UC Santa Barbara in the 1980s felt like the counterculture’s afterparty: sun-drenched, restless, and still echoing defiance. Palm trees swayed over a serene campus where students surfed at Campus Point between (or in lieu of) classes. On the surface, it was idyllic. But beneath the serenity, you could still feel the cultural quakes of the 1960s and ’70s. A decade earlier, UCSB had been a frontline campus in what some called America’s great unraveling. Students marched against the Vietnam War, demanded racial and gender justice, challenged puritanical norms, and torched symbols of establishment power. In 1970, antiwar activists clashed with police and set fire to the local Bank of America at the edge of campus—a dramatic act of rebellion seared into campus lore. By the time I arrived as a freshman in the fall of 1982, the flames were long gone, but you could still smell the smoke in the carpet.
I stepped off the bus in Santa Barbara as a devoutly religious eighteen-year-old from Independence, Missouri, thinking mainly about the postcard-perfect campus and the scholarship that had landed me a spot on UCSB’s top-ranked Gaucho volleyball team. I wasn’t yet aware that I’d also stepped into one of the more volatile intersections in American cultural and political life, a fault line where Reagan-era conservatism was clashing with the counterculture idealism of the California coast.
The UCSB campus community, including a teaching assistant in my first political science class who casually told us she’d thrown the first brick through the BofA window, didn’t want to admit that America was lurching rightward. But just a few miles east in the Santa Ynez Mountains sat Ronald Reagan’s western White House. Two years before I arrived on campus, the Gipper had galloped into Washington with a posse of fundamentalist Christians calling themselves the Moral Majority. They filled a void in America’s soul that Vietnam had bled dry. Assassinations, race riots, and Watergate had scorched the nation’s conscience. There was no trust in government, and then came inflation, malaise, and a stalled Cold War under Jimmy Carter. By 1980, the left was exhausted, and the right was furious—perfect conditions for a conservative counterrevolution.
Of course, much of this was lost on me as a wide-eyed freshman adjusting to my new surroundings. But by the winter of my junior year, the culture shock of UCSB had worn off. I was soaking up the political and cultural complexity around me and for the first time, I found myself caring almost as much about school as I did about volleyball. That shift had a lot to do with a religious studies professor named Walter Capps.
The Christian nationalism of that era didn’t totally disappear. In the 1990s, vestiges of the fallen New Religious Right began evolving to meet the moment.
Professor Capps didn’t just teach about religion and politics; he made the collision compelling. A seminarian and Yale-trained scholar, he was soft-spoken, probing, and profoundly humane. He taught us to dissect ideologies, to challenge their champions and critics, and he welcomed all sides into the lecture hall. His courses were also legendary for the constellation of high-profile guest speakers he attracted.
Capp’s flagship class on the Vietnam War’s impact on American religion and culture became a national sensation, drawing praise from members of Congress, television news anchors, and public intellectuals. I took the Vietnam course as a sophomore, and by junior year I was eager to enroll in another of his signature offerings: Religious Studies 153, Religion and Politics in America Today. The course generated buzz when it debuted two years earlier, cotaught by Capps and former presidential candidate George McGovern, and featuring guest appearances from ideologically diverse luminaries like Eugene McCarthy, Jerry Brown, Paul Weyrich, Cal Thomas, and Robert Billings.
In the 1985 iteration of the course, Capps and his guests dove deep into what he called “the New Religious Right,” a movement that was rapidly reshaping American politics. Our reading list spanned the spectrum from GOP strategist Richard Viguerie and evangelical firebrand Francis Schaeffer to academic analysts like Erling Jorstad and George Marsden.
No figure cast a longer shadow over this movement than Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the charismatic televangelist who founded the Moral Majority, a political organization that became synonymous with the New Religious Right. Falwell was a virtuoso communicator and, although we didn’t use the term back then, a full-throttle Christian nationalist.
He began preaching in the 1950’s as a segregationist and opponent of civil rights. By 1976, when he launched the Moral Majority with a fifty-state “I Love America Tour,” Falwell had rebranded his message into a more genial form of bigotry. Racially segregated religious schools, for example, were defended in the name of “religious liberty” instead of overt racism. His preaching distilled the Moral Majority’s war on America’s alleged sins: court rulings that curtailed school prayer and condoned abortion, the rise of feminism, sexual permissiveness, homosexuality, liberal media, and foreign policy that coddled godless communists. Falwell championed a vision of America rooted in obedience to biblical authority and conformity with traditional values, placing him in tension with Enlightenment principles like individual rights, rational inquiry, and free thought. Indeed, he railed against modernity and “secular Humanism” as threats to the Bible that were corrupting the nation’s soul.
While Falwell seethed at liberal politicians and journalists, he was equally scathing toward fellow Christians in the ecumenical movement—those who wanted to bridge historic schisms between denominations and promote “big tent” Christianity. To Falwell, ecumenicalism was a Trojan horse for doctrinal compromise, cultural decay, and political surrender. He demanded purity, especially on abortion, feminism, and family values. These weren’t just theological positions; they were strategies to advance the one ecumenical goal Falwell embraced. He sought to forge a powerful coalition between conservative evangelicals and Catholics, a “moral majority” capable of reshaping American politics and culture from the ground up.
I found Jerry Falwell’s politicized preaching appalling. As a twenty-one-year-old, I had spent most of my life in and around churches where politics were kept out of the sanctuary. In the faith community where I grew up, subjects like abortion, school prayer, and Supreme Court rulings were simply never discussed, not from the pulpit, and not even among congregants in my experience. It would have been unthinkable. Which is why Falwell’s brash fusion of Christian theology and public policy felt so jarring.
I also recoiled at Falwell’s hellfire absolutism and his condemnation of anyone outside his belief system. The recent death of my father had shaken my faith in the supernatural tenets of Christianity; I ultimately abandoned those beliefs. But the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ as I understood them—the values of love, humility, compassion, forgiveness, nonjudgment, and grace—still drove my moral compass. Falwell’s preaching struck me as the antithesis of those values.
My main takeaway from Capps’s course was that the New Religious Right was not a spiritual revival but a political machine, one that cloaked its ambitions in scripture and wielded faith for partisan ends. Falwell, with his booming voice and southern charm, was persuasive to many. But to me, especially at that time, newly estranged from faith, skeptical of religious dogma, but still steeped in the values and sensibilities of my Christian upbringing, the entire performance felt deeply offensive.
Professor Capps, ever the dispassionate intellectual, let the material speak for itself. He showed Falwell’s sermons and speeches, posed probing questions, and urged us to grapple with the societal implications of the New Religious Right. But reviewing the UCSB archives of Capps’s writing from that era makes clear that his restraint in the classroom masked a deeper concern about the movement and its corrosive influence on public life.
In a 1982 essay, Capps wrote about his visit to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he interviewed Falwell and other Moral Majority leaders and attended a sermon at Liberty University. True to form, Capps presented Falwell’s remarks with minimal editorializing. But every so often, he exercised the writer’s prerogative by offering a quiet rebuttal, a pointed observation, or a subtle critique. For example, Capps wrote critically of Falwell’s fixation on abortion and sexual norms as a defense of “male dominion and the supremacy of patriarchal order.”
One of the most compelling critiques to emerge from Capps’s writings on Falwell centers on their opposing narratives about the Vietnam War. For Falwell, America’s defeat was divine punishment: a consequence of secularism, moral decay, and the abandonment of our covenant with God. His prescription was clear. We needed to reset the nation’s moral compass, restore the covenant, and rebuild our military might to ensure we never again lose to “demonic” communists.
Capps saw something else entirely. He viewed Falwell as a product of Vietnam, a figure born from the national disillusionment and existential drift that followed. He argued that the academic and religious establishments had underestimated Falwell, dismissing him as a fringe figure rather than reckoning with the real moral anxieties his movement tapped into. Falwell’s theology may have been simplistic and flawed, Capps argued, but he had keen instincts. Falwell correctly sensed vulnerability in the uneasy alliance between rationalism and Christianity that had prevailed since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. That truce, born from the scars of Europe’s bloody religious wars and America’s own colonial theocracies, was deemed unbreakable, but Falwell was making inroads toward prying it apart.
Perhaps most viscerally, given the ever-present specter of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, Capps was appalled by Falwell’s apocalyptic rhetoric and cavalier posture toward global destruction. That, along with Falwell’s other moral and theological shortcomings, led Capps to conclude that the Moral Majority was doomed to fail because it would simply scare too many Americans. He believed that Falwell and the New Religious Right were deeply troubling but ultimately transitory—too antithetical to America’s founding principles to endure, too dismissive of individual rights and intellectual freedom to thrive. By demeaning and alienating most people, Capps predicted, the Christian right wing was planting the seeds of its own demise.
That era of Christian nationalism was clearly different than what we’re living through today. While some of the Moral Majority’s rhetoric resembles MAGA Christian nationalism, it never seemed to Capps or to me that they were trying to overthrow democracy. Capps hated their warmongering, but he believed that it was the policy, not the movement itself, that threatened national security.
Indeed, Falwell and other Moral Majority stalwarts framed their efforts as a mirror image of the left’s own playbook from the 1960s and ’70s. They used the same tools of grassroots mobilization, legal advocacy, and cultural persuasion to further their conservative Christian vision. Falwell disclaimed any interest in theocracy, insisting he simply wanted to steer a wayward culture back toward moral clarity, using the levers of political influence. He touted his friendship with Senator Ted Kennedy, seemingly an affirmation that, for all their extreme positions, Falwell and his allies were intent on working within the system of democracy.
Falwell even invited Kennedy to address the students and faculty of Liberty University. Kennedy’s October 3, 1983, speech—delivered after dining with the Falwell family in their home—was one of the most impactful course materials from Capps’s class. Standing before a staunchly conservative evangelical audience, the liberal Catholic fearlessly defended church-state separation, condemned book burning, and reminded the crowd of the fragile nature of religious liberty: “Today’s Moral Majority could become tomorrow’s persecuted minority.” On abortion, he didn’t flinch, telling the pro-life audience, “The proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state.” His thunderous conclusion: “In short, I hope for an America where neither ‘fundamentalist’ nor ‘humanist’ will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of goodwill look at life and into their own souls. I hope for an America where no president, no public official, no individual will ever be deemed a greater or lesser American because of religious doubt—or religious belief.”
The Liberty University audience warmly applauded, and Falwell praised Kennedy for his sincerity and courage. That kind of grace across ideological lines feels like a relic of a more democratic era.
The New Religious Right of the 1980s was many things, none of them good in my view. Falwell and the Moral Majority were brash, combative, and wrong. Their agenda was backward-looking, morally coercive, and steeped in righteous absolutism. But they were trying to win within the system, not burn it down. At least in the 1980s.
Capps’s seminal work, The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics, was published in 1990. Seven years later, after an unexpected win in the 1996 midterm election, he found himself serving in Congress, but only for a few months. Capps died suddenly of a heart attack at Dulles International Airport. I never had the chance to reconnect with my former professor. But I did have the privilege of serving in Congress alongside his widow, Lois, who carried forward his legacy with grace and conviction. For that, I’m deeply grateful.
Capps’s prediction about the New Religious Right was correct. The Moral Majority was disbanded just before his book was published. The movement fragmented, and by the early 1990s, it had collapsed. But it wasn’t because they were too extreme, as Capps had imagined. It was the sudden implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that brought them down. Up to that point, America’s external enemy—the godless Soviets—gave the movement coherence and urgency. When the Cold War ended, that ideological scaffolding vanished.
Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan tried desperately to revive the old magic at the GOP convention in August 1992, with his fiery “culture war” speech, but the moment had passed. The speech failed to register in the new political terrain. That fall, Bill Clinton won the presidency, ending twelve years of Republican rule and signaling that the country was ready to move on from both the Cold War and the culture war it had fueled. Right-wing Christians were no longer in power; their political movement had crumbled. But the Christian nationalism of that era didn’t totally disappear. In the 1990s, vestiges of the fallen New Religious Right began evolving to meet the moment.
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By 1993, church attendance was plummeting. The staunchest pro-choice president since Roe v. Wade was in the White House and his wife, a career-minded Ivy League lawyer, was unapologetically redefining the role of First Lady. Americans were warming to gender equity, LGBTQ rights, and multiculturalism as a surge of immigration from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean brought demographic and cultural shifts. Throughout the long Cold War, America’s monolithic white Christian identity had held steady: The nation was 76 percent white and 90 percent Christian. By the end of the 1990s, however, the percentage of Christians had dropped 10 points, religiously unaffiliated “nones” were rising fast, and suddenly Hawaii was no longer the only state where whites were not the majority: California joined the list. Texas and New Mexico would follow just four years later.
In the face of these changes, the fractured Christian right scrambled for new strategies. Their rules-bound culture war began morphing into an aggrieved insurgency. With the Soviet Union gone, their moral panic turned inward toward domestic enemies. Government, portrayed as demonic and evil, joined liberal culture as the new foil. Guns became sacred, and violence was increasingly justified, if not sanctified.
Critical milestones in this transitional phase of the movement were the deadly confrontations between white Christian extremists and federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992), and Waco, Texas (1993). Ruby Ridge is where white separatist Randy Weaver barricaded himself, his family, and a friend in a remote Idaho cabin after refusing to appear in court on federal weapons charges. Weaver embraced a theology known as Christian Identity that was spreading among militia groups at the time. It exalts racial purity, apocalyptic readiness, and a conspiratorial belief that the federal government is satanic. His standoff with US marshals resulted in the death of a deputy marshal along with Weaver’s wife and fourteen-year-old son before Weaver and his friend, both seriously wounded, ultimately surrendered.
Waco was even more deadly. It involved a Christian sect known as the Branch Davidians at their heavily armed compound. The group’s leader, self-declared prophet David Koresh, founded the communal sect based on his belief that God had chosen him to usher in the Bible’s end-times. When federal agents attempted to serve a warrant for illegal weapons, Koresh and his followers saw it as the beginning of an apocalyptic showdown foretold by scripture. A gunfight erupted, killing four agents and six Branch Davidians. The ensuing fifty-one-day standoff ended in a catastrophic fire, killing seventy-six Davidians including Koresh, twenty-five children, and many who had been shot or trapped inside.
These tragic flashpoints were mythologized into persecution stories, recast by right-wing Christian leaders not as tragic consequences of radical defiance but as proof of an evil secular government at war with faith and freedom. Ruby Ridge and Waco became battle cries that catalyzed the Patriot Movement, a white supremacist militia movement that fused conspiracism and antigovernment narratives with Christian nationalism. At its peak in the mid-1990s, the Patriot Movement swelled to hundreds of militias with tens of thousands of members. In 1995, after one of these militiamen, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including nineteen children, the “Patriot” name was tainted with domestic terrorism and fell out of favor. But the militias and their ideology endured, metastasizing into groups—including Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys—that would become woven into the fabric of today’s MAGA Christian nationalism.
Those of us who saw the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice missed the fact that millions of our fellow Americans saw it differently: They saw a Christian nation under siege from within.
The political work of the New Religious Right continued under the auspices of various GOP groups, including new political and legal organizations that focused less on popular persuasion and more on litigation, novel legal theories, and long-game constitutional battles premised on securing a conservative religious majority on the Supreme Court. Mobilizing Christian voters became the work of decentralized faith networks rather than the top-down structure of the 1980s.
This decentralization mirrored a broader transformation within evangelical Christianity itself: a shift from denominational authority to a sprawling, entrepreneurial religious landscape. Across American Christianity, traditional denominations were shrinking, and churches were closing. But independent charismatic ministries, led by innovative and enterprising pastors, were finding ways to grow.
This trend caught the attention of an evangelical scholar, C. Peter Wagner, the Professor of Church Growth at the Fuller Theological Seminary in southern California. In 1996, he launched a network of churches and ministries called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which quickly began to transform evangelical Christianity. NAR combined a decentralized, nondenominational growth model with militant, charismatic theology rooted in the imperative of Christian dominion over all parts of society, including government. NAR preached that political adversaries are demons who must be vanquished through mass mobilization and “spiritual warfare”: targeted prayer and worship campaigns. The list of NAR’s demonic enemies was familiar: abortionists, the LGBTQ community, public education, secularists, liberals: essentially the same groups targeted by Falwell’s Moral Majority. But NAR brought an ethos of conquest, not persuasion, and it explicitly advocated theocratic takeover.
Thanks in significant part to the growth of NAR-aligned churches and online ministries, the militant antidemocracy ethos of the emerging Christian nationalist movement began to intensify during the 2000s, especially after Barack Obama’s 2008 election. For many, the Obama presidency felt like a time when America’s founding principles of equality and liberty for all were finally being realized. But those of us who saw the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice missed the fact that millions of our fellow Americans saw it differently: They saw a Christian nation under siege from within.
We also failed to notice that the atomized remains of the New Religious Right were radicalizing into what would soon be called the Christian nationalist movement. Beginning in the 1990s and increasingly in the 2000s, growing numbers of right-wing Christians rejected pluralism and church-state separation outright, breaking with democracy and increasingly embracing political violence as an option. The explosive growth of NAR, with its theology of demonization, conquest, and theocratic ambition, was a catalyst. Throughout these years, the seeds of extremism that would forcefully erupt on January 6, 2021, were germinating. Most of us just didn’t see it.
One of the senior henchmen of right-wing Christian politics saw this dangerous transformation unfolding from the inside. Colonel V. Doner helped propel the New Religious Right to its peak of power in the 1980s and remained a key GOP strategist for the next two decades. Doner was more than just a campaign guru: He was a true evangelical believer who worked at the highest levels, from Falwell and Ronald Reagan to Pat Robertson and Sarah Palin, constructing and guiding the right-wing Christian political machine.
But as his movement edged toward what would become today’s MAGA Christian nationalism, Doner’s conscience began to stir. He grew increasingly unsettled by the movement’s fixation on dehumanizing enemies and its neglect of core Christian teachings, including love, mercy, and compassion. He saw how volatile theology fused with militant rhetoric was starting to ignite real-world violence, including murders of abortion providers.
Then came September 11, 2001. When Islamic jihadists carried out their deadly attacks on the United States, Doner saw something hauntingly familiar: religious absolutism, the demonization of enemies, and a righteous lust for violence. It was, to his horror, a mirror image of the Christian political movement he had helped construct. Yet instead of reckoning with the parallels, right-wing pastors were urging Christians to emulate the intensity and all-in dedication of the jihadists. Doner recounts a chilling example of a prominent youth pastor urging peers to indoctrinate an army of “spiritual suicide bombers” for Christ to make young Christians just as violently fanatical as Islamic jihadists.
He traces his moral reckoning in his book Christian Jihad, which chronicles the escalating radicalization and warns—nearly a decade before the January 6th insurrection—of a movement that had traded democracy for dominion and was sanctifying violence to that end.
I didn’t know about Doner and his story until 2024, but reading Christian Jihad carried me back to the New Religious Right I had studied at UCSB. I realized that even though we didn’t use the term then, Prof. Capps’s course was all about the 1980s variant of Christian nationalism. He predicted that movement would collapse, and it did, albeit for reasons he hadn’t anticipated. But he surely would have been dismayed to see it metastasize over the next two decades into something much more virulent.
Imagine what Capps’s course, Religion and Politics in America Today, would be like if he were still alive and teaching. Without a doubt, it would focus on MAGA Christian nationalism, tracing how this extreme antidemocracy insurgency evolved from the ruins of a movement that seemed radical in the 1980s but now looks almost quaint. Capps would leave the contrasts and contradictions for us to grapple with. With scholarly detachment, he would present the evidence, including material from the experts and faith leaders we’ll meet later in this book, and maybe he’d bring some of them in as guest speakers. Capps’s gift was the discipline of inquiry, not certainty, so he would ask probative questions and leave the answers to us.
He would likely pose the same final exam question he asked my class in 1985. That deceptively simple question outlived the professor and his course, and now it belongs to all of us: “Is the involvement of religious groups in politics a good or a bad thing? Discuss.”
I don’t remember how I answered it in 1985, but I know my answer today: It depends.
If religious groups engage in politics while respecting democratic norms—following the law, peacefully bringing their values into the public square, and accepting that in a democracy you don’t always get what you want—that’s a healthy democracy, whether I agree with their views or not. But if they reject the democratic order and seek to impose their religion on others through the coercive power of government, then it’s not just bad, it’s dangerous and anti-American.
I’ll stake my grade on that. But this exam is still in progress, and history is doing the grading.
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From No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism by Jared Huffman. Copyright © 2026. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
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