RELS 281 The Religious Right
This course explores religion and politics in the Americas through a study of the rise of the religious right. We will open by studying this movement’s historical antecedents, surveying how Christians from the colonial era to the present debated issues like religious establishment, immigration, and slavery and abolition. We will then learn about how industrial modernity prompted a crisis of faith among American Christians that led to the birth of Christian fundamentalism. Following that movement’s retreat at the apparent victory of liberal Protestantism, we will learn how fundamentalist Christians publicly reemerged with new political force at the end of the 1970s with Jerry Fallwell’s formation of the “Moral Majority.” In the final section of the course, we will take a hemispheric perspective, tracing the transnational networks of conservative Christianity that has fueled the rise of the political right in the United States and Latin America.