The Production of Religious Right Discourses, 1965-1985

• In Event: Discursive Institutionalist Approaches to APD: Ideas, Identities, Institutions

Abstract

In 2021, it is not uncommon to hear conservative Christians talk about how, as a group, they are “under attack.” Narratives of victimization abound as conservative Catholics and Protestants alike voice fears of an existential threat to an American way of life that they believe themselves to be the rightful progenitors and successors of. But how should we understand the Religious Right’s simultaneous and contradictory claims to represent the nation’s (moral, religious, and racial) majority and its defensive posturing as a victimized and persecuted minority? How have conservative Protestants and Catholics, antagonists for much of United States history, come to share in the belief that they share in a common identity and that their - and the country’s - traditions are under attack? And, perhaps most significantly, what political purpose is served by this narrative of victimization?

This article provides a theoretical and methodological overview for how we might explore the puzzle of Catholic and Protestant political and socio-cultural convergence and their collective mobilization between 1965 and 1985 by: 1) examining how these groups built an enduring and influential political coalition by instrumentalizing a shared identity of victimhood to stitch together a plurality of Right-wing single-issue groups; and 2) interrogating their production of a proactive politics that was - and continues to be - dependent on the manufacturing of an imagined past and prefigurative present for its success.

In this work, I employ Vivien Schmidt’s discursive institutionalist framework to approach the research from the perspective of coordinative and communicative discourses. In short, I conceive of the work that stemmed from the New Religious Right coalition in terms of the collaborative production of “coordinative” (related to the production of policy) and “communicative” (related to the production of political ideas) discourses (2008). Focusing on the production of these discourses as integrally linked illustrates how the New Religious Right’s success depended on a two-part mobilization. I show how, in part, the movement’s political entrepreneurs built an electoral coalition premised on a shared program of socially conservative policy proposals that sought to enshrine religious norms and beliefs into social policy and law (i.e., the production of a coordinative discourse). At the same time, however, I also argue a new political past, present, and future was rhetorically constructed and disseminated by elites – thereby generating a saleable communicative discourse that was used to “communicate the policy ideas and programs developed in the coordinative discourse to the public for discussion and deliberation” (Schmidt, 310). Thinking in terms of discursive institutionalism encourages the development of a holistic understanding of the New Religious Right that accounts for both the ideational and nuts-and-bolts policy and organizational construction of the movement.

Author

• Chelsea Ebin, Centre College