{"id":640,"date":"2008-05-23T13:22:59","date_gmt":"2008-05-23T13:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/2008\/05\/christian-right-endorsements-t.html"},"modified":"2008-05-23T13:22:59","modified_gmt":"2008-05-23T13:22:59","slug":"christian-right-endorsements-t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/05\/christian-right-endorsements-t.html","title":{"rendered":"Christian Right Endorsements: The Reagan Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"mccain19.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godometer\/mccain19.jpg\" width=\"84\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"reagan.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/211\/import\/reagan.jpg\" width=\"91\" \/>Like John McCain today, Ronald Reagan had his work cut out in winning over the Christian Right during his 1980 campaign, when a new organization called Moral Majority was mobilizing evangelicals and other conservative Christians in a way not seen since fallout from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial scared many of those voters away from public life.<br \/>\nReagan, after all, had been a Hollywood export with a scant church attendance record, a second wife, and a reputation for having signed a liberal (for its time) abortion law as governor of California. So Reagan studied up on how to connect with evangelicals and crafted a line that made the movement love him when he uttered at before a crowd of 15,000 pastors in Dallas:  &#8220;I know you can&#8217;t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.&#8221;<br \/>\nFast forward to 2008. Evangelicals are a more powerful force in the GOP than they were during Reagan&#8217;s 1980 campaign. Rather than endorsing the Christian Right, McCain is going out of his way to make clear that endorsements from the movement&#8217;s leaders are a one-way proposition: he doesn&#8217;t endorse them back. And yesterday, McCain flat out told John Hagee and Rod Parsley that he didn&#8217;t want their endorsements. That&#8217;s one huge turnaround from Reagan&#8217;s day.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n1<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like John McCain today, Ronald Reagan had his work cut out in winning over the Christian Right during his 1980 campaign, when a new organization called Moral Majority was mobilizing evangelicals and other conservative Christians in a way not seen since fallout from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial scared many of those voters away from&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-mccain"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Christian Right Endorsements: The Reagan Approach - God-O-Meter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godometer\/2008\/05\/christian-right-endorsements-t.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christian Right Endorsements: The Reagan Approach - 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