Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized

By Jennifer S. Butler
Executive Director, Faith in Public Life

My book, Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized, reveals how the Christian Right is building international, interfaith coalitions and shaping policy in every corner of the world. The book provides the first insider’s account of the strategies and effectiveness of Christian Right lobbying at the United Nations, and their efforts to build a global conservative family values movement. Drawing on interviews with Christian Right leaders, I reveal how today’s most powerful Christian Right organizations are poised to challenge progressive social policy on a worldwide scale.

By Jennifer S. Butler

Executive Director, Faith in Public Life

I wrote the book while serving as the Presbyterian Church (USA) Representative at the United Nations where I witnessed Christian Right groups working with Catholic, Mormon and Muslim allies to advance a conservative agenda. In 2000, the Christian Right began a new phase of its global organizing by bringing 300 Christian Right activists to a UN meeting on women’s rights and encouraging a voting bloc of socially conservative governments. They also began to expand their already diverse coalition by holding international conferences in Qatar, Malaysia and Mexico that drew thousands to organize to advocate for conservative family values. The United States joined this Christian Right alliance, and President George W. Bush began to give them significant access in shaping U.S. positions on issues including women’s rights, reproductive health, human cloning, children’s rights and AIDS.

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The Christian Right is having surprising success at expanding its agenda globally and promises to challenge progressive activism on a worldwide scale. They speak a compelling message about family and religion in an era in which many feel besieged by rapid social and economic changes. They build alliances in the developing world by claiming that progressives will destroy their families and secularize their culture as the have allegedly done in the United States and Europe. They increasingly pit what they call the “secular West” against a religious global south.

What concerned me even more was that progressives seemed so ill equipped to counter these particular allegations or to counter the Christian Right’s organizing strategies. I found the Christian Right’s message to be backwards, but it’s organizing to be more progressive and technologically advanced than those of us who called ourselves progressive. Between the lines the book is really about what progressives must do to reclaim the advantage.

Progressive secular and faith advocates have far too often given up the language of faith and values. They’ve allowed the Christian Right to usurp this terrain and claim to be the voice of religion. In the same way, we’ve also ceded ground on family language. By not speaking proactively to these two concerns we are not only losing a national culture war: we may risk losing a global culture war as well.

The final chapter assesses Christian Right strengths and explores what progressives need to do to regain their advantage:

While progressives are accustomed to academic works and newspaper articles implicitly dismissing these kinds of movements as extremist, or “outside the mainstream,” it is more important for progressives to take a step back and take note of why the Christian Right will change civil society. While out of hand dismissal of these movements might confirm to us that all is right with the world… it does not encourage the necessary standard of self- reflection to which we should hold ourselves as organizers.

There are several basic reasons why they will end up changing civil society. First, the Christian Right’s organizing strategies have outpaced both Christian progressives and the larger political Left represented at the U.N. Second, the Christian Right message appeals to a great number of people in the global South, particularly because it embraces two values that progressive leaders often ignore or reject: religion and the family. Third, these conservatives already have a global infrastructure to deliver their message in the form of growing religious communities (Catholic, evangelical and Mormon).

… The Christian Right has gained a measure of success from its own efforts and the weak state or progressive organizing….Whatever one thinks of Christian Right aims, it would be difficult to deny that the movement is one of the great community organizing success stories of the late twentieth century and will continue to be so in the twenty-first. Any experienced organizer knows that he or she must excel in the following areas to succeed: openness to building new kinds of strategic alliances, openness to new organizing techniques, openness to changing funding priorities and openness to new kinds of rhetorical strategies.

I now get to work on implementing some of these ideas as the Executive Director of Faith in Public Life, a resource center that helps religious moderates and progressives reclaim their once dominant moral voice so that they can shape public debates. We are making sure that those using religion as a tool of division and exclusion do not dominate public discourse. I see victories daily among faith leaders organizing for justice and the common good. So after reading my book, which may be a little scary, visit Faith in Public Life’s website and get some inspiration!