With a post roe vs wade POD, weaken the religious right

With a Pod after roe v wade, find a way to have the religious right be weaker within the Republican Party.

I personally think that having Gerald Ford win the 1976 election, and having the Democrats rule throughout the 80s could make Republicans believe that the Religious Right isn't as powerful as they came to believe IOTL and could somewhat weaken the movement.

What do you think? Are there other Pods you can think of?
 
How much weaker do you want them?

The GOP nominees this century have been Trump, Romney, McCain, and Bush - not Cruz or Huckabee or Santorum or Bauer.

With the GOP in charge of Congress and the White House, there is no serious movement to overturn Obergefell or Roe.
 
How much weaker do you want them?

The GOP nominees this century have been Trump, Romney, McCain, and Bush - not Cruz or Huckabee or Santorum or Bauer.

With the GOP in charge of Congress and the White House, there is no serious movement to overturn Obergefell or Roe.

I guess he meant the religious right as an overall political movement.

One way would be to have Reagan just not run in the 80s. HW Bush wins and he was nowhere near as brash with his religion as Reagan was. Furthermore, supply side economics would not become a thing.

Bush would leave and whoever his successor would be would define the GOP a bit more (say maybe Bob Dole) in the good and the bad.

Alternately, have Reagan run in 76 and have him take the fall for the economic problems and potentially crush supply side economics when things get worse. Then run a strong leftist for the 80s and that could help
 
How much weaker do you want them?

The GOP nominees this century have been Trump, Romney, McCain, and Bush - not Cruz or Huckabee or Santorum or Bauer.

With the GOP in charge of Congress and the White House, there is no serious movement to overturn Obergefell or Roe.

I mean you only have two Republican senators who are pro-choice and three Republican senators who support gay marriage. Sure you could argue that many of those religious conservative senators are not all that bothered by these issues, but it is noticeable how these issues are still big litmus tests within the GOP.

So let's say we have an ATL that has say 20 republican senators who are in favour of gay marriage and say 15 senators who are pro-choice.

Also Bush was the Religious Right candidate in 2000, at least compared to his non-joke rivals.
 
Somehow neuter Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson from performing their anti-liberal witch hunts in the 1970’s, and also stop their ballot-stuffing campaign at the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention, which is what enabled the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.

No fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, and no religious right.

But the best way to do that is to have a stronger more effective Carter administration, and one where he leaned into his faith more.
 
Somehow neuter Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson from performing their anti-liberal witch hunts in the 1970’s, and also stop their ballot-stuffing campaign at the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention, which is what enabled the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.

No fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, and no religious right.

But the best way to do that is to have a stronger more effective Carter administration, and one where he leaned into his faith more.

Those two sound interesting along with that whole debacle. Would that really help? (A simple way to get rid of them would be if they got into a car crash)
 
The movement was temporarily weakened by the 1996 election, so if I had to choose a POD, I'd probably choose 2000, and have Bush lose to Gore, with weaker numbers in a lot of battlegrounds. This would have compounded a lot of the shuffle after 96, when a lot of the christian conservative organizations had some funding and legitimacy troubles.
 
three seperate paths

Carter loses in '76, thus neither party "discovers" Values-focused candidates/focusing entire campaigns around that. This weakens both RR, and on the other side of the coin certain moralistic types of democrats -- think more the "protect the kids from violent video games" sorts.

Bill and Hillary Clinton both stay out of national politics. The two have public personas calculated to anger the RR regardless of whatever they do, which given how conservative Clinton's record was OTL is an achievement tbh.

Replace Obama with any non-HRC dem. Why? His name, that's literally all they needed to freak out. Even another black candidate like Cory Booker or Harold ford wouldn't have caused anywhere near as large of a reaction from them.
 
A few options:

Have a better outcome for civil rights, in which the segregationists and white separatist don't get traction. Let's say we somehow have Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University v. Simon, and Bob Jones University v. United States go in favor of the segregationists. Falwell and Weyrich no longer need to shift to religious freedom and abortion remains a Catholic issue in the eyes of Protestant evangelicals. Works especially well if you combine it with a general social shift away from racism. The religious right (correctly) gets associated with racists and is lumped together with the klan and neo-nazis, all of which wither and die away more than OTL.

Kill off or discredit Paul Weyrich before he gets things rolling. Bonus points for getting Phyllis Schlafl, Jerry Fallwell, Robert Grant, Howard Phillips, Terry Dolan, et al - especially in one go.
 
With a Pod after roe v wade, find a way to have the religious right be weaker within the Republican Party.

"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
 
"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

That may be true, but without abortion the religious right almost certainly flames out fairly quickly. Hence why am I looking for other pods that don't involve preventing legalised abortion.
 
Bowers v. Hardwick going the other way, causing the RR to briefly flame up then burn out would mean a weaker RR in 2018 since they'd have time to get used to the gays and stop Caring earlier than OTL.
 
That may be true, but without abortion the religious right almost certainly flames out fairly quickly. Hence why am I looking for other pods that don't involve preventing legalised abortion.
Going the other way on the segregationists schools keeps abortion from becoming the issue at all. It became a central issue later, but at the time Protestant evangelicals considered it a Catholic, and thus suspect, issue.
 
Going the other way on the segregationists schools keeps abortion from becoming the issue at all. It became a central issue later, but at the time Protestant evangelicals considered it a Catholic, and thus suspect, issue.
Course, that just means you get a Religious Right, albeit one of a different complexion and of different priorities (many Catholics were tending for the Right even before the rise of Falwell.)

The question is, of course, how weak do you want it to be? I suppose one route would be an alrernate resolution to the Casey dispute at the 1992 DNC.
 
Course, that just means you get a Religious Right, albeit one of a different complexion and of different priorities (many Catholics were tending for the Right even before the rise of Falwell.)

The question is, of course, how weak do you want it to be? I suppose one route would be an alrernate resolution to the Casey dispute at the 1992 DNC.

The key, assuming that it happens which is not certain, is you get *a* religious right rather thsn *the* religious right. A more Catholic (falangist, perhaps?) religious right will be vastly different from the dominionist we have now.
 
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