How Religious Broadcasting Explains the Christian Right’s Staying Power in the Republican Coalition

• In Event: Transformations of Right Wing Politics

Abstract

The Christian Right has been a powerful ally of the Republican Party for nearly half a century, but has recently suffered losses in its existing capacity to politically mobilize followers through churches. This presents a puzzle about the basis of the Christian Right’s power and, more generally, about how social movements maintain power inside political parties in an era when movement elites have lost traditional connections to grassroots constituencies. To solve this puzzle, my analysis probes how an underappreciated player in American politics—religious broadcasting—acted as a key broker between the Republican Party and the evangelical grassroots from the late 1990s through at least 2020. Using original archival data collection and secondary sources, I argue that broadcast deregulation in the late 1990s led the Christian Right to fundamentally reorganize by transforming into a multi-level business and political partnership between traditional advocacy groups and highly centralized Christian right broadcasting companies, or what I call CRBCs. I demonstrate how this partnership enabled the movement to forge strong and durable connections between elites and regular citizens, and thus to remain a powerful player in the Republican Party in a period in which the party became increasingly radicalized. Findings have implications for scholarship on social movements, religion, media, and U.S. politics.

Author

• Matthew Brooke, Harvard University