The New Christian Right is a faith-based movement, overwhelmingly composed of white evangelical Christians, which seeks to encourage conservative religious political activism. Evangelical Christianity is not a new phenomenon: it has been a religious impulse popular in the USA since the eighteenth century and is fully engaged in the political discourse. Indeed, the prefix ‘New’ Christian Right is necessary to differentiate them from their ‘born-again’ predecessors. After the embarrassment of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, conservative Christianity faded into the US subculture, dedicating itself to its primary goal of spreading the gospel. It re-emerged dramatically onto the national political stage in the 1970s as a key Republican Party constituency. There is a debate among historians as to why this was.
▪ Some historians see the Supreme Court rulings of the 1960s and 1970s on so-called ‘hot button’ issues, such as prayer in public schools and abortion, as the primary politicising factor for conservative Christians seeking to defend their biblically-mandated lifestyle from the forces of secularism.
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