Suchergebnisse

Investigates the importance of civility in the expansion of the Christian Right's influence in US politics, drawing on a discussion of Oliver North's campaign in the 1994 VA Senate race. It is found that, although 67%-80% of evangelicals supported North, 20%-30% of these Christians withheld their endorsement. North's failure to carry the entire evangelical population is interpreted in terms of a basic ambiguity in evangelical Christianity: between the purity of their moral principles & their accommodations to their communities. Although North was widely viewed as holding religiously pure beliefs, many evangelical Christians understood his conduct during the Iran-Contra affair to be morally repugnant. These questions about his moral integrity prevented North from mobilizing evangelical Christians to his cause. It is concluded that if the Christian Right is to become more powerful in US politics, it must learn to accommodate to other groups in their communities. 1 Table, 29 References. D. M. Ryfe