Why God Votes Republican
In 1968 the Protestant Left lost its political clout over their opposition to the Vietnam War – and opened the door for the rise of the modern Religious Right.
The white Christian left was once a powerful influence on American politics, in an era when faith did not dictate political inclination. Then came the 1968 declaration against the Vietnam War by the National Council of Churches. President-elect Richard Nixon would later eschew liberal Christian leaders – and become the first of a series of presidents who built their base on the anxieties of white Christian conservatives. Phillip talks with professor Jill Gill of Boise State University in Idaho, whose parents were a conservative evangelical and a secular liberal. She tells us how evangelicals became synonymous with conservatism in today’s political landscape.
Also: RSS Feed
Music: “And never come back” by Soft and Furious, found on FreeMusicArchive.org, licensed under CC0 1
Archival: Martin Luther King, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Role of the Church Militant
Lecture by William Sloane Coffin on the Vietnam War, November 19, 1972
They’ll Know We Are Christians Peter Scholtes 1966
NIXON TAPES: Vietnam is Kennedy’s Fault (Billy Graham)
LBJ and Martin Luther King, 11/5/64. 3.20p.
Ann Coulter - Godless: The Church of Liberalism
President Obama sings Amazing Grace (C-SPAN)
Obama links raising taxes to Christianity
Evangelicals turn on Trump over immigration
Read more: Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right
Read These Next
Populist podcasters love RFK, Jr., and he took the same left-right turn toward Trump as they did
How did this lifelong Democrat go full MAGA? A scholar of populism finds some answers in the ‘manosphere’…
Better but not stellar: Pollsters faced familiar complaints, difficulties in assessing Trump-Harris
With a history of presidential polls getting it wrong − sometimes very wrong − how did this year’s…
Campuses are ground zero in debates about antisemitism − but that’s been true for 100 years
Universities have an important role in Jewish American history – highlighting both deep-seated prejudice…