Harper's has just posted online my cover story from the December, 2006 issue, "Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Reimagining American History." Since the magazine is postdated, the piece actually arrived in subscribers' mailboxes the second week of November, after the big Democratic win. As is usual when one publishes in Harper's, I was asked to be a guest on a bunch of radio shows. Almost without fail the first or second question was, "Isn't the Christian Right a spent force in American life?"
I don't think so. The death of the Christian Right has been prematurely declared with cyclic regularity ever since the Scopes trial of 1925. They weren't dead then, nor was the movement dead even at the height of the New Deal, when it identified organized labor as a main enemy and began organizing to lobby conservative congressmen, an effort that resulted in Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the destruction of progressive labor. They weren't dead in '64, when they couldn't push Goldwater over the finish line, and they weren't dead in '74, when Billy Graham's pal Nixon revealed his dirty tricks. They keep on ticking.
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