Reagan’s Religious Right: The Unlikely Alliance between Southern Evangelicals and a California Conservative

Abstract

When leaders of an emerging Christian Right began campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980, some evangelicals expressed dismay at this seemingly incongruous alliance. Reagan, after all, was a divorced Hollywood actor who, as governor of California, had signed into law one of the nation’s most liberal abortion bills only thirteen years earlier. Why would evangelicals who wanted to bring America back to “traditional values” campaign for a candidate whose cultural and political background reflected the influence of the secular forces that they denounced? “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right,” evangelist Billy Graham told Parade magazine in February 1981. “The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”1