Today rapture theology has enormous influence in American politics through the close relationship between Christian fundamentalists and the Republican Right. Rapture theology shapes both domestic and foreign policies.
For instance, policies concerning the environment are increasingly effected by a theology that hopes for a rapturing away from a doomed earth. Reagan-era Secretary of the Interior James Watt told US senators that we are living at the brink of the end times and implied that this justifies clearcutting the nation’s forests and other unsustainable environmental policies.
When he was asked about preserving the environment for future generations, Watt told his Senate confirmation hearing, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”
But true followers of the Lord know the Lord’s mind about this.
“We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned…and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged…and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.” (Revelation 11:17-8)
This confluence of bad ideology and worse theology is truly disturbing, but what is even more frightening is the impact on foreign policy.
American propaganda cast the Cold War as one of history’s great religious wars, between the godless and the God-fearing, between good and evil. It was a simplistic depiction that was supported and promoted in the highest echelons of government and by the leaders of America’s key institutions. During the course of the presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, U.S.-Soviet rivalry was transformed from a traditional great power struggle into a morality play.
Truman made religion America’s ideological justification for abandoning America’s wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower used religion to persuade the world that America was a force for good in the international arena. The resulting anti-communist crusade was to have profound consequences for Christian America…
Over time it caused irrevocable alterations to America’s religious landscape. The anti-communist dynamic unleashed…anti-liberalism and was a factor in the rise of the Christian Right and the decline in America’s mainstream churches. In addition, the image of a godless and evil enemy dictated an irreconcilable conflict that precluded the very modes of diplomacy and discourse that might have helped avoid the worst excesses, costs, and consequences of the Cold War.
Time magazine’s July 1, 2002 cover story on “The Bible and the Apocalypse,” reports that 36% of Americans polled who support Israel “say they do so because they believe in biblical prophecies that Jews must control Israel before Christ will come again.” This leads them to support a particular Middle East political scenario, including U.S. military and political aid to Israel, and expansion of Israel’s settlements into the West Bank.
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals…considered [abortion] a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance…refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy.
In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed…”
Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
So what then were the real origins of the religious right?
It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.
The real origins of the religious right is its belief in White Supremacy.
In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status…The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
the plaintiffs won…
Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams…”
For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990…
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school…”
The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970…The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation…
In…an attempt to forestall IRS action, [Bob Jones University] admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption.
“That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
Weyrich saw that he had the beginningsof a conservative political movement…he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon…In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich…were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision…
the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters…Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer…considered by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm…argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to “secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral decay.
By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the “unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS “against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion. Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their votes…
After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great…”
it is certainly true that evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The emergence and popularity of the Moral Majority came at a time when there were growing efforts to establish the rights of women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. Moral Majority, thus, represented the conservative religious reaction to those efforts.
The Moral Majority drew primarily from white fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, although it also…mobilized a broader conservative religious and political coalition than just white conservative evangelicals…Ultimately, this broad coalition of conservatives – mostly white Christians – came to represent the “Religious Right.” It has had an enormous impact on both the Republican Party and on public policy more generally since its founding...
Falwell died in 2007, and his efforts to combine his religious and political commitments seem to have fallen to his son, Jerry Falwell Jr., who as president of Liberty University has been outspoken in his support of Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, seems to have rewarded him for his support with the appointment to the education reform task force.
President Donald Trump appointed evangelical Christian leader Jerry Falwell Jr.to head the White House education reform task force…
Falwell Jr. is as outspoken in his religiously glossed opinions on issues as was his father, speaking at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 21, 2016.
Over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, making the Falwell legacy as important as Reagan for the Republican Party.
Under Falwell Jr., the school became the largest Christian university in the U.S. due to online students – a combined student body of about 93,000. It received about $857 million in federal money for student aid, making it one of the largest recipients of such funding, while Falwell Jr. made Liberty a destination for conservative speakers: Ted Cruz launched his White House bid from the school’s campus and Jeb Bush and Donald Trump also spoke at the school during the same election cycle.
Falwell ignited a major controversy in late 2015 by encouraging Liberty students to carry concealed weapons while at the school. During one of the school’s convocations he stated, “I’ve always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.”
After multiple students reported that they were threatened with conduct violations of the school’s strict moral code, known as the Liberty Way, if they pursued charges of rape on campus, the national Education Department launched an investigation of compliance with a federal law that requires universities to report crime that occurs on their campus. Their investigation uncovered multiple attempts to cover its tracks for failing to do so, for example, “senior officials in HR sought the assistance of IT staff to wipe certain computer hard drives on April 26, 2022, the very week that the review team first visited the campus.”
Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as president of Liberty University Tuesday amid an unfolding sex scandal involving Falwell, his wife Becki, and their seven year relationship with young hotel pool boy in a tale of financial, institutional, and political corruption involving one of the most prominent evangelical organizations in the country — and the saga may even have helped make Donald Trump president.
Michael Cohen — whom Falwell had met a few years earlier when Trump came to speak at Liberty — tried to help the Falwells fix a problem stemming from this situation. A few months later — and a few days before the 2016 Iowa caucuses — Falwell Jr. announced that he was endorsing Donald Trump for president. This was one of Trump’s first prominent endorsements, and it was surprising and controversial among evangelicals, considering Trump’s weak ties to organized religion and his messy personal life.
The prominent evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr is facing a $10m lawsuit from the Christian university founded by his father, and which he served as president until resigning in the wake of a sordid extortion scandal last year. Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, claims Falwell hid “potentially damaging” details of the scandal as he negotiated a lucrative new contract for himself with the university’s trustees. breached his fiduciary duties to the university and kept university property he was required to return, and failed to disclose or address “his personal impairment by alcohol”.
Falwell dropped his own defamation lawsuit against Liberty in December 2020.
Kingdom Come 