AHC: Prevent the rise of the religious right

Since the late 1960's the religious right has been on the march in the US. They brought religious involvement in politics to a new level, arguably enabled the shift to the 6th party system and were key in enabling Republican success under the new system.

I've seen numerous reasons given for the rise of the religious right. From Supreme Court decisions, to de-segregation, to Republican opportunism, to watergate and even to post-modernism.

With so many different factors at play is it possible to prevent the rise of the religious right?

Would no watergate do it? Or perhaps no Roe vs Wade?
 
Roe v. Wade was probably the number one catalyst for the rise of the religious right. Abortion is the biggest motivator for this demographic. Ironically this is also probably why it is still in effect-even “pro-life” Republicans don’t want to lower turnout of a reliable part of their voter base so they aren’t really going to push hard for an amendment overturning the decision.

But back to the point, if Roe hadn’t happened, the religious right would be far less influential. On a state level there’d be debate around abortion but they wouldn’t be the national force of OTL.
 
"What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."--Paul Weyrich https://books.google.com/books?id=Tzi7bIDP3aMC&pg=PA173
 
It's pretty difficult to stop the rise of some kind of religious right movement gaining traction by about the 1980s. Sure preventing roe vs wade would certainly weaken the religious right but it probably wouldn't be enough to prevent it from becoming some kind of movement.

But what a lot people mean by this question is actually "how can the religious right be prevented from assuming the power it has over the Republican Party". This isn't so difficult, all you need to do is prevent the large landslides in the 1980s that convinced the republican leadership that embracing the religious right was an electoral asset for the GOP.
The easiest POD to do this is to have Gerald Ford beat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and have a democrat win in 1980.
 
You need to ask the right question to understand what motivates these people. It was Brown vs. Board of Education that they objected to. Racism in the guise of religion, money and power is what these people are all about. Anything else they say is a self serving lie.
 
You need to ask the right question to understand what motivates these people. It was Brown vs. Board of Education that they objected to. Racism in the guise of religion, money and power is what these people are all about. Anything else they say is a self serving lie.
I find using racism to attack the Religious Right not only myopic but inflammatory (and I'm agnostic). Someone is blind to missionary work in Africa, China, and North Korea at a minimum as well as multiple religious figures pressing for Civil Rights. That is just TOO broad a brush.

The Religious Right arose just like the backlash in the 2016 election: incremental. Counter culture, increasing drug use, corruption in government (Watergate) and a loss in faith in the establishment, the shift of youth to harder rock music, the Democrats casting out the Dixiecrats, abortion, economic malaise, increasing secularism, birth control, liberal sexual attitudes, a shift in cinema and television toward sex, violence, and real world problems, etc. It was a fear of veering away from tradition.

Reagan noticed and harnessed the tide giving them voice and a symbol representing the lost moral right of a bygone America (I love the man but admit he was incredibly flawed).

You'll require multiple PODs to slow if not stop the coming of the religious right.
 
That is hardly myopic, and any who has spent any time around these people knows that the three things I sighted are what drives them. How else do explain the fact that are willing to put aside all of their so-called beliefs for any politician who panders to overt bigotry. Reagan, who you give a tongue bath to went to Mississippi and just a few miles form where three civil rights workers were lynched gave speech about "States Rights" in one of the most disgusting displays of pandering to racism and ignorance imaginable. If you think that is a positive vision of America then shame on you. As for that "missionary work" in Africa, Pat Robertson was caught using it as a front for diamond smuggling. https://www.thedailybeast.com/missi...exploited-post-genocide-rwandans-for-diamonds Money, power and exploiting bigotry are all these people have ever been about. If you can't deal with that reality then that is on you.
These people? I'm afraid that general statement strips you of authority on the matter. I don't remember the Religious Right screaming for a return to segregation, making miscegenation illegal, or demanding Creationism in all schools. I've lived in the American Midwest and the South, and just like every part of the world there may be racists but they are not the norm and you should be ashamed for trying to say otherwise. Stereotypes lead to misunderstanding. Tolerance and life experience will do the opposite. Stop the diatribe that religion means discrimination. I live in Utah. There are some major racists up here who hate my mixed marriage but I don't declare the whole state to be in the wrong. I've lived in South Africa and knew Afrikaaners who battled for an end to Apartheid despite the view all Boers were racist.

For God's sake, Nixon was more hardcore equality than JFK or LBJ. Grey, not black or white, is the reality. Stop baiting.
 
1973: Yom Kippur War escalates into full US-USSR exchange. Surviving Southern Hemisphere is divided between Catholicism and new Posadist religion.
1976_movie_poster_for_the_movie_%27a_boy_and_his_dog%27.jpg
 
Roe v. Wade was probably the number one catalyst for the rise of the religious right.
As David T alludes to, abortion was not initially the big issue. There are a few articles about it, but the rub is this: even when Roe v Wade happened, the Evangelicals and others Protestants viewed abortion as a specifically Catholic issue, one which they sometimes ridiculed Catholics for. The Evangelicals and the Religious Right switched on abortion sometime between 1978 and 1980.
Even the people that started the Christian Right remarked that it the inciting incident was the attempts by the Federal Government in 1970s to punish Evangelical institutions, particularly Bob Jones University, for racially discriminatory practices.

Seeing as the Religious Right formed, broadly as a reaction to the Counterculture, but specifically as a reaction to desegregation and the Black civil rights movement, it's something that's probably impossible to avoid. The stuff the created it also created the conditions that enabled Nixon's election in 1968, that enabled the rise of the Western conservatives in the GOP, that generated the urban tumult of the 1970s. The Religious Right wasn't one isolated movement, it was part of a wider White (primarily Southern) conservative backlash. To avoid it, you'd have to literally stall the Civil Rights movement entirely (which was not going to happen, it had generated too much momentum and politically mobilized the black demographic).
 
A Supreme Court decision regarding abortion was coming down the pipeline eventually, even if you prevent Roe.

IMHO, you go a long way to preventing the rise of the Religious Right by avoiding Jimmy Carter (the first President who explicitly invoked his faith in that sort of way). Ford winning in 1976 works, as does No Watergate.

(Funny thing - until Reagan, there's no particular reason it has to be the Religious Right, rather than the Religious Left).
 

FBKampfer

Banned
I can think of several ranging from insurrection during civil rights leading to a great dying of rubes and the ignorant (and demographically speaking there is great overlap with these simpletons opposed to equality, and both right wing politics and religiosity), to stronger enforced state education under the guise of fighting poverty and improving the well-being of the country.

A federal law mandating standard curriculum (not even anti-religiously based science or anything, just better math and English, and better education in general) in the 1900's would go miles towards crippling the religious right. There are strong trends between education and support of secularism (regardless of personal beliefs) and economic mobility, and ties between economic mobility and religious views.

Start educating the hinterlands in a slow, methodical manner (but mandatory at gunpoint if need be), and you can have the religious right pushed back to isolated populations in the Ozark and Smokey Mountain ranges, and Utah.
 
I can think of several ranging from insurrection during civil rights leading to a great dying of rubes and the ignorant (and demographically speaking there is great overlap with these simpletons opposed to equality, and both right wing politics and religiosity), to stronger enforced state education under the guise of fighting poverty and improving the well-being of the country... ... and you can have the religious right pushed back to isolated populations in the Ozark and Smokey Mountain ranges, and Utah.

Most of the 'Religious Right' I have personally known/had business with in the past fifty years were educated. University degrees ect... They simply dismiss the validity of anything that contracts their agenda or belief system. Business degrees & hard sciences did not inoculate those I've known against their conservative religious views.
 
You need to ask the right question to understand what motivates these people. It was Brown vs. Board of Education that they objected to. Racism in the guise of religion, money and power is what these people are all about. Anything else they say is a self serving lie.

I find using racism to attack the Religious Right not only myopic but inflammatory (and I'm agnostic). Someone is blind to missionary work in Africa, China, and North Korea at a minimum as well as multiple religious figures pressing for Civil Rights. That is just TOO broad a brush. ...

Ya, the evangelicals tend to not be overtly racist. Patronizing in my experience, but not the sort who claim the white race as Gods choosen. I've known individuals in both groups. As was also pointed out in this thread the term Religious Right covers a spectrum of beliefs and agendas associated with Christianity & the catchall term 'Conservative'.
 
Ya, the evangelicals tend to not be overtly racist. Patronizing in my experience, but not the sort who claim the white race as Gods choosen. I've known individuals in both groups. As was also pointed out in this thread the term Religious Right covers a spectrum of beliefs and agendas associated with Christianity & the catchall term 'Conservative'.
Generalizations may simplify but they also antagonize. If anything humanity is and will forever be complicated...and difficult.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Most of the 'Religious Right' I have personally known/had business with in the past fifty years were educated. University degrees ect... They simply dismiss the validity of anything that contracts their agenda or belief system. Business degrees & hard sciences did not inoculate those I've known against their conservative religious views.

Trends allow for outliers.

It wouldn't fix individuals, but over multiple generations, it would fix the problem.

And it's important to remember that early education helps with increased neuroplasticity, deductive reasoning, and measured intelligence.

The goal is not simple education, but alteration of capabilities, ultimate potential, and through improved opportunities, changes in their way of life. It's not the education itself that erodes faith and gullibility, but the opportunities, challenges, and associated and necessary methods of thinking.

Innocent, idealized small town America will be lost. But ultimately it's a necessary casualty.

Those first kids are going to be mostly as gullible as their parents. But they will be better educated, and have greater opportunities. Their kids might be college bound, and increasingly taught to question their world.

Give it five or six generations of consistent, concerted education and effort to reach the more isolated communities, and you'll have dealt a death blow to evangelism.



Or there's always self-inflicted culling via insurrection. I'm flexible.
 
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