Military metaphors structured Falwell’s understanding of Christianity. The church was an “army equipped for battle,” Sunday school an “attacking squad,” Christian radio “the artillery.” Christians, “like slaves and soldiers,” ask no questions. As an occupation force, they needed to advance “with bayonet in hand” to bring the enemy under submission

In 1971, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Bill with the purpose of establishing a national day-care system to help working parents. It was only thanks to Pat Buchanan, a conservative Catholic White House aide who denounced the plan as one that would bring about “the Sovietization of American children,” that Nixon

It was only through the identification of common enemies that fundamentalists were able to fashion a powerful (if unstable) identity.6

evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.

For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.

As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion. But with the liberalization of abortion laws, and as abortion proponents began to frame the issue in terms of women controlling their reproduction, evangelicals started to reconsider their position.

this apolitical rhetoric seems odd coming from the founder of the Moral Majority, consider that Falwell addressed his earlier denouncement of Christian political activism to “Ministers and Marchers”—in other words, to Christian pastors active in the civil rights movement. A child of the South, Falwell was a segregationist. Rather than fearing that

LaHaye’s embrace of Reconstructionism demonstrates how theological contradictions could be smoothed over in practice. In adopting Reconstructionist teachings piecemeal, premillennialists patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism. Such quibbles apparently paled in comparison to what they held in common—a desire to

In 1977, on the occasion of Wayne’s seventieth birthday, an article in the conservative journal Human Events attempted to explain Wayne’s allure, and the racialized portrait of Wayne is revealing: Wayne was a “basic American breed,” a “tall Celt” of “pioneer Scots, Irish and English stock.”