The Radical Mind is a groundbreaking analysis of the origins of the Christian Right, whose political victories are radically reshaping the landscape of American society. Scholars and the public alike have traditionally regarded the New Right and the Christian Right as separate movements. The New Right is supposedly a secular right-wing operation with purely political goals, while the Christian Right is an evangelical Protestant movement largely motivated by religious convictions. Insofar as both are conservative efforts, most people view them as reactionary and driven by a culture-war backlash against liberal changes to society.Chelsea Ebin’s The Radical Mind aims to overturn this consensus. Through a close analysis of New Right architects Connaught Marshner and Paul Weyrich (who is often seen as secular but was a committed Catholic), this book explores the way conservative Catholics and Protestants overcame their long-standing antipathy to form a political coalition—what Ebin calls the New Christian Right. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ebin shows how the movement’s key architects infused right-wing activism with religion. Rather than working to conserve the past, this book argues that the New Christian Right is fundamentally a forward-looking and proactive movement focused on remaking the political landscape in the United States.
The radical aims of the New Christian Right have been obscured by the way they cultivated a shared identity of victimhood and manipulated the discourse about backlash to create a nostalgic idea of the past that they then leveraged to justify their right-wing policy goals. The Catholic-Protestant alliance constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as their ideal vision of society. Ebin calls this strategy “prefigurative traditionalism”—a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this tactic, the New Christian Right coalition disguised the radicality of its politics by framing their aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive.
An interdisciplinary work informed by the fields of history, religious studies, public law, and American politics, The Radical Mind offers a new and convincing explanation for the recent gains of the Christian Right and the morally supercharged political landscape we face today.
Table of Contents:
PrefaceAcknowledgments
A Note on Terminology
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Reconceptualizing Backlash
2. Paul Weyrich: 1968 and the Roots of a (Catholic) Radical
3. Building the New Right and the New Traditional Woman
4. Jerry Falwell: A Fundamentalist Phenomenon Rises Up to Meet the Grassroots
5. Pro-Family Politics and the Political Convergence of Conservative Catholics and Protestants on the American Rights
Epilogue: Who Is It That Overcomes the World?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Chelsea Ebin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drew University and co-editor of Male Supremacism in the United States: From Patriarchal Traditionalism to Misogynist Incels and the Alt-Right.
Review :
A bold and compelling reinterpretation of the rise of the New Right that places religion at the heart of the movement. Ebin demonstrates that figures like Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell were not revivalists of tradition but political and theological innovators whose ideas bound together conservative Catholics and Protestants into a coalition that transformed American politics.""—Gene Zubovich, author of Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States ""This bold reframing of the New Christian Right draws on extensive and perceptive archival research to illustrate the ambitious goal at the heart of the movement: to transform American culture and with it, American politics. Chelsea Ebin centers Catholic activist Paul Weyrich in the development of strategies that brought conservative Protestants and Catholics together under an identity of victimhood. Ebin’s carefully constructed argument challenges the dominant framing of the New Christian Right as a ‘backlash’ to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and demonstrates the revolutionary—and relevant—goal of cultural dominance at the heart of the movement.""—Seth Dowland, author of Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
