Religious Social Movements in the Public Sphere 321
produce what came to be known as Progressivism. Yet all of the causes above were ab-
sorbed into the consolidating institutional structure of the parties and thereby into the
federal government.
Part of this emerging societal infrastructure was the development of travel and
informational technology that knitted the country together in a way theretofore un-
known. Thus the twentieth century saw a truly national politics develop in accord with
increasing social and geographic mobility and national economic integration. By the
middle of the twentieth century, the political landscape was dominated by two par-
ties, each of which had a solid constituency base, composed of a coalition of different
social and economic groups. The “New Deal” coalitions produced several decades of
electoral stability, built on such certainties as the “solid South,” Catholic Democrats,
and an increasing institutional separation of religious organizations and governmental
functions.
In the past half century, this situation has changed considerably. The political par-
ties have declined in importance – now essentially acting as fundraising conduits.
Dealignment has loosened both sides of the New Deal coalitions. Increasing numbers
of Americans identify as “independents,” and running on an “antiparty” campaign
platform has never been more popular. That people inside the Washington Beltway
take their party affiliations so seriously is derided as “partisanship,” and further helps
distinguish them from “real Americans.” In short, although parties still matter enor-
mously in the institutional workings of established government, they have lost their
place as the culturally approved way of organizing political attitudes and loyalties.
However, this has not reduced the nationalization of American politics. To the con-
trary, the weakening of political parties is an indication of the increasing regulation of
life by national governmental institutions, and an increasingly national “culture” knit
together through entertainment, news, and advertising media. (Although markets may
be more sliced along lines of ethnicity, gender, and lifestyle, the slices are increasingly
national themselves – as in the case of Hispanic Americans, who are less divided than
previously by region and locale.) New technologies have of course abetted these social
and political developments; the growth of telecommunications has made the intercon-
nectedness of the national economy more apparent, and facilitated national responses
to government policy.
For their part, social movements have increasingly aimed at influencing national
politics through federal action, with Washington, DC, becoming center stage. For ex-
ample, every January the anti-abortion movement stages a huge parade to protest the
Roe v. WadeSupreme Court decision. But many movements use Washington as their
setting even when the original cause of grievances is not there. Thus, the Civil Rights
Movement’s 1963 March on Washington dramatized and nationalized its cause even
as its targets of protest remained in the South. A more recent example is the 1997
Promise Keepers rally in Washington – a rally that was even accompanied by many
denials that the movement had a political agenda. But the city is the symbolic heart
of the nation, and is the venue par excellence for nationalizing a movement’s message
(Williams 2001).
Organizing people politically has thus become the job of social movement organi-
zations as much as political parties. But those two forms of organization have signif-
icant differences. In its efforts to capture public offices and govern, a political party
must create an internal coalition of often heterogeneous groups. This means it must