Speaking as a conservative evangelical who according to some definitions would be "right wing", I'd like to offer my take on the rise of the "religious right".
First some history is in order. The evangelical/fundamentalist church (I'll use evangelical to describe both for convenience and the rest of this posting) was active in the political movement as far back as the late 19th century. Two of the major issues that predominated in that period were temperance and the rise of Darwin's teaching in the public schools.
The temperance movement grew out of the teachings of a number of mid to late 19th century theologians and teachers most notably men like Charles Finney.
And there were many equally opposed to Darwinian theories fearing that such theories would lead to a denial of the Bible and atheism (see below)
In addition at this time the rise of the "higher critical" school of interpreting Scripture became popular in many American seminaries. This prompted greater and greater fears among the pastors and teachers in evangelicalism that the basic doctrines of Christianity were being undermined.
Things came to a head in the early part of the 20th century when the religious "right" of the day led by preachers such as Rev. Billy Sunday preached against the evils both of alcohol and of Darwinism. The result in the case of the former was the adoption of Prohibition. In the case of the latter we had the infamous Scopes Trials.
Prohibition was an unmitigated disaster as noted by many historians. And the Scopes Trial left the general public with the impression that evangelicals were anti-intellectual and ignorant.
These two defeats more then anything else caused evangelicalism to turn inward for the next several decades. It was felt any form of social activism was useless in a world that seemed literally "hell-bent" on its own destruction.
Then in the early to late 50's things began to change. There were many factors in the "reawakening" of evangelicals to social issues. I'll list them briefly below.
- The rise of communism in Europe and Asia, especially after World War II
- An increasingly liberal bend being taken by the mainline denominations.
- The rise of new music in the form of rock and roll.
- The banning of prayer in public schools by the Supreme Court (Engel vs. Vitale).
- The rise of the drug culture in the 60's and 70's.
- The rise of feminism.
- The rise of gay rights.
- The legalization of abortion (Roe v. Wade).
The last of these 8 issues was the proverbial "straw the broke the camel's back." Many evangelicals got into the public arena fearful that their very freedoms were at stake. Roe v. Wade was the trigger for over two decades of
perceived moral decline in the U.S. Pastors such as Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, and Pat Robertson feared that if nothing was done that evangelicals would soon lose their religious freedom. This was the beginning of the Moral Majority and other organizations known as the "religious right"
It was not one single cause, there were several that brought this about.