The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond explores the media career and activism of American television icon Norman Lear as an expression of “the Religious Left.” Lear created such famous shows as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. Through one-on-one interviews and archival research, the book illustrates how Lear has been the paradigmatic expression of the Religious Left in the recent past. Lear’s All in the Family wasn’t simply entertainment; it was television with a political purpose. The following excerpt foregrounds a pointed exchange between President Ronald Reagan and Lear in the pages of Harper’s magazine. Their religious and political differences came down to two prepositions: freedom of versus freedom from religion. These mutually exclusive terms continue to shape much of our political discourse today.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

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In the fall of 1984, Harper’s magazine hosted a spirited discussion between renowned television producer and writer Norman Lear and then President Ronald Reagan. “Dear Mr. President,” the letter began, “I am deeply troubled by what seems to be an endorsement of the so-called Christian Nation movement in many of your recent speeches. While I fully respect (and would fight to protect) your right to whatever spiritual and religious beliefs you prefer, I am concerned that you not use the office of the presidency as Evangelist in Chief or to further the notion that any particular group of Americans is to be accorded special standing because it practices any religion.” Lear willingly accepted the fact that Americans, including the President himself, had the constitutional right to express themselves freely, yet he was hesitant to admit that conservative political religions were not attempting to curtail the very same individual liberties in an act of religious tyranny. “Mr. President,” Lear elaborated, “without freedom from religion we could have no freedom of religion.”^[1]

The President’s prompt response assured Lear that he had no intention of representing what Lear called “the Christian Nation movement” in any of his social policy decisions. “I certainly do not support the notion that any group of citizens is to be accorded special standing ‘because it practices any religion,’” Reagan responded. “The goal of our nation must always be to achieve the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.” Despite Reagan’s philosophical differences with Lear, his description would prove quite prescient since his notion of the “orderly society,” and the values and ethics through which it could be realized, would contribute to defining two very important developments in late twentieth-century America: the emergence of the culture wars as both idea and social phenomenon, and the terms of a new conservative consensus.^[2] More importantly, the discussion between Lear and Reagan spoke to the impact of Southern California and the larger Sunbelt on postwar American religious life as understood from the sound stages and writing rooms of “the Dream Factory,” known otherwise, as Hollywood, California.^[3] Due in large part to the clarity of their respective positions, the arguments between Lear and Reagan were nothing less than dramatic, as a former television writer went head-to-head with a former actor over the means and ends of the orderly society in a pivotal moment in late twentieth-century America.

President Reagan with Rev. Jerry Falwell

In many ways, Lear’s disagreement with Reagan was the product of nearly a decade of organizing and activism in defense of what was popularly referred to as, “the American Way.”^[4] Lear had been on the collective radar of conservative activists, journalists, and organizers since the premiere of his 1971 hit situation comedy All in the Family. Despite, or because of, the inclusion of the word “family” in the show’s title, the program faced virulent criticism for its naive or “indecent” material by some of conservatism’s most well respected names including writer William Buckley and evangelist Jerry Falwell.^[5] In fact, Falwell would later declare Lear to be the “number one enemy of the family in America” during the show’s run on CBS. This seemingly innocuous difference in opinion between Lear and Falwell over the nature of television programming, however, effectively illuminates the contested character of the American family at the time and the ways in which liberals and conservatives understood it during what scholars refer to as the Culture Wars.^[6] It also speaks to the liberal religious reliance on culture in order to make political claims about public life and how best to regulate it in contested times. This approach to politics, however, cut in both directions: it facilitated the rise of the Religious Left, but it also facilitated the same Left’s estrangement from the public square and gradual fall over the course of the 1970s.

Nevertheless, Lear’s religio-political work became especially significant in these contests when he and other Hollywood writers sued the FCC, along with television networks NBC, CBS, and ABC, over a perceived curtailment of their freedom of expression as a result of adopting “the Family Viewing Hour” in primetime. Despite the largely conservative notion of family that would help mobilize a generation of voters, it was Lear who inaugurated the decade with his vision of family and family values as part of the federally protected public interest on network television. In this way, Lear’s activism was indicative of a broader style of organizing and argumentation commonly referred to as the Religious or Spiritual Left in American public life, a style that viewed the public square as its own creation and deserving of federal protection and regulation in the name of the public interest.^[7]

Lear with the All in the Family cast

Lear’s involvement in the entertainment industry drew his and others’ attention to the activities of conservative Protestants and their protests much earlier than many of the journalists, academics, and political commentators who encountered them in the public square as part of a story or formal study of “the Christian Right.”^[8] As such, Lear’s decision to found the non-profit organization People for the American Way (PFAW) in 1981 came out of his observations and careful analyses of right-wing organizations, speakers, and preachers— namely those who constituted the ascending “Electronic Church” and the Moral Majority. In this sense, Lear can be understood as one of the more significant interpreters of the “New Right,” “the Religious Right,” and/or “the New Christian Right” in the recent American past as understood from the vantage of the burgeoning “Religious Left.”^[9] These phrases not only functioned as terms of historically contingent description for Lear and his supporters, but also as powerful rhetorical stereotypes of conservative religiosity run rampant in the public square.^[10]

Due to the publicity and character of Lear’s arguments, his religio-political writings and activism were defended vociferously throughout the 1970s and 1980s by interfaith organizations such as the National Council of Christians and Jews and mainline Protestant organizations including the National Council of Churches and the The Christian Century.^[11] In light of this support, Lear first decided to compose a satirical movie based on the lives of two preachers in order to articulate his criticisms of the Christian Right and its methods of exclusionary politics and tax evasion.^[12] Despite the assistance of fellow comedy writers Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, Lear decided to go in a different direction due to the urgency he felt from the growing collective weight of televangelist influence over American media. “Then one day, while working to realize the film we envisioned, my concern reached its peak. I had tuned in to Jimmy Swaggart and caught the reverend, Bible in hand, railing about a constitutional issue that was due to come before the Supreme Court and asking his ‘godly’ viewers to pray for the removal of a certain justice,” Lear recalled. “That was the last straw for me—I had to do something.”^[13]

Lear was not the only one to be disgusted by what he saw on the television screen during this period, yet it is his story, and those who supported him, that remains to be told in the recent history of American religion and the wars of culture that have characterized subsequent American political debate since the 1960s. On the one hand, this is a story about cultural victory, one signifying a given community’s ability to shape and even dictate culture to those eager to consume it.^[14] On the other, it is a story about what may be gained by this power over the long term, and what is lost in the short term in the realm of politics itself as understood as the deliberation and negotiation of power by means rarely agreed upon by the combatants. In this sense, those who defended the ability of public reason to govern public discourse by deploying it against their political enemies were making an argument about how the public square should be constituted and on whose terms. As illustrated by the following analysis of Norman Lear’s career in media and non-profit activism, this vision, broad as it may have been, ultimately lacked the capacity to include those who it seemed to care about most: most notably, Archie Bunker himself.

In other words, whether it was publisher William Rusher, political operative Kevin Phillips, or Bunker himself, Lear and his various supporters within the Religious Left had difficulty seeing past the caricatures Lear himself was partly responsible for creating of conservatism in the public square. In this sense, many of the struggles and challenges that American religious liberals have experienced since can be understood as largely self-inflicted in nature as they gradually lost the ability to speak to the masses due to the successes of Lear’s form of popular, yet relevant entertainment on a mass scale. In many ways, this study demonstrates why such irony remains largely unrealized to this day, and as such, unexamined in both popular and academic imaginations.

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^[1] Norman Lear and Ronald Reagan, “A Debate on Religious Freedom,” Harper’s (Oct 1984): 15-20. For more on political religions, see Jason Bivins, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).

^[2] See Jeffrey K. Hadden, “Clergy Involvement in Civil Rights,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (January 1970): 119.

^[3] See Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, (New York, NY: Martino Fine Books, 2013 – reprint, 1950). For more on California’s liberal religious cultures, see Eileen Luhr, “Seeker, Surfer, Yogi: The Progressive Religious Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Place in Encinitas, California,” American Quarterly 67, 4 (Dec 2015): 1169-1193.

^[4] Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement,(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).

^[5] William Buckley, “The Nightmare of Norman Lear,” National Review (November 27 1981): 1441.

^[6] For the standard work in this field, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

^[7] For the latest account of the Religious Left, see Doug Rossinow, Marian Mollin, and Leilah Danielson, eds., The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2018). For a broader collection on the same topic, see Rebecca Alpert, ed., Voices of the Religious Left: A Contemporary Sourcebook (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000). For a more historical account of liberal religion generally considered, see Matthew Hedstrom, The Birth of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Leigh E. Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). For more on the religious left in real time and its definition, see Nadia Marzouki, “Does the United States Need a Religious Left?” Social Science Research Council (January 23 2019). Available here: https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/01/23/does-the-united-states-need-a-religious-left/ (Accessed February 22nd 2019). For historian Rebecca Alpert, the “religious left” speaks to “a range of issues with common themes of peace, justice, and support for the disenfranchised and speak from a religious perspective. The religious left is composed today of groups and individuals with progressive political values that are undergirded by their religious beliefs in justice, freedom, and peace. But these groups and individuals do not agree about all of the issues that comprise a progressive political agenda…the religious left is multifaceted rather than cohesive. The absence of theological or political consensus contributes to the inability of the religious left to have a unified voice or a stronger public presence today” (2). “Any study of the Religious Left,” argues Alpert, “must include the voices of Muslims, Buddhists, and Native Americans, as well as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.” Since the term “Religious Left” is arguably as ephemeral as “the Religious Right,”my usage of the term is more out of necessity than it is out of convenience. In short, Lear’s career in media is representative of a Religious Left understanding of American religion and politics as illustrated from outside the confines of traditionally institutional settings, such as churches or synagogues. As such, Lear’s work illustrates why liberal religious activism in the name of the first amendment and religious freedom finds many of its most effective tools of organizing and argumentation outside “religious” settings and vocabularies. This tactic has arguably been American religious liberalism’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. As it gains power and influence in culture, it loses its ability to speak to a religio-political vision of the nation and its inhabitants. As a result, liberals of various sorts may be able to influence and shape culture, or even win wars of culture, but largely at the expense of political power itself. Lear’s career in media is the paradigmatic example of American liberalism’s over reliance on culture for its politics-making. Counter intuitively, such influence has resulted in a form of cultural revolution by way of popular culture at the expense of a political one via an emphasis on class. For more on this sociological argument, see Daniel Bell, “Afterword (2001): From Class to Culture,” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 447-503. For more on “halfway houses” within American Religious Liberalism and the Religious Left, see David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

^[8] My understanding of conservative Protestantism follows the lead of historian Timothy E. W. Gloege, who argues that the term describes evangelicals who “emphasize that their individualistic relationship to God is with a person, generally a ‘he.’ Their individualistic, ‘plain’ interpretation of the Bible is superintended by dispensational assumptions that keep the most radical implications of the Bible in check…and generally, they consider social reform a fruit secondary to evangelism.” I support Gloege’s notion that evangelicals have made themselves “the public face of conservative Protestantism.” While this has been a remarkable “rhetorical achievement…it was precisely that.” See Timothy E.W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 13.

^[9] My usage of quotation marks around “the Christian Right” and the “Electronic Church” is intended to suggest that such terms are largely fictitious ones, inventions of a collection of liberal and conservative actors in the public square during the 1970s designed to capture a particular religio-political sentiment in the name of electoral politics.

^[10] These stereotypes were arguably the product of what literary theorists identify as (political) metonymy and synecdoche, specifically liberal ones. In each instance, a linguistic “part” stood in for a larger social “whole,” whereby “the new Christian Right” functioned as a metonymy for conservative Protestant Christianity within the US by representing the social whole through the rhetorical part. These arguments, and their application to the study of religio-political discourse since the 1960s, are in the preliminary stages of development.

^[11] Martin Marty, “A Profile of Norman Lear: Another Pilgrim’s Progress,” The Christian Century (Jan 21 1987): 56-60.

^[12] My emphasis on conservative Protestant “method” resonates with Gloege’s analyses, which contend that “The lasting significance of The Fundamentals project laid in its methods, not its contents. It pioneered a means of creating an evangelical ‘orthodoxy’ out of an ever—shifting bricolage of beliefs and practices, each varying historical significance and some entirely novel…The Fundamentals thus pointed the way forward for modern conservative evangelicalism by modeling the methodology for creating, and constantly recreating, whatever ‘orthodoxy’ the present moment required.” There is no better evidence for this argument during the period under study than the actions and cultural productions of evangelist Jerry Falwell and his advocacy group, the Moral Majority. The creation of the bible scorecard, a document that evaluated the Christian character of a politician or person in office based on a predetermined conservative policy agenda, was arguably part of evangelicalism’s ability to carry out and successfully execute instances of improvisational orthodoxy. For Gloege, The Fundamentals “replaced doctrine with the performance of orthodoxy facilitated by modern promotional techniques.” Perhaps most importantly, “the work created an imagined community of Protestants united in their opposition to theological modernism” (11, 163, and 181).

^[13] Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience, (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2015), 330.

^[14] Jay Demerath III, “Cultural Victory and Organizational Defeat in the Paradoxical Decline of Liberal Protestantism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34, 4 (Dec 1995): 458-469.

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Benjamin Rolsky received his Ph.D. from Drew University in American Religious Studies. He is currently an adjunct instructor at Rutgers University and Monmouth University in New Jersey. His work has appeared in academic and popular venues including Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Christian Century, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN Opinion, and the Religion and Culture Forum at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests include religion and politics, the study of popular culture, and critical theory. Rolsky’s first monograph, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond, was  published with Columbia University Press. He plans to begin research on a second book project that examines the history of the New Christian Right across the 20th century.