Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271692324
CITATIONS READS
4 10
2 authors, including:
Clyde Wilcox
Georgetown University
195 PUBLICATIONS 3,271 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Clyde Wilcox on 19 July 2017.
The Christian Right and the Pro-Life Movement: An Analysis of the Sources of Political
Support
Author(s): Clyde Wilcox and Leopoldo Gomez
Source: Review of Religious Research, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Jun., 1990), pp. 380-389
Published by: Religious Research Association, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3511563
Accessed: 19-07-2017 20:02 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3511563?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Religious Research Association, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Review of Religious Research
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
380
Clyde Wilcox
Leopoldo Gomez
Georgetown University
Although Christian Right elites predicted a united front between the funda
talist Right and pro-life groups, the alliance has been an uneasy one at b
Only a minority of pro-life supporters have thrown their support to the C
tian Right, and Christian Right supporters do not universally support the
life groups. We explore the differences between the supporters of the Chri
Right and the pro-life movement using data from a national survey in 1984
find that religious differences are quite important in distinguishing betwee
supporters of the two sets of groups, with evangelicals supporting the Chri
Right and Catholics supporting the pro-life movement. Among evangelic
those who attend church frequently are more likely to support both gr
while those who belong to evangelical denominations but do not attend r
larly are more likely to support only the Moral Majority. In additi
religious differences, the supporters of the two sets of groups displayed im
tant political differences as well, with the pro-life supporters markedly
moderate on foreign policy and minority politics. Supporters of both gr
were decidedly more conservative than those who supported only one se
organizations.
Most studies of public support for the New Christian Right during the
reported that support was limited to between 10% and 15% of whites (B
Sigelman, 1985; Wilcox, 1987a; Sigelman, Wilcox and Buell, 1987; W
1989). These organizations have been unable to expand beyond their initial
support, a fate which also fell on the Presidential campaign of Pat Roberts
drew primarily from charismatic churches. The failure of the Christian R
expand beyond a small minority of dedicated supporters was not predicted by
early observers, who foresaw the possibility of a united front of the Moral M
various pro-life groups, and other sympathetic organizations.
There were good reasons to suspect that the Christian Right would draw
from pro-life citizens. Groups like the Moral Majority made abortion one o
central issues, and Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority during
the 1980's, spoke often of the common ground which the two sets of organ
shared. Falwell predicted that his organization would draw support from a
of pro-life Catholics, as well as morally conservative Jews. In fact, howeve
of the activists of the Moral Majority were concentrated in independent B
churches (Liebman, 1983; Wilcox, 1987b). Practically no activists were Ca
and support among Catholics was quite low. Although pro-life and Christia
forces have joined together at the elite level to lobby Congress on abort
predicted common front has failed to materialize.
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
381
In some ways, elite level cooperation is important, regardless of any mass level
coalitions. For many members of the Moral Majority or national right-to-life
organizations, membership consists almost entirely of contributing money through
direct mail. Hayes (1986) has argued that the nature of interest groups has changed
radically over the past twenty years, and that in many of the newer groups member-
ship consists merely of contributing money, with little potential for face-to-face
contact for the membership. For these sorts of organizations, elite cooperation on
lobbying and the sharing of direct-mail solicitations lists which are the lifeblood of
mass organizations (Godwin, 1988) may be important.
Yet neither the Moral Majority nor the right-to-life movement are purely direct-
mail organizations. The Moral Majority made a concerted effort to mobilize the
grass roots, and succeeded in building state level organizations which varied in
strength (Liebman, 1983; Wilcox, 1987b; Pierand and Wright, 1984). There has
been even more activism at the local level in the pro-life movement, with many
supporters logging long hours of volunteer work (Luker, 1984). The failure of a
larger movement to emerge at the grass roots, then, has important political conse-
quences.
In this paper we explore some of the reasons for the failure of the Christian Right
to draw greater support among pro-life forces. We present bivariate analysis of
national survey data which allows us to compare supporters of the Moral Majority,
supporters of the Right-to-Life movement, and those who supported both organiza-
tions. We next use multivariate discriminant analysis to help us sort out the sets of
variables which best predict which citizens were more likely to support each
organization, and which were likely to support both.
We explore two possible explanations for the failure of the Christian Right
coalition to emerge. First, it is possible that the intolerance of the fundamentalists
of the Christian Right has prevented them from gaining support from Catholics in
the pro-life movement. Wilcox (1986) reported that activists in the Ohio Moral
Majority publicly expressed anti-Catholic sentiments, and Kellstedt (1988) found
that anti-Catholicism was a significant predictor of support for the Moral Majority
platform among evangelicals, even after multivariate controls.
A second possible explanation rests in the nature of the pro-life movement.
Because pro-life groups have steadfastly resisted attempts by some activists to
expand their agenda to incorporate a broader conservative orientation, they may be
able to attract support from moderates and occasionally liberals whose religious or
moral beliefs lead them to oppose abortion without endorsing other conservative
positions. These moderate or liberal pro-life supporters would be unlikely candi-
dates for membership in the Moral Majority. This political strategy makes good
sense for right-to-life groups, since Catholics are more likely than Protestants to
identify themselves as Democrats, to identify themselves as liberals, and to support
spending for social programs. These moderate Catholics, however, may be unlikely
converts to a Moral Majority.
The Data
The data for this study comes from the 1984 American National Election Study
(ANES) conducted by the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan
in 1984. This survey was a short-term panel study of a national sample Americans
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
382
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
383
Table 1
Education:
less than High School 14% 24% 20% 21%
College Degree + 22% 13% 17% 15%
Occupation:
Worker 38% 49% 42% 47%
Professional/Manager 24% 13% 21% 12%
Region: South 27% 35% 30% 37%
Rural Born 30% 35% 37% 46%
Doctrinal Evangelical 18% 50% 31% 72%
Denminational Evang. 13% 25% 21% 29%
Catholic 30% 18% 37% 18%
Male 46% 56% 41% 44%
Political Attitudes
Affect - Left 41 33 34 22
Affect - Liberals 55 51 54 44
Affect - Minorities 59 50 59 57
Foreign Policy 3.7 4.3 4.1 4.6
Women's Issues 3.2 3.9 3.6 4.6
Minority Issues 3.5 3.3 3.5 3.4
School Prayer 4.6 6.1 6.0 6.7
Spending - Social Progs. 1.8 1.8 1.8 2.1
Spending - Cons. Progs. 2.2 2.3 2.2 3.4
General Equality Values 3.6 3.2 3.5 3.2
Gender Equality Values 3.8 3.2 3.5 2.8
Partisanship 2.9 3.4 3.2 4.0
N 1084 91 215 87
Percentage of cases falling into each category, or mean value on each scale.
Affect scales reflect degree of warmth respondent reported for groups in
scale. Issue scales and partisanship are reflected so that the higher scores
indicate more conservative positions.
Multivariate Analysis
We next tested the impact of these demographic, religious, and attitudinal varia-
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
384
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
385
Table 2
Canonical Discriminant Fu
Function 1 Function 2 Function 3
Total 53%
The Failure of a Ma
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
386
the fundamentalist supporters of the Moral Majority for Catholics, and the second
focusing on the narrow agenda of the pro-life movement, which allows moderates
and even liberals to support its cause. Our data suggest that there is some truth to
both explanations. The results from the discriminant analysis suggest that those
who support only the anti-abortionists and do not support the Moral Majority are
markedly more moderate than Moral Majority supporters on nearly all measures:
foreign policy, spending on social welfare, other women's issues and gender
equality, minority issues and minority affect, and affect towards the Left. It seems
likely that the consistent conservatism of the Moral Majority is not attractive to
these moderates, whose only common ground is opposition to abortion.
Table 3
JULTIVARIATE RESUL=S: ANTI-CATHOLICISM AND SUPPORT AMDNG PRUtESTANTS
Total 58%
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
387
The Moral Majority supporters may fail to support the anti-abortion movement
in part because of their anti-Catholicism. To further test this explanation, we
repeated our discriminant analysis, selecting only Protestant respondents and in-
cluding a measure of affect toward Catholics as an independent variable. The
results were substantively similar to our earlier results, with some interesting
differences. The data are presented in Table 3. In this analysis, the second function
discriminated between those who supported only the Moral Majority and those
who supported the anti-abortion movement, and affect toward Catholic loaded
heavily on this function. This would suggest that anti-Catholicism is an important
barrier in the expansion of the Christian Right coalition to include pro-life Catho-
lics.
An additional discriminant analysis (not shown) suggests that Catholics may
respond to this anti-Catholicism: among Catholics, those who attend church most
frequently and those who feel the greatest positive affect toward other Catholics are
the least likely support the Moral Majority.
Conclusions
The data suggest that in part we can view support for these two organizations as
additive: the function associated with the lion's share of the common variance is
best interpreted as tapping support for the Right, with Moral Majority and pro-life
supporters equally associated with the function. Important differences between
those who support only one or the other of these two organizations emerge,
however. Those who support only the pro-life movement are more moderate politi-
cally, more likely to be Catholic, to oppose school prayer, and more egalitarian in
their values. Among the most important distinguishing variables are religious
variables, with evangelicals and Catholics supporting different organizations.
Those who support both sets of groups seem to be those who hold evangelical
beliefs and attend church frequently, though not necessarily in an evangelical
denomination.
Two sets of barriers have kept the predicted Christian Right coalition from
emerging. First, those who support the pro-life movement, (and in particular
Catholic supporters) are political moderates who support greater equality for
blacks and women, as well as spending for social programs. These moderates are
doubtlessly not attracted to the consistent conservatism of the Moral Majority
leadership and supporters. Second, many of the supporters of the Moral Majority
have not attempted to form political bridges, in part because of anti-Catholic
sentiments.
NOTES
1. We would like to thank Elizabeth Cook and anonymous reviewers for helpf
comments. The data was collected by the Center for Political Studies at the Univ
sity of Michigan, and made available by the Inter-University Consortium f
Political and Social Research. The authors alone bear the responsibilities for
analysis and interpretations.
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
388
REFERENCES
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
389
Wilcox, Clyde
1986 "Evangelicals and Fundamentalists in the New Christian Right: Religious Dif-
ferences in the Ohio Moral Majority." Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 25: 355-363.
Wilcox, Clyde
1987a "Popular Support for the Moral Majority in 1980: A Second Look." Social
Science Quarterly 68: 157-167.
1987b "Religious Orientations and Political Attitudes: Variations within the New
Christian Right." American Politics Quarterly. 15: 274-296.
1989 "Support for the Moral Majority in 1984: A Test of Alternative Hypotheses."
Social Science Journal 26: 55-56.
This content downloaded from 141.161.91.14 on Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:02:30 UTC
View publication stats
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms