Informal fallacy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy 

Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not just due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but can also be due to their content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them. These misleading appearances are often connected to various aspects of natural language, such as ambiguous or vague expressions, or the assumption of implicit premises instead of making them explicit.

Traditionally, a great number of informal fallacies has been identified, including the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy of amphiboly, the fallacies of composition and division, the false dilemma, the fallacy of begging the question, the ad hominem fallacy and the appeal to ignorance. There is no general agreement as to how the various fallacies are to be grouped into categories. One approach sometimes found in the literature is to distinguish between fallacies of ambiguity, which have their root in ambiguous or vague language, fallacies of presumption, which involve false or unjustified premises, and fallacies of relevance, in which the premises are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise.

The traditional approach to fallacies has received a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. This criticism is often based on the argument that the alleged fallacies are not fallacious at all, or at least not in all cases. To overcome this problem, alternative approaches for conceiving arguments and fallacies have been proposed. These include the dialogical approach, which conceives arguments as moves in a dialogue-game aimed at rationally persuading the other person. This game is governed by various rules. Fallacies are defined as violations of the dialogue rules impeding the progress of the dialogue. The epistemic approach constitutes another framework. Its core idea is that arguments play an epistemic role: they aim to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. In the Bayesian approach, the epistemic norms are given by the laws of probability, which our degrees of belief should track.

The study of fallacies aims at providing an account for evaluating and criticizing arguments. This involves both a descriptive account of what constitutes an argument and a normative account of which arguments are good or bad. In philosophy, fallacies are usually seen as a form of bad argument and are discussed as such in this article. Another conception, more common in non-scholarly discourse, sees fallacies not as arguments but rather as false yet popular beliefs.

Traditional account

Informal fallacies are a form of incorrect argument in natural language. An argument is a series of propositions, called the premises, together with one more proposition, called the conclusion. The premises in correct arguments offer either deductive or defeasible support for the conclusion. The source of the error in incorrect arguments can be in the argument's form, content or context. If the error is only due to the form, it is considered a formal fallacy. Informal fallacies may also include formal errors but they primarily involve errors on the level of content and context. Informal fallacies are expressed in natural language. This brings with it various difficulties not faced when studying formal fallacies, like ambiguous terms, vague expressions or the premises being assumed implicitly rather than stated explicitly. Traditionally, a great number of informal fallacies have been listed, including the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy of amphiboly, the fallacies of composition and division, the false dilemma, the fallacy of begging the question, the ad hominem fallacy or the appeal to ignorance. The traditional approach tries to account for these fallacies using the concepts and theses discussed in this section.

Arguments and fallacies

Only arguments can constitute a fallacy. Various erroneous expressions do not count as fallacies because no argument was made, e.g. because no reasons were cited or no assertion was made. The core idea of arguments is that the premises support the conclusion or that the conclusion follows from the premises. Deductively valid arguments offer the strongest form of support: for them, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true. The premises in non-deductive arguments offer a certain degree of support for their conclusion but they are defeasible: it is possible for all the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. Defeasible arguments may still be rationally compelling despite being fallible. So they do not automatically constitute fallacies. The premises of an argument may be seen as the foundation on which the conclusion is built. According to this analogy, two things can go wrong and turn an argument into a fallacy. It could be that the foundation is shaky. But even a solid foundation is not helpful if it does not provide support for the conclusion in question.

Traditionally, fallacies have been defined by three necessary conditions: "a fallacy (i) is an argument, (ii) that is invalid, and (iii) appears to be valid." This definition covers only formal fallacy since it has deductive invalidity as a necessary condition. But it can easily be modified to include informal fallacy by replacing this condition with a more general term, like logical weakness or incorrect reasoning. The last clause includes a psychological element in referring to how the argument appears to the arguer. This clause is used to distinguish genuine fallacies from mere mistakes in reasoning, for example, due to carelessness. The idea is that fallacies have an alluring element that goes beyond mere carelessness by seducing us into committing the mistake, thereby explaining why they are committed in the first place. Some philosophers reject this appeal to appearances because the reference to psychology would complicate the investigation in various ways. One issue is that appearances are different for different people. This problem would also involve social sciences in order to determine which reference group of people to consult for defining fallacies. It has been suggested that, at its core, the study of fallacies is about normative aspects of arguments and not about their persuasive force, which is studied by empirical psychology instead.

Form, content and context

The source of the error in incorrect arguments can lie in the argument's form, content or context. The form or structure of an argument is also called "rule of inference". The most well-known rule of inference is modus ponens, which states that given a premise of the form "If p then q" and another in the form "p", then the conclusion is "q". Rules of inferences are formal because it depends only on the structure or the syntax of the premises and not on their content. So an argument based on modus ponens is valid no matter what propositional contents are used for "p" and "q".

The content of an argument is found on the level of its propositions: it is what is expressed in them. The source of many informal fallacies is found in a false premise. For example, a false dilemma is a fallacy based on a false disjunctive claim that oversimplifies reality by excluding viable alternatives.

The context of an argument refers to the situation in which it is used. Based on its context it may be intended to play different roles. One way for an argument to be fallacious is if it fails to perform the role it was supposed to play. The strawman fallacy, for example, involves inaccurately attributing a weak position to one's opponent and then refuting this position. The argument itself may be valid in that the refutation of the opposed position really is successful. The error is found on the level of the context since the opponent does not hold this position. This dependence on a context means that the same argument may be successful in another context: against an opponent who actually holds the strawman position.

Natural language and contrast to formal fallacies

Formal fallacies are deductively invalid arguments. They are of special interest to the field of formal logic but they can only account for a small number of the known fallacies, for example, for affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent. Many other fallacies used in natural language, e.g. in advertising or in politics, involve informal fallacies. For example, false dilemmas or begging the question are fallacies despite being deductively valid. They are studied by informal logic. Part of the difficulty in analyzing informal fallacies is due to the fact that their structure is not always clearly expressed in natural language. Sometimes certain keywords like "because", "therefore", "since" or "consequently" indicate which parts of the expression constitute the premises and which part the conclusion. But other times this distinction remains implicit and it is not always obvious which parts should be identified as the premises and the conclusions. Many informal arguments include enthymematic premises: premises that are not explicitly stated but tacitly presumed. In some domestic quarrels and political debates, it is not clear from the outset what the two parties are arguing about and which theses they intend to defend. Sometimes the function of the debate is more to clarify these preliminary points than to advance actual arguments.

The distinction between formal and informal fallacies is opposed by deductivists, who hold that deductive invalidity is the reason for all fallacies. One way to explain that some fallacies do not seem to be deductively invalid is to hold that they contain various hidden assumptions, as is common for natural language arguments. The idea is that apparent informal fallacies can be turned into formal fallacies by making all these assumptions explicit and thereby revealing the deductive invalidity. The claim that this is possible for all fallacies is not generally accepted. One requirement for a formal treatment is translating the arguments in question into the language of formal logic, a process known as "formalization". Often many of the subtleties of natural language have to be ignored in this process. Some bodies of knowledge can be formalized without much residue but others resist formalization. This is also true for many informal fallacies.

Other approaches

The traditional approach to fallacies has received a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. This criticism is often based on the argument that some of the alleged fallacies are not fallacious at all, or at least not in all cases. Various alternative approaches to how arguments and fallacies are to be conceived have been proposed. These alternatives often aim to show that, given their perspective, it is possible to evaluate if an alleged fallacy is actually fallacious in a given case. The dialogical approach uses a game-theoretic framework to define arguments and sees fallacies as violations of the rules of the game. According to the epistemic approach, it is the goal of arguments to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. It has been suggested that there may not be one single framework for evaluating all fallacies but only a manifold of ideals according to which a given argument may be good or bad.

Dialogical

The dialogical approach sees arguments not simply as a series of premises together with a conclusion but as a speech act within a dialogue that aims to rationally persuade the other person of one's own position. A prominent version of this approach is defended by Douglas N. Walton. On his game-theoretic conception, a dialogue is a game between two players. At the outset, each player is committed to a set of propositions and has a conclusion they intend to prove. A player has won if they are able to persuade the opponent of their own conclusion. In this sense, dialogues can be characterized as "games of persuasion". The players can perform various moves that affect what they are committed to. In this framework, arguments are moves that take the opponent's commitments as premises and lead to the conclusion one is trying to prove. Since this is often not possible directly, various intermediary steps are taken, in which each argument takes a few steps towards one's intended conclusion by proposing an intermediary conclusion for the opponent to accept. This game is governed by various rules determining, among other things, which moves are allowed and when. The dialogical approach makes it possible to distinguish between positive arguments, which support one's own conclusion, and negative arguments, which deny the opponent's conclusion.

From this perspective, fallacies are defined as violations of the dialogue rules. They are "deceptively bad argument[s] that impede the progress of the dialogue". The strawman fallacy, for example, involves inaccurately attributing a weak position to one's opponent and then proving this position to lead to one's own conclusion. This mistake is not logical in the strict sense but dialogical: the conclusion may as well follow from these premises but the opponent does not hold these commitments. In some cases, it varies from game to game whether a certain move counts as a fallacy or not. For example, there are cases where the tu quoque "fallacy" is no fallacy at all. This argument, also known as appeal to hypocrisy, tries to discredit the opponent's argument by claiming that the opponent's behavior is inconsistent with the argument's conclusion. This move does not necessarily break the rules of the dialogue. Instead, it can reveal a weakness in the opponent's position by deflecting her criticism onto herself. This move shifts the burden of proof back to the opponent, thereby strengthening one's own position. But it still constitutes a fallacy if it is only used to evade an argument.

Epistemic

The core idea behind the epistemic approach is that arguments play an epistemic role: they aim to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. This explains, for example, why arguments that are accidentally valid are still somehow flawed: because the arguer himself lacks a good reason to believe the conclusion.

The fallacy of begging the question, on this perspective, is a fallacy because it fails to expand our knowledge by providing independent justification for its conclusion. Instead, the conclusion is already assumed in one of its premises. A purely logical approach, on the other hand, fails to explain the fallacious nature of begging the question since the argument is deductively valid.

The Bayesian approach constitutes a special form of the epistemic approach. Bayesianism interprets degrees of belief as subjective probabilities, i.e. as the degree of certainty of the believer that the believed proposition is true. On this view, reasoning based on an argument can be interpreted as a process of changing one's degrees of belief, usually in response to new incoming information. Fallacies are probabilistically weak arguments, i.e. they have a low probability on the Bayesian model. Whether an argument constitutes a fallacy or not depends on the credences of the person evaluating the argument. This means that what constitutes a fallacy for one arguer may be a sound argument for another. This explains why, when trying to persuade someone, one should take the audience's beliefs into account. But it can also make sense of arguments independent of an audience, unlike the dialogical approach.

This perspective is well suited for explaining why some slippery slope arguments constitute fallacies but others not. Slippery slope arguments argue against a certain proposal based on the fact that this proposal would bring with it a causal chain of events eventually leading to a bad outcome. But even if every step in this chain is relatively probable, probabilistic calculus may still reveal that the likelihood of all steps occurring together is quite small. In this case, the argument would constitute a fallacy. But slippery slope arguments are rationally justified if the associated probabilities are sufficiently high.

Types

A great variety of informal fallacies have been discussed in academic literature. There is controversy both concerning whether a given argument really constitutes a fallacy in all of its instances and concerning how the different fallacies should be grouped together into categories. The categorization here follows proposals commonly found in the academic literature in these or similar terms. It distinguishes between fallacies of ambiguity, which have their root in ambiguous or vague language, fallacies of presumption, which involve false or unjustified premises, and fallacies of relevance, in which the premises are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise. Other categorizations have been proposed and some fallacies within this categorization could also be grouped in another category.

Fallacies of ambiguity

The source of the error for fallacies of ambiguity lies in the usage of language. This is due to the fact that many terms in natural language have ambiguous or vague meanings. Ambiguous terms have several meanings while vague terms have an unclear meaning. Fallacies of ambiguity often result in merely verbal disputes: the arguing parties have different topics in mind and thereby talk past each other without being aware of this. One way to avoid or solve these fallacies is to clarify language, e.g. by committing to definitions and by introducing new distinctions. Such reformulations may include a condensation of the original argument in order to make it easier to spot the erroneous step.

Fallacies of ambiguity are perhaps best exemplified by the fallacy of equivocation, in which the same term appears with two different meanings in the premises, for example:

Feathers are light.

What is light cannot be dark.

Therefore, feathers cannot be dark.

The source of this fallacy is due to the ambiguity in the term "light", which is used first in the sense "not heavy" and later in the sense "bright". Equivocations are especially difficult to detect in cases where the two meanings are very closely related to each other.

The fallacy of amphiboly also involves ambiguity in meaning, but this ambiguity arises not on the level of individual terms but on the level of the sentence as a whole due to syntactic ambiguity, for example:

"The police were told to stop drinking on campus after midnight.

So, now they are able to respond to emergencies much better than before"

On one interpretation, the police are not allowed to drink alcohol. On another, it is now the job of the police to stop other people from drinking. The argument seems plausible on the former reading but fallacious on the latter reading.

The fallacies of division and composition are due to ambiguity of the term "all" and similar expressions. This term has both a collective and a distributive meaning. For example, the sentence "all the citizens are strong enough to resist a tyrant" may mean either that all together are strong enough (collective) or that each one individually is strong enough (distributive). The fallacy of division is committed if one infers from the sentence in the collective sense that one specific individual is strong enough. The fallacy of composition is committed if one infers from the fact that each member of a group has a property that the group as a whole has this property. For example, "[e]very member of the investigative team was an excellent researcher", therefore "[i]t was an excellent investigative team". Any form of fallaciously transferring a property from the whole to its parts or the other way round belongs to the category of fallacies of division and composition, even when linguistic ambiguity is not the cause.

Fallacies of presumption

Fallacies of presumption involve a false or unjustified premise but are often valid otherwise. This problematic premise can take different forms and the belief in it can be caused in different ways, corresponding to the various sub-categories in this field. Many well-known (alleged) fallacies in the field of philosophy fall into this category, for example, the naturalistic fallacy, the moralistic fallacy or the intentional fallacy.

A false dilemma is a fallacy of presumption based on a false disjunctive claim that oversimplifies reality by excluding viable alternatives. For example, a false dilemma is committed when it is claimed that "Stacey spoke out against capitalism, therefore she must be a communist". One of the options excluded is that Stacey may be neither communist nor capitalist. Our liability to commit false dilemmas may be due to the tendency to simplify reality by ordering it through either-or-statements.

For fallacies of generalization, the false premise is due to an erroneous generalization. In the case of the fallacy of sweeping generalization, a general rule is applied incorrectly to an exceptional case. For example, "[e]veryone has a right to his or her property. Therefore, even though Jones had been declared insane, you had no right to take his weapon away." The generalization, in this case, ignores that insanity is an exceptional case to which the general rights of property do not unrestrictedly apply. Hasty generalization, on the other hand, involves the converse mistake of drawing a universal conclusion based on a small number of instances. For example, "I’ve met two people in Nicaragua so far, and they were both nice to me. So, all people I will meet in Nicaragua will be nice to me".

Begging the question is a form of circular reasoning in which the conclusion is already assumed in the premises. Because of this, the premises are unable to provide independent support for the conclusion. For example, the statement "Green is the best color because it is the greenest of all colors", offers no independent reason besides the initial assumption for its conclusion. Detecting this fallacy can be difficult when a complex argument with many sub-arguments is involved, resulting in a large circle.

Fallacies of relevance

Fallacies of relevance involve premises that are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise. They may succeed in persuading the audience nonetheless due to being emotionally loaded, for example, by playing on prejudice, pity or fear.

Ad hominem arguments constitute an important class among the fallacies of relevance. In them, the arguer tries to attack a thesis by attacking the person pronouncing this thesis instead of attacking the thesis itself. Rejecting a theory in physics because its author is Jewish, which was common in the German physics community in the early 1930s, is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. But not all ad hominem arguments constitute fallacies. It is a common and reasonable practice in court, for example, to defend oneself against an accusation by casting doubt on the reliability of the witnesses. The difference between fallacious and justified ad hominem arguments depends on the relevancy of the character of the attacked person to the thesis in question. The author's cultural heritage seems to have very little relevance in most cases for theories in physics but the reliability of a witness in court is highly relevant for whether one is justified in believing their testimony. Whataboutism is a special form of the ad hominem fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.

Appeal to ignorance is another fallacy due to irrelevance. It is based on the premise that there is no proof for a certain claim. From this premise, the conclusion is drawn that this claim must therefore be false. For example, "Nobody has ever proved to me there’s a God, so I know there is no God". Another version of the appeal to ignorance concludes from the absence of proof against a claim that this claim must be true.

Arguments from analogy are also susceptible to fallacies of relevance. An analogy is a comparison between two objects based on similarity. Arguments from analogy involve inferences from information about a known object (the source) to the features of an unknown object (the target) based on the similarity between the two objects. Arguments from analogy have the following form: a is similar to b and a has feature F, therefore b probably also has feature F. The soundness of such arguments depends on the relevance of this similarity to the inferred feature. Without this relevance, the argument constitutes a faulty or false analogy, for example: "If a child gets a new toy he or she will want to play with it; So, if a nation gets new weapons, it will want to use them".

 

Christian right

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right 

The Christian right, or the religious right, are Christian political factions that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative and traditionalist policies. Christian conservatives seek to influence politics and public policy with their interpretation of the teachings of Christianity.

In the United States, the Christian right is an informal coalition formed around a core of largely white conservative evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Christian right draws additional support from politically conservative mainline Protestants and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The movement has its roots in American politics going back as far as the 1940s; it has been especially influential since the 1970s. Its influence draws from grassroots activism as well as from focus on social issues and the ability to motivate the electorate around those issues.

The Christian right is notable for advancing socially conservative positions on issues such as school prayer, intelligent design, temperance, Christian nationalism, and Sunday Sabbatarianism, as well as opposition to embryonic stem cell research, LGBT rights, sex education, abortion, and pornography. Although the term Christian right is most commonly associated with politics in the United States, similar Christian conservative groups can be found in the political cultures of other Christian-majority nations.

Terminology

The Christian right is "also known as the New Christian Right (NCR) or the Religious Right", although some consider the religious right to be "a slightly broader category than Christian Right".

John C. Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life states that Jerry Falwell used the label religious right to describe himself. Gary Schneeberger, vice president of media and public relations for Focus on the Family, states that "[t]erms like 'religious right' have been traditionally used in a pejorative way to suggest extremism. The phrase 'socially conservative evangelicals' is not very exciting, but that's certainly the way to do it."

Evangelical leaders like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council have called attention to the problem of equating the term Christian right with evangelicals. Although evangelicals constitute the core constituency of the Christian right, not all evangelicals fit the description and moreover, a number of Roman Catholics are also members of the Christian right's core base. The problem of description is further complicated by the fact that religious conservative may refer to other groups. Mennonites and the Amish, for example, are theologically conservative, however, there are no overtly political organizations associated with these denominations.

History

Jerry Falwell, whose founding of the Moral Majority was a key step in the formation of the "New Christian Right"

In 1863, representatives from eleven Christian denominations in the United States organized the National Reform Association with the goal of adding a Christian amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in order to establish the country as a Christian state. The National Reform Association is seen as one of the first organizations of the Christian right, through which adherents from several Christian denominations worked together to try to enshrine Christianity in American politics.

Early organizations of the Christian right, such as the Christian Civic League of Maine founded in 1897, supported the aims of the temperance movement.

Patricia Miller states that the "alliance between evangelical leaders and the Catholic bishops has been a cornerstone of the Christian Right for nearly twenty years". Since the late 1970s, the Christian right has been a notable force in both the Republican Party and American politics when Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell and other Christian leaders began to urge conservative Christians to involve themselves in the political process. In response to the rise of the Christian right, the 1980 Republican Party platform assumed a number of its positions, including adding support for a restoration of school prayer. The past two decades have been an important time in the political debates and in the same time frame religious citizens became more politically active in a time period labeled the New Christian Right. While the platform also opposed abortion and leaned towards restricting taxpayer funding for abortions and passing a constitutional amendment which would restore protection of the right to life for unborn children, it also accepted the fact that many Americans, including fellow Republicans, were divided on the issue. Since about 1980, the Christian right has been associated with several institutions including the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.

While the influence of the Christian right is typically traced to the 1980 Presidential election, Daniel K. Williams argues in God's Own Party that it had actually been involved in politics for most of the twentieth century. He also notes that the Christian right had previously been in alliance with the Republican Party in the 1940s through 1960s on matters such as opposition to communism and defending "a Protestant-based moral order".

In light of the state atheism espoused by communist countries, secularization came to be seen by many Americans as the biggest threat to American and Christian values, and by the 1980s Catholic bishops and evangelicals had begun to work together on issues such as abortion.

The alienation of Southern Democrats from the Democratic Party contributed to the rise of the right, as the counterculture of the 1960s provoked fear of social disintegration. In addition, as the Democratic Party became identified with a pro-abortion rights position and with nontraditional societal values, social conservatives joined the Republican Party in increasing numbers.

In 1976, U.S. President Jimmy Carter received the support of the Christian right largely because of his much-acclaimed religious conversion. However, Carter's spiritual transformation did not compensate for his liberal policies in the minds of Christian conservatives, as reflected in Jerry Falwell's criticism that "Americans have literally stood by and watched as godless, spineless leaders have brought our nation floundering to the brink of death."

Ability to organize

Demonstrators at the 2004 March for Life in Washington, D.C.

The Christian Right has engaged in battles over abortion, euthanasia, contraception, pornography, gambling, obscenity, Christian nationalism, Sunday Sabbatarianism (concerning Sunday blue laws), state sanctioned prayer in public schools, textbook contents (concerning creationism), homosexuality, and sexual education. The Supreme Court's decision to make abortion a constitutionally protected right in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling was the driving force behind the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s. Changing political context led to the Christian Right's advocacy for other issues, such as opposition to euthanasia and campaigning for abstinence-only sex education.

Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Christian Coalition, stated that the 1988 presidential campaign of Pat Robertson was the 'political crucible' that led to the proliferation of Christian Right groups in the United States.

Randall Balmer, on the other hand, has suggested that the New Christian Right Movement's rise was not centered around the issue of abortion, but rather Bob Jones University's refusal to comply with the Supreme Court's 1971 Green v. Connally ruling that permitted the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to collect penalty taxes from private religious schools that violated federal laws.

Grassroots activism

Much of the Christian right's power within the American political system is attributed to their extraordinary turnout rate at the polls. The voters that coexist in the Christian right are also highly motivated and driven to get out a viewpoint on issues they care about. As well as high voter turnout, they can be counted on to attend political events, knock on doors and distribute literature. Members of the Christian right are willing to do the electoral work needed to see their candidate elected. Because of their high level of devotion, the Christian right does not need to monetarily compensate these people for their work.

Political leaders and institutions

Led by Robert Grant advocacy group Christian Voice, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Ed McAteer's Religious Roundtable Council, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation and The Heritage Foundation, and Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the new Religious Right combined conservative politics with evangelical and fundamentalist teachings. The birth of the New Christian right, however, is usually traced to a 1979 meeting where televangelist Jerry Falwell was urged to create a "Moral Majority" organization. In 1979, Weyrich was in a discussion with Falwell when he remarked that there was a "moral majority" of Americans ready to be called to political action. Weyrich later recalled in a 2007 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that after he mentioned the term "moral majority", Falwell "turned to his people and said, 'That's the name of our organization.'"

Weyrich would then engineer a strong union between the Republican Party and many culturally conservative Christians. Soon, Moral Majority became a general term for the conservative political activism of evangelists and fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson, James Robison, and Jerry Falwell. Howard Schweber, Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes that "in the past two decades", "Catholic politicians have emerged as leading figures in the religious conservative movement."

Institutions in the United States

National organizations

One early attempt to bring the Christian right into American politics began in 1974 when Robert Grant, an early movement leader, founded American Christian Cause to advocate Christian ideological teachings in Southern California. Concerned that Christians overwhelmingly voted for President Jimmy Carter in 1976, Grant expanded his movement and founded Christian Voice to rally Christian voters behind socially conservative candidates. Prior to his alliance with Falwell, Weyrich sought an alliance with Grant. Grant and other Christian Voice staff soon set up their main office at the headquarters of Weyrich's Heritage Foundation. However, the alliance between Weyrich and Grant fell apart in 1978.

In the late 1980s, Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition of America, building from his 1988 presidential run, with Republican activist Ralph Reed, who became the spokesman for the Coalition. In 1992, the national Christian Coalition, Inc., headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia, began producing voter guides, which it distributed to conservative Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic, with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Under the leadership of Reed and Robertson, the Coalition quickly became the most prominent voice in the conservative Christian movement, its influence culminating with an effort to support the election of a conservative Christian to the presidency in 1996. In addition, they have encouraged the convergence of conservative Christian ideology with political issues, such as healthcare, the economy, education and crime.

Focus on the Family's Visitor's Welcome Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Political activists lobbied within the Republican party locally and nationally to influence party platforms and nominations. More recently James Dobson's group Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, and the Family Research Council in Washington D.C. have gained enormous respect from Republican lawmakers. While strongly advocating for these ideological matters, Dobson himself is warier of the political spectrum and much of the resources of his group are devoted to other aims such as media. However, as a private citizen, Dobson has stated his opinion on presidential elections; on February 5, 2008, Dobson issued a statement regarding the 2008 presidential election and his strong disappointment with the Republican party's candidates.

In an essay written in 1996, Ralph Reed argued against the moral absolutist tone of Christian right leaders, arguing for the Republican Party Platform to stress the moral dimension of abortion rather than placing emphasis on overturning Roe v. Wade. Reed believes that pragmatism is the best way to advocate for the Christian right.

Partisan activity of churches

Overtly partisan actions by churches could threaten their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status due to the Johnson Amendment of the Internal Revenue Code. In one notable example, the former pastor of the East Waynesville Baptist Church in Waynesville, North Carolina "told the congregation that anyone who planned to vote for Democratic Sen. John Kerry should either leave the church or repent". The church later expelled nine members who had voted for Kerry and refused to repent, which led to criticism on the national level. The pastor resigned and the ousted church members were allowed to return.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a far-right group now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom, started the Pulpit Freedom Initiative in 2008. ADF states that "[t]he goal of Pulpit Freedom Sunday is simple: have the Johnson Amendment declared unconstitutional – and once and for all remove the ability of the IRS to censor what a pastor says from the pulpit."

Electoral activity

Both Christian right and secular polling organizations sometimes conduct polls to determine which presidential candidates will receive the support of Christian right constituents. One such poll is taken at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit. George W. Bush's electoral success owed much to his overwhelming support from white evangelical voters, who comprise 23% of the vote. In 2000 he received 68% of the white evangelical vote; in 2004 that percentage rose to 78%. In 2016, Donald Trump received 81% of the white evangelical vote.

Education

Jerry Falwell Jr. and Donald Trump at Liberty University

The Home School Legal Defense Association was co-founded in 1983 by Michael Farris, who would later establish Patrick Henry College, and Michael Smith. This organization attempts to challenge laws that serve as obstacles to allowing parents to home-school their children and to organize the disparate group of homeschooling families into a cohesive bloc. The number of homeschooling families has increased in the last twenty years, and around 80 percent of these families identify themselves as evangelicals.

The main universities associated with the Christian right in the United States are:

• Bob Jones University – Protestant Fundamentalist institution, founded in 1927.
• Christendom College – Roman Catholic institution, founded in 1977
• Liberty University – Baptist institution, founded in 1971
• Regent University – Evangelical Christian institution, founded in 1977

Media

The media has played a major role in the rise of the Christian right since the 1920s and has continued to be a powerful force for political Christianity today. The role of the media for the Religious right has been influential in its ability to connect Christian audiences to the larger American culture while at the same time bringing and keeping religion into play as both a political and a cultural force. The political agenda of the Christian right has been disseminated to the public through a variety of media outlets including radio broadcasting, television, and literature.

Religious broadcasting began in the 1920s through the radio. Between the 1950s and 1980s, TV became a powerful way for the Christian right to influence the public through shows such as Pat Robertson's The 700 Club and The Family Channel. The Internet has also helped the Christian right reach a much larger audience. Organization's websites play a strong role in popularising the Christian right's stances on cultural and political issues, and informed interested viewers on how to get involved. The Christian Coalition, for example, has used the Internet to inform the public, as well as to sell merchandise and gather members. More recently an organization called Christ Church, with an avowed purpose to make America a theocratic state, launched a series of animations aimed at children.

Views

Education

The Christian right strongly advocates for a system of educational choice, using a system of school vouchers, instead of public education. Vouchers would be government funded and could be redeemed for "a specified maximum sum per child per years if spent on approved educational services". This method would allow parents to determine which school their child attends while relieving the economic burden associated with private schools. The concept is popular among constituents of church-related schools, including those affiliated with Roman Catholicism.

Evolution

See also: Creation and evolution in public education

The Protestant members of the Christian right in the United States generally promote the teaching of creationism and intelligent design as opposed to, or alongside, biological evolution. Some supporters of the Christian right have opposed the teaching of evolution in the past, but they did not have the ability to stop it being taught in public schools as was done during the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in which a science teacher went on trial for teaching about the subject of evolution in a public school. Other "Christian right organizations supported the teaching of creationism, along with evolution, in public schools", specifically promoting theistic evolution (also known as evolutionary creationism) in which God is regarded as the originator of the process.

Members of and organizations associated with the Christian right, such as the Discovery Institute, created and popularized the modern concept of intelligent design, which became widely known only with the publication of the book Of Pandas and People in 1989. The Discovery Institute, through their intelligent design initiative called the Center for Science and Culture, has endorsed the teach the controversy approach. According to its proponents, such an approach would ensure that both the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory were discussed in the curriculum. This tactic was criticized by Judge John E. Jones III in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, describing it as "at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard." The overwhelming majority of scientific research, both in the United States and elsewhere, has concluded that the theory of evolution, using the technical definition of the word theory, is the only viable explanation of the development of life, and an overwhelming majority of biologists strongly support its presentation in public school science classes. Outside the United States, as well as among American Catholics and Mainline Protestants, Christian conservatives have generally come to accept the theory of evolution.

Sexual education

Some Christian groups advocate for the removal of sex education literature from public schools, for parental opt-out of comprehensive sex education, or for abstinence-only sex education. Thirty percent of America's sexual-education programs are abstinence based. These programs promote abstinence until marriage as the only way to prevent pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and emotional issues that could arise from sexual activity. There is no evidence supporting the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education; multiple studies have failed to find any benefit, and have even found that it may be harmful. It has been found to be ineffective in decreasing HIV risk in the developed world. Likewise, it does not decrease rates of sexual activity or unplanned pregnancy when compared to comprehensive sex education.

Schooling

The Christian right promotes homeschooling and private schooling as a valid alternative to public education for parents who object to the content being taught at school. In recent years, the percentage of children being homeschooled has risen from 1.7% of the student population in 1999 to 2.2% in 2003. Much of this increase has been attributed to the desire to incorporate Christian teachings into the curriculum. In 2003, 72% of parents who homeschooled their children cited the ability to provide religious or moral instruction as the reason for removing their children from public schools. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case established that creationism cannot be taught in public schools, and in response officials have increasingly appropriated public funds for charter schools that teach curricula like Accelerated Christian Education.

Sunday Sabbatarianism

The Christian right is in favour of legislation that maintains and promotes Sunday Sabbatarianism, such as Sunday blue laws that forbid shopping and restrict the sale of alcohol on Sundays, which is the Lord's Day in mainstream Christianity.

Role of government

Supporters of the Christian right have no one unified stance on the role of government since the movement is primarily one that advocates social conservatism; in fact, "struggles [have] broken out in state party organizations" between supporters of the Christian right and other conservatives. It promotes conservative interpretations of the Bible as the basis for moral values and enforcing such values by legislation. Some members of the Christian right, especially Catholics, accept the Catholic Church's strong support for labor unions.

Church and state relations

See also: Accommodationism

The Christian right believes that separation of church and state is not explicit in the American Constitution, believing instead that such separation is a creation of what it claims are activist judges in the judicial system. In the United States, the Christian right often supports their claims by asserting that the country was "founded by Christians as a Christian Nation." Members of the Christian right take the position that the Establishment Clause bars the federal government from establishing or sponsoring a state church (e.g., the Church of England), but does not prevent the government from acknowledging religion. The Christian right points out that the term "separation of church and state" is derived from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, not from the Constitution itself. Furthermore, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) takes the view that the concept of "separation of church and state" has been used by the American Civil Liberties Union and its allies to inhibit public acknowledgment of Christianity and restrict the religious freedoms of Christians.

Thus, Christian right leaders have argued that the Establishment Clause does not prohibit the display of religion in the public sphere. Leaders, therefore, believe that public institutions should be allowed, or even required, to display the Ten Commandments. This interpretation has been repeatedly rejected by the courts, which have found that such displays violate the Establishment Clause. Public officials though are prohibited from using their authority in which the primary effect is "advancing or prohibiting religion", according to the Lemon Supreme Court test, and there cannot be an "excessive entanglement with religion" and the government. Some, such as Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, argue that the First Amendment, which specifically restricts Congress, applies only to the Congress and not the states. This position rejects the incorporation of the Bill of Rights.

Generally, the Christian right supports the presence of religious institutions within government and the public sphere, and advocates for fewer restrictions on government funding for religious charities and schools. Both Catholics and Protestants, according to a 2005 Gallup study, have been supportive of school prayer in public schools.

Economics

Early American fundamentalists, such as John R. Rice often favored laissez-faire economics and were outspoken critics of the New Deal and later the Great Society. The contemporary Christian right supports economic conservative policies such as tax cuts and social conservative policies such as child tax credits.

Middle East

See also: Christian Zionism

Many evangelical Protestant supporters of the religious right have strongly supported the state of Israel in recent decades, encouraging support for Israel within the United States government. Some of them have linked Israel to Biblical prophesies; for example, Ed McAteer, founder of the Moral Majority, said "I believe that we are seeing prophecy unfold so rapidly and dramatically and wonderfully and, without exaggerating, makes me breathless." This belief, an example of dispensationalism, arises from the idea that the establishment of Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus, because it represents the Biblically prophesied Gathering of Israel. A 2017 poll indicates that this belief is held by 80% of evangelicals, and that half of evangelicals consider it an important cause of their support for the state of Israel.

During the Lebanese Civil War that started in 1975 and ended in 1990, many Christian parties endorsed the right's political viewpoints such as the Christian Lebanese phalanges which is known as the Kataeb Party, and later, the right's political viewpoints were also endorsed by the Lebanese Armed Forces because their power and influence were threatened by the growing power and influence of the more radical Islamist and left-wing movements, such as the Shiite Amal Movement, and the Progressive Socialist Party in the 1980s.

Abortion and contraception

See also: Bioethics and Consistent life ethic

The Christian right opposes abortion, believing that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. Therefore, those in the movement have worked toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and have also supported incremental steps to make abortion less available. Such efforts include bans on late-term abortion (including intact dilation and extraction), prohibitions against Medicaid funding and other public funding for elective abortions, removal of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortion services, legislation requiring parental consent or notification for abortions performed on minors, legal protections for unborn victims of violence, legal protections for infants born alive following failed abortions, and bans on abortifacient medications.

The Christian right element in the Reagan coalition strongly supported him in 1980, in the belief that he would appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. They were astonished and dismayed when his first appointment was Sandra Day O'Connor, whom they feared would tolerate abortion. They worked hard to defeat her confirmation but failed.

The Christian right contends that morning-after pills such as Plan B and Ella are possible abortifacients, able to interfere with a fertilized egg's implantation in the uterine wall. The labeling mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Plan B and Ella state that they may interfere with implantation, but according to a June 2012, The New York Times article, many scientists believe that they work only by interfering with ovulation and are arguing to have the implantation language removed from product labels. The Christian right maintains that the chemical properties of morning-after pills make them abortifacients and that the politics of abortion is influencing scientific judgments. Jonathan Imbody of the Christian Medical Association says he questions "whether ideological considerations are driving these decisions." Specifically, many Catholic members, as well as some conservative Protestant members, of the Christian right have campaigned against contraception altogether.

Biotechnology

Due to the Christian right's views regarding ethics and to an extent due to negative views of eugenics common to most ideologies in North America, it has worked for the regulation and restriction of certain applications of biotechnology. In particular, the Christian right opposes therapeutic and reproductive human cloning, championing a 2005 United Nations ban on the practice, and human embryonic stem cell research, which involves the extraction of one or more cells from a human embryo. The Christian right supports research with adult stem cells, amniotic stem cells, and induced pluripotent stem cells which do not use cells from human embryos, as they view the harvesting of biological material from an embryo lacking the ability to give permission as an assault on a living being.

The Christian right also opposes euthanasia, and, in one highly publicized case, took an active role in seeking governmental intervention to prevent Terri Schiavo from being deprived of nutrition and hydration.

Opposition to drugs

Further information: Woman's Christian Temperance Union and List of anti-cannabis organizations

The Christian right has historically supported the temperance movement, thus supporting causes such as maintaining Sunday blue laws, adding alcohol packaging warning messages to bottles and limiting alcohol advertising. It has advocated for the prohibition of drugs and has opposed efforts to legalize marijuana.

Sex and sexuality

The modern roots of the Christian right's views on sexual matters were evident in the 1950s, a period in which many Christian conservatives in the United States viewed sexual promiscuity as not only excessive, but in fact as a threat to their ideal vision of the country.

Beginning in the 1970s, conservative Christian protests against promiscuity began to surface, largely as a reaction to the "permissive sixties" and an emerging prominence of sexual rights arising from Roe v Wade and the gay rights movement. The Christian right proceeded to make sexuality issues a priority political cause.

The Christian right champions itself as the "self-appointed conscience of American society". During the 1980s, the movement was largely dismissed by political pundits and mainstream religious leaders as "a collection of buffoonish has-beens". Later, it re-emerged, better organized and more focused, taking firm positions against abortion, pornography, sexual deviancy, and extreme feminism. Beginning around the presidency of Donald Trump, Christian conservatives have largely refrained from engaging in debates about sexual morality.

Influential Christian right organizations at the forefront of the anti-gay rights movement in the United States include Focus on the Family, Family Research Council and the Family Research Institute. An important stratagem in Christian right anti-gay politics is in its rejection of "the edicts of a Big Brother" state, allowing it to profit from "a general feeling of discontent and demoralization with government". As a result, the Christian right has endorsed smaller government, restricting its ability to arbitrate in disputes regarding values and traditions. In this context, gay rights laws have come to symbolize the government's allegedly unconstitutional "[interference] with individual freedom".

The central tenets of Focus on the Family and similar organizations, such as the Family Research Council, emphasise issues such as abortion and the necessity of gender roles. A number of organizations, including the New Christian Right, "have in various ways rejected liberal America in favor of the regulation of pornography, anti-abortion legislation, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the virtues of faithfulness and loyalty in sexual partnerships", according to sociologist Bryan Turner.

A large number of the Christian right view same-sex marriage as a central issue in the culture wars, more so than other gay rights issues and even more significantly than abortion. The legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2004 changed the Christian right, causing it to put its opposition to these marriages above most other issues. It also created previously unknown interracial and ecumenical coalitions, and stimulated new electoral activity in pastors and congregations.

Criticism

Criticisms of the Christian right often come from Christians who believe Jesus' message was centered on social responsibility and social justice. Theologian Michael Lerner has summarized: "The unholy alliance of the Political Right and the Religious Right threatens to destroy the America we love. It also threatens to generate a revulsion against God and religion by identifying them with militarism, ecological irresponsibility, fundamentalist antagonism to science and rational thought, and insensitivity to the needs of the poor and the powerless." Commentators from all sides of the aisle such as Rob Schenck, Randall Balmer, and Charles M. Blow criticized the Christian right for its tolerance and embrace of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election despite Trump's failure to adhere to any of the principles advocated by the Christian right groups for decades.

Interpretation of Christianity

See also: Christian left

One argument which questions the legitimacy of the Christian right posits that Jesus Christ may be considered a leftist on the modern political spectrum. Jesus' concern with the poor and feeding the hungry, among other things, are argued, by proponents of Christian leftism, to be core attributes of modern-day socialism and social justice. However, others contend that while Jesus' concern for the poor and hungry is virtuous and that individuals have a moral obligation to help others, the relationship between charity and the state should not be construed in the same manner.

According to Frank Newport of Gallup, "there are fewer Americans today who are both highly religious and liberal than there are Americans who are both highly religious and conservative." Newport also noted that 52% of white conservatives identify as "highly religious" while only 16% of white liberals identify as the same. However, African-Americans, "the most religious of any major racial or ethnic group in the country", are "strongly oriented to voting Democratic". While observing that African-American Democrats are more religious than their white Democrat counterparts, Newport further noted, however, that African-American Democrats are "much more likely to be ideologically moderate or conservative."

Some criticize what they see as a politicization of Christianity because they say Jesus transcends political concepts.

Mikhail Gorbachev referred to Jesus as "the first Socialist".

Race and diversity

The Christian right has tried to recruit social conservatives in the black church. Prior to the 2016 United States presidential election, African-American Republican Ben Carson emerged as a leader of the Christian right. Other Christian African-Americans who identify with conservatism are Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, rapper Kanye West, Alveda King, and pastor Tony Evans.

LGBT rights

Whilst the Christian right in the United States generally identifies with aspects of LGBT rights opposition, other Christian movements argue that the biblical texts only oppose specific types of divergent sexual behaviour, such as paederasty (i.e. the sodomising of young boys by older men). During the Trump administration, there was a growing push for religious liberty bills that would allow individuals and businesses claiming anti-LGBT beliefs that are religious in origin to exempt themselves from obeying anti-discrimination laws intended to protect LGBT people.

Use of dominionism labeling

Some social scientists have used the word "dominionism" to refer to adherence of dominion theology as well as to the influence in the broader Christian Right of ideas inspired by Dominion Theology. Although such influence (particularly of Reconstructionism) has been described by many authors, full adherents to Reconstructionism are few and marginalized among conservative Christians. In the early 1990s, sociologist Sara Diamond defined dominionism in her PhD dissertation as a movement that, while it includes Dominion Theology and Reconstructionism as subsets, is much broader in scope, extending to much of the Christian Right. She was followed by journalists who included Frederick Clarkson and Chris Hedges and others who have stressed the influence of Dominionist ideas on the Christian right.

The terms "dominionist" and "dominionism" are rarely used for self-description, and their usage has been attacked from right-leaning quarters. Stanley Kurtz labeled it "conspiratorial nonsense", "political paranoia", and "guilt by association", and decried Hedges' "vague characterizations" that allow him to "paint a highly questionable picture of a virtually faceless and nameless 'Dominionist' Christian mass." Kurtz also complained about a perceived link between average Christian evangelicals and extremism such as Christian Reconstructionism:

The notion that conservative Christians want to reinstitute slavery and rule by genocide is not just crazy, it's downright dangerous. The most disturbing part of the Harper's cover story (the one by Chris Hedges) was the attempt to link Christian conservatives with Hitler and fascism. Once we acknowledge the similarity between conservative Christians and fascists, Hedges appears to suggest, we can confront Christian evil by setting aside "the old polite rules of democracy." So wild conspiracy theories and visions of genocide are really excuses for the Left to disregard the rules of democracy and defeat conservative Christians – by any means necessary.

Lisa Miller of Newsweek said that many warnings about "dominionism" are "paranoid" and she also said that "the word creates a siege mentality in which 'we' need to guard against 'them.'" Ross Douthat of The New York Times noted that "many of the people that writers like Diamond and others describe as 'dominionists' would disavow the label, many definitions of dominionism conflate several very different Christian political theologies, and there's a lively debate about whether the term is even useful at all." According to Joe Carter of First Things, "the term was coined in the 1980s by Diamond and is never used outside liberal blogs and websites. No reputable scholars use the term for it is a meaningless neologism that Diamond concocted for her dissertation", while Jeremy Pierce of First Things coined the word "dominionismist" to describe those who promote the idea that there is a dominionist conspiracy.

Another criticism has focused on the proper use of the term. Berlet wrote that "some critics of the Christian Right have stretched the term dominionism past its breaking point", and argued that, rather than labeling conservatives as extremists, it would be better to "talk to these people" and "engage them". Sara Diamond wrote that "[l]iberals' writing about the Christian Right's take-over plans has generally taken the form of conspiracy theory", and argued that instead one should "analyze the subtle ways" that ideas like Dominionism "take hold within movements and why."

Dan Olinger, a professor at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, said, "We want to be good citizens and participants, but we're not really interested in using the iron fist of the law to compel people to do everything Christians should do." Bob Marcaurelle, interim pastor at Mountain Springs Baptist Church in Piedmont, said the Middle Ages were proof enough that Christian ruling groups are almost always corrupted by power. "When Christianity becomes the government, the question is whose Christianity?" Marcaurelle asked.

Movements outside the United States

While the Christian Right is a strong movement in the United States, it also has a presence in Canada. Alan Curtis suggests that the American Christian right "is a phenomenon that is very hard for Europeans to understand." Robin Pettitt, a professor at Kingston University London, states, however, that like the Christian right in the US, Christian Democratic movements in Europe and Latin America are "equally driven by the debate over the role of the state and the church in political, social and moral life."

Canada

Further information: Conservatism in Canada

See also: Abortion in Canada

Religion has been a key factor in Canadian politics since well before the Canadian Confederation was established in 1867, when the Conservatives were the party of traditionalist Catholics and Anglicans and the Liberals were the party of Protestant dissenters and anti-clerical Catholics. This pattern largely remained until the mid-twentieth century when a new division emerged between the Christian left (represented by the Social Gospel philosophy and ecumenicism) and the Christian right (represented by fundamentalism and biblical literalism). The Christian left (along with the secular and anti-religious left) became supporters of the New Democratic Party while the right moved to the Social Credit Party, especially in Western Canada, and to a lesser extent the Progressive Conservatives.

The Social Credit Party, founded in 1935, represented a major change in Canadian religious politics. Until that time, fundamentalists had shunned politics as "worldly", and a distraction from the proper practice of religion. However, the new party was founded by fundamentalist radio preacher and Bible school teacher William Aberhart or "Bible Bill". Aberhart mixed his own interpretation of scripture and prophecy with the monetary reform theories of social credit to create a movement that swept across Alberta, winning the provincial election of 1935 in a landslide. Aberhart and his disciple Ernest Manning then governed the province for the next forty years, several times trying to expand into the rest of Canada. In 1987 Manning's son, Preston Manning, founded the new Reform Party of Canada, which soon became the main party of the religious right. It won majorities of the seats in Western Canada in repeated elections, but was unable to break through in Eastern Canada, though it became the official opposition from 1997 to 2003 (Reform was renamed the Canadian Alliance in 2000). In 2003 the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives merged to create the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Stephen Harper, a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, who went on to become prime minister in 2006.

Canada has had a Charter of Rights and Freedoms since the Canadian Constitution was patriated in 1982. As a result, there have been major changes in the law's application to issues that bear on individual and minority group rights. Abortions were completely decriminalized after the two R. v. Morgentaler cases (in 1988 and in 1993). A series of provincial superior court decisions which legalized same-sex marriage led the federal government to introduce legislation that legalized same-sex marriage in all of Canada. Before he took office, former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper stated that he would hold a free vote on the issue, but declared the issue closed after a vote in the House of Commons in 2006.

The Caribbean, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa

Main articles: Pentecostal Christian politics in Latin America and Sub-saharan Africa, Pentecostal political parties in Latin America, and Political influence of Evangelicalism in Latin America

Further information: Conservative wave and World Christianity

Christian right politics in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa is strongly connected with the growing propagation of the Evangelical-Pentecostal movement in the Global South and Third World countries. Roman Catholics in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, despite being normally socially conservative, tend to be more left-wing in economics due to the traditional teachings of the Catholic social doctrine. Evangelical-Pentecostal Christians, on the other hand, are mostly from the neo-Pentecostal movement, and thus believers in the Prosperity theology that justifies most of their neoliberal economic ideas. They are also strongly socially conservative, even for Latin American standards.

Netherlands

In the Netherlands Calvinist Protestants have long had their own political parties, now called the Reformed Political Party (SGP) on the right, and the ChristianUnion (CU) in the center. For generations they operated their own newspapers and broadcasting association. The SGP has about 28,000 members, and three members of parliament, of the 150. It has always been in opposition to the government. The SGP has helped the Dutch government to get laws through the Second Chamber 2010–2012. In exchange that government did not increase the number of Sundays on which shopping is allowed.

Other countries

In Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley led a Protestant fundamentalist party, the Democratic Unionist Party, which had a considerable influence on the province's culture. For a time after the 2017 United Kingdom general election, the DUP provided confidence and supply to the governing Conservative Party, although this agreement provoked concern from socially liberal elements of the party about possible DUP influence on social policy. Although there is no evidence this occurred. Karen Armstrong has mentioned British evangelical leader Colin Urquhart as advocating positions similar to the Christian Right. Some members of the Conservative Party and the Brexit Party including Ann Widdecombe, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries, Matthew Offord and Peter Bone also support some of the values of the Christian right.

In Australia, fundamentalist Christianity is the base for Fred Nile and his Christian Democratic Party as well as the Family First Party. Nile in 1967–68 was Assistant Director of the Billy Graham Crusade in Sydney. Both parties promote social conservatism, opposing gay rights and abortion. Some party members of the Liberal and National Party Coalition and the Australian Labor Party also support some of the values of the Christian right on abortion and gay rights. The Australian Christian Lobby argues for opposition to same-sex marriage in state and federal politics.

In the Philippines, due to Spanish colonization, and the introduction of the Catholic Church, religious conservatism has a strong influence on national policies. Some have argued that the U.S. Christian right may have roots in the Philippines.

The Swiss Federal Democratic Union is a small conservative Protestant party with about 1% of the vote.

In Scandinavia, the Centre Party is a bible-oriented fundamentalist party; it has about 4% of the votes in the Faroe Islands. However, the Norwegian Christian People's Party, the Swedish Christian Democrats and Danish Christian Democrats are less religiously orthodox and are similar to mainstream European Christian Democracy.

In Fiji, Sodelpa is a conservative, nationalist party which seeks to make Christianity the state religion, while the constitution makes Fiji a secular republic. Following the 2014 general election, Sodelpa is the main opposition party in Parliament.

In Brazil, the evangelical caucus have a great influence at the parliament and in the society in general. The bloc promotes strong socially conservative positions, like opposition to abortion, LGBT rights, marijuana legalization, sexual and gender education at schools and support to decrease of age of defense of infancy. Except for left-wing and far-left parties with strong social progressive beliefs like Workers' Party or Socialism and Liberty Party, Christian conservatives can be found in all political parties of Brazil, but nevertheless they are more common associated with parties like Social Democratic Party, Democratas, PSL, Social Christian Party, Brazilian Republican Party, Patriota and in the Party of the Republic. In 2016, Marcelo Crivella, a licensed pentecostal pastor from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, won in a runoff the election to mayor of Rio de Janeiro, the second biggest city in Brazil, with the Brazilian Republican Party, making for the first time an evangelical bloc member mayor of a big city in Brazil. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president with massive support of conservative Catholics, Charismatics, Evangelicals and Pentecostals; Another candidate, Cabo Daciolo, from Patriota, attracted much attention from media and public in general, despite a lower votation. Both had a right-wing populist, Christian Nationalist program, but Bolsonaro was near to a national conservative and economic liberal one, contrasting with an Ultranationalist, theocratic and protectionist style of Daciolo.

In Poland, the Roman Catholic national-conservative party Law and Justice can be considered to be a party of the Christian right.

In Hungary, the ruling national-conservative party Fidesz can also be considered to be a party of the Christian right. Viktor Orbán is known for his use of conservative Christian values against immigration and the rise of Islam in Europe.

The Christian right has a strong position in several Conservative parties worldwide, although many members of these parties would also, paradoxically, strongly oppose such views.