I see questions about modern fundamentalism (which I assume are a part of the 'some sects' your refering to) come up here from time to time - some of them get almost no (good) responses, some generate some good discussions (even if some are conflicting).
I hope this generates some good responses as I'd love to hear them as well - if not, here's a related (but different) question from a couple of years ago I had saved in case it helps you find your own way:
I can talk about several denominations within Christianity in Canada from the 50s onwards. These denominations (spec. Baptists, Mennonites, and CMA/CAMA, tended to be, and still tend to be, more conservative than other groups with Canada, including the RC church, Anglicans, and so on--though the latter are not my area of expertise). Please note that when I refer to "Baptists", I'm not referring to the Southern Baptist movement within the United States. Rather, I'm talking about Canadian descendants of the Anabaptist movement in 16C. They may have similar roots but frankly I don't know.
Putting aside dietary restrictions for a moment, in the third quarter of the 20th century (so 1950-1975) there were strong taboos against men with long hair (1 Cor 11.14) and tattoos (Lev 19.28) in mainstream Baptist, Mennonite, and CMA congregations in Western Canada. Sermons were preached about it in many churches over many years. The same goes for tattoos, which were seen as unacceptable unless a church member were an adult convert. While the taboo against long hair grew less influential in the 80s, the taboo against tattoos lasted longer.
The question is, to what extent did existing religious norms influence society as a whole, as long hair, certainly, was seen to be a part of youthful rebellion. In smaller communities within AB, BC, and SK (and even larger centres such as Lethbridge), many businesses were simply closed on Sundays during this quarter. I would argue that, the more religious the community, the more influence that the church had upon individual towns, to the extent that Biblical precepts against working on the Sabbath influenced the culture as a greater whole. (Some of those restrictions, closures on Sunday in particular, still have ramifications today, but that's beyond the scope of this subreddit.)
Homosexuality within these groups was simply not tolerated, and abortion... well, that's an interesting topic, as the laws on abortion in Canada were loosened in 1967 as a result of Pierre Trudeau, himself influenced by the Quiet Revolution in the 60s (which saw a shift in societal values away from the Roman Catholic church and towards secularism). While abortion was quasi-legal at that time, it was still largely decried by many Christian churches within Canada, including Baptists and Mennonite groups, and CAMA/CMA (The Christian and Missionary Alliance).
There may be individual congregations with exceptions to the above rule, but looking at statements of belief from this era (and God help me but I can't find any of my old textbooks in which this was discussed... we're talking about mimeograph copies from provincial assemblies of the aforementioned groups, and I have no idea where they are), the above is by and large true.
So: the above groups largely condemned homosexuality (let alone gay marriage) and abortion, as well as tattoos, working on Sundays, and long hair for men. Consistent so far. Back to dietary restrictions: speaking of Christianity, there are no longer any dietary restrictions, period. In Acts 10 & 11, Peter has a vision in which God essentially tells him that it's okay to eat anything, that the old dietary laws of the Old Testament no longer applied. This is why Christians in general have no issue with eating anything, and that's a blanket statement that applies worldwide (with a few minor exceptions, such as Messianic Jews).
I understand that this is a very limited answer from a very limited geographical area within North America. I apologise for my lack of sources, but little on this can be found online outside of regional paper archives, and those are spread out and difficult to access on a Sunday afternoon (heh). The texts to which I have access, including Readings in Baptist History: Four Centuries of Selected Documents by Joseph Early and Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology by Paul Fiddes are broader and the former does talk about Southern Baptists; this would be a useful resource to look at belief statements from larger organising bodies. My post is related more towards a posteriori experiences in individual congregations in the latter part of the 20th century in W. Canada.
Follow-up/related question: were these other issues (tattoos, working on Sundays etc) ever politically important to Christians? When did they stop being important (politically at least)?
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I know, I know, reddit gloms onto anything that smells of religion and hypocrisy. But bear with me, because the intellectual and political developments in play are important to understanding, beyond any gut jerk condemnation or automatic acceptance.
The story that Christians tell themselves, passed down in the Book of Acts and some of the New Testament epistles, is that Jesus came and fulfilled the Law, that is, the Old Testament. It's pretty clear in context that the critical issue was nascent Christianity's built in mission (evangelization) imperative juxtaposed with Jewish prescriptions, most importantly circumcision, although kosher laws also feature prominently in the biblical discussion.
But while what is depicted by Christian tradition as a battle between "Jewish Christians" and "Gentile Christians" ultimately comes down on the side of God apparently no longer requiring circumcision in the "new covenant," this hardly means that developing Christianity shed its Jewish roots including the Old Testament, or the Hellenized Roman culture in which it incubated. Everyone's favorite example here is abortion, so let's roll with it. Early and medieval Christians recognized abortion as a moral question, connected to infanticide. But perspectives differed-and would continue to differ-on when abortion began to be a problem. Was it always immoral? Or was it only immoral after the infusion of the soul into the body? And when was that, and was it different for boys and girls? As John Riddle points out, even as one tradition that would become canon law condemned contraception and abortion, some theologians continued to repeat earlier ideas and even mention recipes for contraceptives.
The complicating and complicated, but crucial, factor is sex. Christianity inherits a deep skepticism towards sex and the human body from Greek philosophy, to the extent that Jerome (who gave us the Vulgate Bible) argues that virgins should kill themselves to avoid the pollution of being raped. Of course, a society without sex is self-eradicating, and Christians quickly come up with the longstanding view that sex is okay if it is in accord with nature, that is, can lead to procreation. And the wonderfully spicy Song of Songs is reinscribed as an allegory: the love song between Christ and his Church or Christ and the soul (or, because he Middle Ages love you and want you to be happy, Christ and Mary, his virgin mother).
The spread and entrenchment of thhe Latin Church as a landed power over the early high Middle Ages introduced a new wrinkle to the concept of moral authority: legal authority, and the desire to shepherd and augment it for the salvation of as many people as possible. Christians have a harder task in the establishment of religious law than Jews and Muslims, since the NT works mightily hard to reject legalism as a principle. So canon (Church) law ends up cobbled together out of the Bible, philosophers, practical situations. It's in the efforts to codify canon law in 11-12C that theolgians start to pay attention to sodomy with a definition of (male, primarily) homosexuality. Although it is still just one form of the "sin against nature", and there are no signs of active persecution from Latin Christians. But the codification of canon law reflects a long term trend in the west towards social order, hierarchy, purity, playing out above all on religious (anti-Semitism) and gender policing lines (misogyny, patriarchal families, strict gender roles and gender expression norms). Homosexual sex acts stack up poorly here, as you can imagine, and by the fifteenth century it can be and sometimes was punishable by death.
So what is the Bible doing in all this? As suggested by the multivalent interpretations of the Song of Songs (totally ripped from rabbinic readings of the love been God and his chosen people, by the way), medieval biblical interpretation was majestically flexible. This could lead to things like understanding the story of Jonah as a prophecy of Christ, descending into hell for three days, as well as being the story of a man who tried to say no to God and got eaten by a fish. Or it could mean trying to apply the "sons of Noah"-Shem, Japheth, Ham-as a paradigm to understand the peoples of an expanding (in Latin consciousness) world. The most famous medieval permutation here is the use of the curse of Ham to justify the existence of Latin, Christian serfdom. It often took on geographic origin meanings, however, which were as varied as the peoples of the Mediterranean world. In the early modern era, the western interpretation will harden into the "curse of Ham" that morally justifies the enslavement of black Africans by white Europeans and colonial descendants.
But that development, and even more its entrenchment, are somewhat of a departure in the evolution of European intellectual culture. Even as the Protestant reformers and the Catholic reaction supposedly streamline and "harden" biblical interpretation methods (don't worry, the Song of Songs lives on in all its meanings), first the influence of humanism and then the evolution of natural philosophy into science never quite allowed the Bible to be Clarissa Explains It All.
Well, nineteenth century coming at you to change all that.
An important evolution that is actually played out in interpretations of the curse of Ham story is a growing sense that slavery is a moral issue. Not just related to religious in-group-ism, but ownership of humans in light of humanity, period. Now, it's crucial to recognize the mutually reinforcing and guiding nature of religious beliefs/morality and other circumstances, be they political, economic, environmental, what have you. Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (which is to some extent the point towards which so much of career oriented him) lays out cleanly that the split between Christians opposed to slavery and Christians supporting it broke down along the geographic lines you would expect, but also that both sides made religion the basis for securing popular support. Abolitionists appealed to the ideals of "liberal theology" (not in the modern US political sense) and biblical exegesis, favoring holistic readings and the "sense" of scripture. Slavery's defenders huddled down into what we call proof-texting: if you can find it in the Bible, somehow someway, it's God's inerrant word. Even if there are contradictory texts. This principle-fundamentalism, literalism, inerrancy-is a 19C invention. But so is the abolitionists' holistic reading. So is Luther's the Old Testament through the cross hermeneutic. So is medieval and patristic fourfold senses (historical and three allegorical forms).
All of these developments that I've talked about-sex, literalism, holistic/critical exegesis, race, moral politics, the role of religion in galvanizing political opinion and vice versa, tumble into the 20C. If anything, the Victorian and then Progressive era and its emphasis on "middle class values" (an adjusted vision of rightly ordered, moral society) demonstrated even more firmly the power of religion in spurring people's political activism as well as introducing new dimensions of concern over the policing of sex and, now, "sexuality." This period also saw a critical social invention in America: widespread, mandatory public education.
This was inseparable from religion, please understand. Apart from the Catholic Church's long leadership role in all levels of education and nuns as THE champions of educating girls, late 19/early 29C Catholics often perceived public schools as a covert Protestant indoctrination, hence the longstanding tradition of Catholic schools in many American cities. This is a vital precedent. Because when the US finally gets its head temporarily out of the racist sand and makes school segregation illegal, it's southern Christians in the same "biblical inerrancy" tradition who defended slavery, who lack qualms about expressing their racism.
I choose my word carefully here. Because you can certainly cherry pick quotes from the odd Protestant leader or Southern politician who explicitly links the rise of religious (Protestant, PLEASE) schools, mainly in the south, to a desire to prolong segregation. That's not the dominant narrative, you understand. Religious freedom! Need to secure the morality of our good sons and daughters! Gosh, and don't those race based admissions requirements make it a safer environment for the children. When the segregation policies were challenged in court (Green v. Connally; Coit v. Green), it was easy to sell this as religious persecution, not the government's rightful enforcement of due civil rights. And to be clear: the issue here wasn't about the closure of the schools. What got conservative Christians crying persecution! was the threat of revoking the schools' tax-exempt status. America, y'all.
The lesson, going forwards, would be the power of evangelical Protestant Christianity as a political force-to motivate its believers, and the vitality of the consenting-to-legal-racism white voter as a target bloc.
some sects of Christianity
That's a really, really broad question. Instead, I'm just going to talk about abortion as viewed by Evangelical Christianity in the United States. This issue has not always been a priority, and much of the focus on and politicization of it started in the 1980s. My comment is based on chapter 2 of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley (which is impeccably sourced; nearly a quarter of the book is citations). See this summary of the relevant chapter for more.
The bible itself is very wishy-washy on abortion: it's not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, and the Old Testament is pretty permissive of it (hence why it's not uncommon for Jews to be pro-choice). If someone injures a pregnant woman and kills her, it's a crime punishable by death, but if the injury merely causes her to miscarry, the offender shall just pay a fine (Exodus 21; I'm quoting chapter but not verse so that you have to look at the surrounding verses before claiming I'm taking anything out of context). God commanded Moses to take a census but no one under 1 month old counted as a person (Numbers 3). Numbers 5 contains instructions on how to make a potion that is harmless when drunk by faithful women but causes miscarriages when drunk by adulterers. There are other verses, but those three hit home for me.
Early Christians had varied and conflicting views on when ensoulment took place and when abortion counted as murder. Tertullian and Calvin would today be considered pro-life, while Augustine and Aquinas would be considered pro-choice. The Catholic church became strictly anti-abortion in the 1800s, though I don't have a good understanding of why that happened. In contrast, Protestants were largely pro-choice. This continued for over a century, as the Catholics started passing anti-abortion statutes in various states.
Evangelicals were somewhere between ambivalent and opposed to banning abortion. In 1968, Christianity Today magazine and the Christian Medical Society wrote A Protestant Affirmation on the Control of Human Reproduction, which states that "when principles conflict, the preservation of fetal life... may have to be abandoned in order to maintain full and secure family life." The Southern Baptist Convention of 1971 resolved to "work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." They reiterated this position in 1974 and 1976 (note that Roe v. Wade was in 1973).
As for how this flipped, Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, Ed Dobson, and other folks like that were trying to turn Evangelicals into a political force, reasoning that there are a whole lot of Evangelicals and they'd be able to have a massive influence if they just got everyone organized and pointing in the same direction. This started with a wide variety of issues: segregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, etc. They found that by coming down squarely on the anti-abortion side, they could increase their influence on Catholics, and draw in a larger crowd of people. By the 1980s, they had a sense of which issues drew people in, and discarded all the other issues that didn't have the same effect (so, abortion stayed on their agenda, while mandatory school prayer was dropped). They then went full force on these issues, which convinced a receptive audience that these were biblical stances, and the religious right grew in strength and influence.
I’ll start by saying that I don’t feel I have the knowledge necessary to comment on why gay marriage in particular seems to be a bigger political issue than other Biblical mandates; I’ll leave that question to someone more qualified. Instead, I’ll focus my efforts mainly on the history of the alignment between the Republican party and conservative Christianity. It’s easy to see that today conservative Republican ideology and Christian ideology go hand-in-hand. But your question is specifically about the history of this issue, and you ask if its always been that way. The answer appears to be yes, for at least the last 50 years.
A 2015 Gallup poll found that 40% of those polled would not vote for a candidate who was an atheist, and 24% would not vote for a gay/lesbian candidate. Below is their exact wording of the question:
Between now and the 2016 election, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates - their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be (fill-in-the-blank), would you vote for that person? (McCarthy, 2015)
In general, Gallup polls is a wonderful resource for determining how political attitudes in the US have changed over time, because they ask the same questions (although sometimes the wording changes slightly) year after year. With specific reference to this question, it has been asked of people since 1937, although at that time the only identities asked about were female, Jewish, or Catholic. The earliest data Gallup offers about gay/lesbian candidates is from 1978, when just 26% of respondents said they would vote for such a candidate, compared to 68% in 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republicans are less likely to vote for a gay/lesbian candidate than either Democrats or Independents. In 2016, 85% of Democrats said they would vote for a gay/lesbian candidate, compared to 61% of Republicans (McCarthy, 2015; Jones, 2012).
The data from Gallup suggests that Republicans’ fixation with homosexuality dates back to at least the late 1970s. Other sources provide different avenues of information and trace the origins of the alignment of Republicans and conservative Christians back even further. In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, establishing the position of the Catholic Church as anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive:
We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children^(14). Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary^(15) (Paul VI, 1969).
The reference footnotes in the above quote are:
^(14) See Council of Trent Roman Catechism, Part II, ch. 8; Pius XI, encyclical letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 562-564; Pius XII, Address to Medico-Biological Union of St. Luke: Discorsi e radiomessaggi, VI, 191-192; Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 842-843; Address to Family Campaign and other family associations: AAS 43 (1951), 857-859; John XXIII, encyclical letter Pacem in Terris: AAS 55 (1963), 259-260 [TPS IX, 15-16]; Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, no. 51: AAS 58 (1966), 1072 [TPS XI, 293].
^(15) See Pius XI, encyclical letter Casti connubii: AAS 22 (1930), 565; Decree of the Holy Office, Feb. 22, 1940: AAS 32 (1940), 73; Pius XII, Address to Midwives: AAS 43 (1951), 843-844; to the Society of Hematology: AAS 50 (1958), 734-735 [TPS VI, 394-395].
Because of this addition to the Catholic dogma, many Catholics felt compelled to adjust their voting habits accordingly. In the late 1960s, the Republican party had already established itself as having anti-abortion leanings, so the alignment came quite naturally. A 1980 study looking at abortion trends found that roughly 41% of respondents supported abortion. Respondents were given six reasons and asked if they would support a woman getting an abortion due to that reason. In 1977, a seventh item was added, asking if respondents would support a woman getting an abortion “for any reason.” The reason with the most support was “If the woman's health is seriously endangered” with 73 percent, and the reason with the least support was “If the woman is married and does not want any more children” with 16 percent (Granberg and Granberg, 1980; Guttmatcher Institute, 1983).
In addition to the Papal element, the Republicans had also set themselves up to favor the white vote, particularly the racist whites who opposed the Civil Rights Act and racial integration. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and a pervasive legend has him as saying some variant of “There goes the South for a generation,” or “We [Democrats] have lost the South for a generation” (Green, 2014). However, Dr. Steven J. Allen (2014) cites a wide body of research, all of which finds no evidence of Johnson having ever said that. But regardless of if Johnson said those words, there appears to have been an element of truth behind them. Kevin Phillips, an aide to Richard Nixon, is quoted as saying:
All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage […] From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that. […] The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are (Boyd, 1970).
Returning to the aforementioned Gallup polls which asked if people would vote for a candidate of a specific identity, they found that support was low for black candidates in the 1950s and 1960s. Support reached a majority level for the first time in 1965 with 59%. It’s worth noting that, prior to 1978, the question asked about “a negro” man rather than “a black” person, although the trend of gradually increasing support for black candidates was evident from 1958 on (Jones, 2012). The Washington post compiled data showing that, in 1940, black Americans were about equally likely to vote Democrat as Republican, but they’ve since skewed heavily Democrat beginning in 1948. The article cites Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics as crediting the huge spike to Harry Truman’s policies, including “a federal ban on lynching and bolstering existing civil rights laws” (Bump, 2015).
This skewing of Black voters away from the Republican party also fit well with the existing trends of many white evangelicals as being opposed to racial integration. There’s some debate as to the degree to which this opposition was motivated by out-and-out racism, but the level of support is fairly clear (Taylor, 2016). Because many conservative Christians were opposed to racial segregation, and the Republican party had publicly espoused similar ideals, it only made sense that they’d align.
TL;DR: In the 1960s, conservative Christians were opposed to abortion, birth control, and racial integration, as was the Republican party. Alignment of their causes naturally followed.
Sources:
I would say they are the two remainders because they are the last two in an age of reason and enlightenment that could really be given time in an ethical debate..
To expound, fundamentalism falls into several denominations, but is particularly strong in the US, because the country was settled by one of the most fundamentalist Christian sects that have(*still) exist..These quakers and puritans were offshoots of the Church of England, which was an offshoot the the Roman Catholic church..each schism asking that the bible be taken more literally and the power decentralized..If you were to go back to 1680,I'd imagine you would find many more hot topics than the two you describe..Furthermore,an anti- gay marriage stance(being gay at all) and abortion WAS A POPULIST OPINION, because of the role religion played in society..It wasn't even on the table..I mean, the original schism from the Roman Catholic church was over bread actually turned into holy flesh in your gut. Many will probably disagree, but these two issues are some of the last grips that the church has over ethical conunundrums... Religion is always changing to meet the modern day circumstances of its patrons, albeit some slower than others..We need only look at offenses punishable by death 500 years ago..the two you listed are some of the last.
Hi, friends,
AskHistorians is a subreddit where people with questions about history can get answers from those with expert-level knowledge in the subject at hand.
Please keep in mind that OP has asked about the 20th century history of evangelical/conservative Christianity and political involvement, not for a Sunday School lesson. Direct your answers accordingly.
Thanks!