very acceptable” (Levy 2005, 19).

[13] There are many examples to illustrate how gender and sexual norms have changed over the last several years. There is now a popular website devoted to the celebration of “cougars.” defined as older women who prey on younger men. At its most extreme, in raunch culture women have come to adopt the worst of male sexual behaviour, such as female junior high and high school teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau and Debra Lefavre who have famously been arrested for having sex with young male students.

[14] Raunch culture confounds Levy from a feminist perspective. In other words, she does not see how women adopting what she argues is (at best) boorish male behaviour is empowering to women. She also notes the emergence of raunch culture in an increasingly conservative America:

Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive in the years that have passed since I first became aware of it. A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular: What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality (Levy 2005, 5).

[15] Raunch culture encourages—nay, demands—the sexual objectification of women. This sexualization occurs through various industries and practices. And all of these practices are based upon American capitalism’s success in figuring out what sells. Bernadette Barton catalogues a host of what she calls stripper-inspired consumer habits:

Young girls exercising to stripper workout videos, buying thongs in droves, and asking their parents for poles to practice in their bedrooms. “Slutware.” as I have dubbed the latest fashion in girls’ and women’s clothing, has never been more “in.” As I write this, female fashion trends feature crop tops, stiletto heels, low-cut pants, impossibly short miniskirts, and latex body suits (2006, 28).

[16] No industry has promoted women’s sexual objection more than the multibillion dollar pornography industry, which has grown from a non-normative and somewhat secretive practice to featured prominence on the New York Times bestseller list (where pornography star Jenna Jamison’s autobiography was the number one bestseller). As Alex Kuczynski notes, “images derived from pornography but stylized for mainstream consumption are a part of daily life: Abercrombie & Fitch sells thong underwear for little girls, inspired by those worn by exotic dancers” (Kuczynski 2006, 129). While the Christian Right objects to pornography, we live in an increasingly pornified world. Pamela Paul explains it:

The all-pornography, all-the-time mentality is everywhere in today’s pornified culture—not just in cybersex and Playboy magazine. It’s on Maxim magazine covers where even women who ostensibly want to be taken seriously as actresses pose like Penthouse pinups. It’s in women’s magazines where readers are urged to model themselves on strippers, articles explain how to work your sex moves after those displayed in pornos, and columnists counsel bored or dissatisfied young women to rent pornographic films with their lovers in order to ‘enliven’ their sex lives (Paul, 2005, 5).

[17] Nowadays pornography is found everywhere. “Even wholesome hotel chains, such as Holiday Inn, provide hard-core pornography on demand” (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2004, 380). Indeed, Mark Regnerus gives the estimate “that roughly 40 percent of American hotels (more than 1.5 million rooms) offer pay-per-view pornography, accounting for several hundred million dollars in revenue per year, and up to 80 percent of total in-room entertainment charges (2007, 173-74). Overall, U.S. pornographized culture now spends “$8 billion to $10 billon per year on the sex industry, including consumption of strip bars, peep shows, pornography rentals, phone sex, sex acts, sex toys and sex magazines” (Barton 2006, 10).

[18] The Christian Right does try to protect itself from this raunch culture. One way it tries to do so is by developing its own movies, magazines, books, and even its own colleges and universities (see Hendershot, 2004 for a good discussion of alternative Christian popular culture). But its purpose is not merely to keep itself and its adherents from the harm that the larger culture can inflict. Such a task is nearly impossible in today’s culture, as Mark Regnerus claims, when discussing evangelical parents’ losing the fight to shield their children from our coarse culture. He notes that the “battle against sexually permissive media content must now be waged on dozens of fronts, most of them well outside parental control” (Regnerus 2007, 156).

[19] Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to protect oneself and ones’ children from coarse culture, many in the Christian Right are trying to transform or to convert the larger culture, although that is not their only—or even primary— purpose. As Kenneth Heineman notes, fundamentalists like the late Jerry Falwell “never thought that America could be made perfect through federal intervention. Punishing immoral behaviour would make America a better place but not a paradise” (Heineman 1998, 7-8). As importantly, many Christian fundamentalists are as interested in the next world as they are in the current one. They believe that the Rapture and the End Times will soon be upon us and they need to prepare for Christ’s return to earth. The central concern for the Christian Right remains salvation, but increasingly the concern about salvation is focused not just on the coming millennium, but also on the coarse culture that surrounds us as we approach the millennium.

[20] Some people might think that it is odd to see the rise of raunch culture at the same time that fundamentalist Christianity is so politically strong. But Ariel Levy has no problem with this apparent contradiction: “If the rise of raunch culture seems counterintuitive because we hear so much about being in a conservative moment, it actually makes perfect sense when we think about it. Raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial” (Levy 2005, 29). Levy’s analysis is right on the mark. Raunch culture does not exist to promote any kind of political agenda even if it seems to espouse a sexual politics which is counter to the ethos of the Christian Right. It supports the sexual politics that it does because of the law of supply and demand that we all learned about in macroeconomics. The Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey makes the same point about the larger culture wars (where sexuality features as a predominant issue) when he says, “the culture wars are over, and capitalism has won” (Lindsey 2007, 37).

[21] In other words, pornography is plentiful at the Holiday Inn not because the hotel’s owners support the pornography industry or have an ideological belief in the benefits of pornography. The moment that the Holiday Inn ceases to make money from hard-core pornography on demand it will stop providing it. Raunch culture “believes” what it believes and sells what it does because it is commercially beneficial to do so. Michael Brendan Dougherty makes a similar point when he questions whether or not “big business … is even compatible with promoting traditional values” (Dougherty 2007, 25). Mark Regnerus argues that it is not, and concludes that nothing has damaged traditional Christian marriage more than “individualism and consumer capitalism and the self-focused desires it creates” (2007, 213).

[22] Thus, the emphasis on pornography, stripper clothing, etc. demonstrates that the free market under capitalism (something usually promoted by most conservatives) also “cater[s] to the unregulated demands of consumers [and] produce[s] things such as pornography … which do not contribute to those virtues that conservatives champion” (Tanner 2007, 12). The free market (supported by the Christian Right’s sometime political allies the libertarians) promotes products, which sell, not products that enforce or teach godliness.

[23] But raunch culture also exists at this particular moment in time as a result of how modern American feminism came to help society to redefine male and female sexuality. In her excellent history of sex education in American public schools, Kristin Luker discusses how the first wave of feminism in the early twentieth century identified male sexual behaviour as negative and took as its charge the challenge to remake men sexually so that they would behave more like women. Activists and analysts in first wave feminism agreed that the two sexes behaved differently around sexual issues. And they rejected the double standard which allowed one set of behaviours for men and another set for women. They argued that men and women should both behave the same way. Since men’s behaviour was worse than women’s, men would have to be remade and men’s behaviours would need to become more like women’s.

[24] First wave feminists believed that by and large men were far more interested in non-committed, casual sex than were women. As such, men would attempt to persuade women to have noncommitted and nonmarital sexual relationships. The women were often seduced and abandoned, made pregnant and/or left by men, or lied to about the man’s future intentions. First wave feminists thought that women preferred love to sex while men believed the opposite and thus preferred casual, noncommitted sexual encounters. While some might consider this an outmoded, and perhaps never accurate gender stereotype, former stripper Elizabeth Eaves makes much the same point when she argues that women traditionally learned “about sex from an unfortunate combination of religion and romance novels, and men learn … about it from porn flicks” (Eaves 2002, 126). From a more academic perspective, Kristin Luker notes the belief that “men … had a basic, primitive sexuality that constantly sought outlet, while women had a more contingent sexuality that could be subordinated to the needs of both family and society” (2006, 56).

[25] One of the most important differences between first and second wave feminism is the change regarding which gender should be the model or the standard for good sexual behaviour. Like first wave feminism, second wave feminism sought to make women and men equal. Like first wave feminism, the second wave shared the idea that men and women should behave the same way sexually (the eradication of the double standard). But under second wave feminism, men were the chosen sex and their sexual behaviour was to become the model for women to imitate. As Kristin Luker explains: “like their predecessors in the early part of the twentieth century, late-twentieth century feminists could have argued that men should be more like women. But that didn’t happen: Men and women became more similar, but this time male behavior was the model” (Luker 2006, 203).

[26] As a result, raunch culture emerges because male sexual behaviour has become the model and the norm for both sexes. Women are now acting like men in terms of consuming pornography and becoming sexually more aggressive. They are engaging in the kinds of sexual behaviours earlier associated with men (for example, more casual sex with multiple partners, called hooking up by modern college students). They are also making themselves into the kind of sexual objects that early second wave feminism denounced. In other words, women in the 1970s did not get breast implants or participate in wet tee shirt contests to become the sexier young things that males supposedly sought. But women today do. As Laura Sessions Stepp notes: “Today’s young women … [are] either mimicking male behaviour … or enjoying their bodies in a ways their mothers never did. Freedom to be openly sexual has leveled the playing field for some girls; they don’t have to be pretty and popular to attract guys, nor do they have to worry as much as past generations did about acquiring a (bad) reputation” (Stepp 2007, 33-34).

[27] As Ariel Levy suggested earlier, raunch culture is primarily commercial. It does not exist to promote a political agenda. At the same time, its commercial values do help to promote a politics which flies directly in the face of the expressly political platform of the Christian Right. Modern American culture has come to embrace the values of raunch culture, much more than the values of the Christian Right. Thus, the Christian Right is losing the culture war at the hands of both raunch culture and post-industrial capitalism.

[28] If the Christian Right better understood why they were losing the war, they might be more able to fight the good fight. What, then, would it take for the Christian Right to win against raunch culture? Could it do something to trump the values of capitalism with the values of Christendom? To answer these questions, I will first begin by going back to the changes in American sexual attitudes and behaviours which have resulted in raunch culture.

[29] The argument that sexual values and behaviours have changed from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty first century is well documented. The point to be made here is that if values and behaviours have changed, what is to prevent them from changing again? In other words, there is no reason to expect the attitudes and behaviours of raunch culture to become permanent in American society when no other sexual behaviours have persisted virtually unchanged. We have seen the divorce rate skyrocket, the number of sexual partners increase and a greater acceptance of same sex marriage. This does not mean these changes are permanent, however. Attitudes and behaviours are amazingly fluid and flexible over time. While it is quite possible that sexual behaviours will change in another fifty years, the question for fundamentalist Christians who distain secular America’s values and behaviours, is what, if anything, can they do to facilitate changes now?

[30] The answer may be a disappointing one. Paul Weyrich, the guru of the political Right over the last thirty years, has “come to the conclusion that conservatives fighting the decline of American culture simply can’t depend on electoral politics to get the job done” (Sager 2006, 141). What Weyrich means by this is that fundamentalists should stop fighting a fight they are currently and will in the future continue to lose. In other words, he recommends they stop trying to get a constitutional amendment passed which would define marriage as solely between a man and woman or stop trying to outlaw abortion. These are examples of losing political fights. Instead of losing political fights, Weyrich advises his fellow conservatives to focus on changing the culture. When he talks about cultural changes, what he is really advocating is an alternative fundamentalist culture, like the successful homeschooling movement he considers a model for the right kind of political activism.

[31] The same kind of thinking is evidenced by Gene Edward Veith in his review of Mark Regnerus’ book Forbidden Fruit. Turning away from the larger decadent culture, and towards strengthening the Christian one, Veith suggests that the fundamentalist churches can do much more than they are doing to help youngsters remain celibate. In particular, he believes that evangelical youth can be saved from the sexual temptations of modern culture by promoting early marriage. He reminds us that “adolescence is a modern invention. In the past, people married much younger, as soon as they were sexually ready … A counter-cultural church may do well to encourage younger marriages” (Regnerus 2007, 9). While other data suggest that youthful marriages lead to higher levels of divorce, the point is that Veith is legitimately searching for ways that evangelicals can fight the lures of raunch culture.

[32] If there is nothing permanent in the values of raunch culture—which means the attitudes and behaviour that underlie it can be changed—the same can be said for the values of capitalism. Capitalism supports whatever sells. When pornography was restricted to Times Square in New York, you would not see X rated films in respectable hotels. That you do now is a matter of economics. But if today’s sexual behaviours and attitudes are not immutable, neither is what sells. In other words, it is possible to imagine a world where celibacy is a hot value or a hot commodity. It is not inevitable that pornography and slut-ware are what will sell five years or twenty-five years from now. Indeed, they did not sell twenty-five years ago the way they sell now.

While there is no reason why fundamentalists cannot use the market the same way pornographers can, it is hard to imagine the lures of chastity outselling raunch sex any time soon. It is difficult to imagine how marketing chastity would succeed in our mainstream, sex obsessed culture. This takes us back again to Weyrich’s idea that perhaps Christians should stop trying to fight what he sees as the losing political fight and concentrate instead on strengthening their own culture. That is a fight that they can win.

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