304 Jeff Manza and Nathan Wright
surprisingly a number of empirical questions about these changes have vexed ana-
lysts. Four questions have been central in recent debates: (a) What has been the im-
pact of the political mobilization of evangelical Protestant groups since the 1970s?
(b) Have Catholic voters become less Democratic, and if so, why? (c) To what extent
has a political realignment toward the center occurred among mainline Protestants,
and why? (d) How have doctrinal divisions, especially between religious liberals and
conservatives and often within denominations, produced changing patterns of political
alignment?
Rise of a New Christian Right?Perhaps the most widely debated thesis about religion
and politics in both the mass media and among political analysts in recent decades con-
cerns the possibility of a political realignment among conservative Protestant voters.
The sudden emergence of the new Christian Right (CR) in the late 1970s as an orga-
nizational force in U.S. politics, and the visible role of some early CR groups such as
the Moral Majority in the 1980 elections seemed to herald a new type of political con-
flict in which conservative religious values were becoming increasingly important in
the political system. The confluence of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election (and even larger
victory in 1984), the 1980 recapture of the Senate by the Republicans for the first time
in nearly thirty years, and the intense media attention given to early CR leaders such
as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others led many observers to draw the conclusion
that these events were closely related.
In the relatively brief period since 1980, however, the varying fortunes of the CR
at the national level have cast doubt about these hypotheses. The initial social science
search for a mass base to the CR in the 1980s unearthed both very modest support for
groups such as the Moral Majority and little evidence that the CR mobilized a significant
group of voters (see Manza and Brooks [1999: 95–6] for references). Indeed, by the late
1980s, many informed observers were emphasizing the sharp decline of the CR, at least
as a force in national politics (e.g., Bruce 1988; Jelen 1991: 135–55).
In the 1990s, the cycle of debates over the CR came full circle around yet again. The
rapid growth of the Christian Coalition, a multidenominational organization that grew
out of Pat Robertson’s failed 1988 presidential bid helped to revive scholarly interest in
and respect for the political power of the CR. The Coalition has emphasized state and
local politics, working up to the national level by gaining influence with the state-level
Republican Party (Rozell and Wilcox 1995). In 1995, the organization claimed some
1.6 million members organized in sixteen hundred chapters across the country. These
chapters were said to have distributed some thirty-five million voter guides in the 1994
midterm elections alone (Wald 1996: 233; cf. Regnerus et al. 1999). With the renewed
prominence of the CR in politics, a new spate of studies appeared, many advancing
arguments or evidence of a recent shift of evangelical voters toward the Republican
Party (e.g., Green et al. 1995; Wilcox 1996; Kellstedt et al. 1994: 308). However, the
recent organizational decline of the Christian Coalition has again prompted a retreat
from scholarly and popular attention to the CR and pessimism about its electoral impact
(see, e.g., Green, Guth, and Wilcox 1998; Kohut et al. 2000).^6
(^6) A final set of debates about the impact of the CR concerns the mobilization of evangelical voters
and its impact on turnout. To the extent that it has been examined, the general conclusion
has been that evangelical voters did increase their turnout in 1980 and thereafter (see, for