America's Radical Right Revisited. A Comparison of the Activists in Christian Right Organizations from the 1960s and the 1980s (original) (raw)
1987, Sociological Analysis
Although several studies now exist of the supporters of the New Christian Right, to date little research has examined the characteristics and beliefs of the activists of these organizations. Moreover, the literature to date has made no effort to place the New Christian Right in any historical context. This paper compares the activists of the Ohio Moral Majority in 1982 with activists from the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade surveyed by Wolfinger and his coUeagues twenty years earlier. The results suggest that despite the claims by Falwell and other New Christian Right leaders to speak for previously apolitical fundamentalist Christians, the activists of the organization at the state level, like those activists of the Christian Right of the 1960s, are higher SES Republicans with high levels of political activism. 1 This suggests that the New Christian Right is similar to all political groups in the socioeconomic characteristics of its activists, and similar to other right-wing organizations in its heavy appeal to Republicans. 1. Based on data from the 1980 and 1984 CPS National Election Studies. See W'flcox, 1987a, for a discussion of the operational definitions which yield this result.
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