inaugural lecture<\/a> as the John R. Reitemeyer Professor of Political Science here at Trinity, Tony Messina discussed the various anti-immigrant parties currently bedeviling the progress of European integration. What his analysis shows is that it’s the parties with a variety of concerns that have shown the greatest staying power. The premier example is France’s National Front, led by the Le Pens father and now daughter, which since the 1980s has been able to combine anti-immigration agitation with economic and cultural concerns.<\/p>\nNow think about the American equivalent. Since the 1980s it’s been referred to variously as the New Christian Right, the Christian Right, and the Religious Right. But it’s always had an anti-tax, anti-big government dimension, and a certain military adventurist (Onward Christian Soldiers!) streak as well. Now it’s become clear that the Tea Party, in its various manifestations, is just as socially conservative as the Religious Right–that, in fact, they are two faces of the same movement. Which would, on the Messina view, explain its staying power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s been a lot of chatter, including in this space, about the relationship between social and economic and foreign policy conservatives and how their relationships with each other create problems for the Republican Party as it seeks to recover control of the federal government. The unstated assumption is that such a diversity of policy concern…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n
The Robustness of the Religious Right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/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\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/the-robustness-of-the-religious-right.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Robustness of the Religious Right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There’s been a lot of chatter, including in this space, about the relationship between social and economic and foreign policy conservatives and how their relationships with each other create problems for the Republican Party as it seeks to recover control of the federal government. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}