# Christian Right The **Christian Right** is the alliance between conservative white evangelical Protestantism — with traditionalist Catholics and Mormons as junior partners — and the [[Republican Party]], organized from the late 1970s and dominant in the party's primaries ever since. It is an *electoral coalition* first: a set of institutions (megachurches, Christian broadcasting, voter guides, legal shops, lobbying arms) that turns a theology into turnout. It is distinct from [[Christian Nationalism]], the ideological project of redefining the United States as a Christian nation, though the first has increasingly adopted the second's language, and both feed the [[Culture War]]. ## How it was built - **The trigger was not abortion.** The movement's own founding story — evangelicals roused by *[[Roe v. Wade]]* (1973) — was, as [[Paul Weyrich]] later said plainly, written after the fact. The organizing grievance of 1976–78 was the IRS's move against the tax exemptions of segregated Christian schools such as [[Bob Jones University]]; abortion was chosen as the public issue because it could unite Protestants with Catholics. See [[Moral Majority]] for the founding. - **The institutions.** [[Jerry Falwell]]'s [[Moral Majority]] (1979–89) delivered the 1980 Reagan coalition; [[Pat Robertson]]'s [[Christian Coalition]] (1989), run by [[Ralph Reed]], built the precinct machine and the voter guide; [[James Dobson]]'s [[Focus on the Family]] supplied the radio audience; the [[Council for National Policy]] (1981) supplied the room where donors, broadcasters and politicians met. Reed's [[Faith and Freedom Coalition]] (2009) is the current vehicle: Trump addressed its policy conference on June 26, 2026, calling the left "the most serious threat to our country since its existence" and declaring that "religion is back." - **The payoff.** Six Supreme Court seats and *[[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]]* (2022), the movement's fifty-year objective, achieved — after which its issue portfolio shifted to schools, gender, and the [[Seven Mountain Mandate]]'s program of dominion over institutions. ## The Trump settlement The Christian Right's embrace of a thrice-married casino owner was the moment its critics said it had become a partisan bloc with a religious vocabulary, and the numbers bear on that: white evangelicals gave Trump roughly eight in ten votes in three elections, and the [[Southern Baptist Convention]]'s internal fights since 2016 have been over whether to say so out loud. The support is not unconditional. Pew's January 2026 survey put white evangelical approval of Trump at **69%, down from 78% a year earlier** — still his strongest constituency by twenty points, but with a fifteen-point drop in confidence in his ethical conduct. The movement's leadership has not moved; its pews have, slightly. ## Why it matters here The Christian Right is the vault's paradigm case of a movement that won its stated goal and did not disband: it converted from a coalition seeking a policy into an identity seeking power, and that conversion is what makes [[Christian Nationalism]] the successor rather than a fringe. See [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]] for the denominational map, [[Christian Zionism]] for the foreign-policy wing, and [[Evangelicals and Catholics Together]] for the 1994 pact that made the Protestant–Catholic alliance explicit. ## See Also - [[Moral Majority]] · [[Christian Coalition]] · [[Faith and Freedom Coalition]] · [[Focus on the Family]] · [[Council for National Policy]] - [[Jerry Falwell]] · [[Pat Robertson]] · [[Ralph Reed]] · [[James Dobson]] · [[Paul Weyrich]] - [[Christian Nationalism]] · [[Christian Zionism]] · [[Seven Mountain Mandate]] · [[Culture War]] · [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] · [[Republican Party]]