religious right, Christian right, evangelical right
What to know
The religious right is an evolving religious and political category that organizes around conservative causes including opposition to abortion access, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights. The religious right also supports the safeguarding of what adherents describe as religious liberty for individuals and institutions, which in practice tends to mean support for Christian prayer and Christian symbols in schools, legal protections for Christians, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, women, and non-Christian religious groups.
The religious right is composed mostly of evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics and mainline Protestants, and sometimes includes other conservative religious groups. In a US context, the phrasing “religious right” often largely means “Christian right,” or sometimes, more specifically, conservative white evangelicals. Phrasing used to describe other right-wing faith groups may specify the religion, e.g., “conservative Muslims.”
A more extreme faction of the Christian right, which scholars often describe as white Christian nationalism, draws on theological arguments, including a dominionist interpretation of Genesis 1:26-28, to argue against separation of church and state and justify Christian domination of the world and the adoption of an explicitly Christian agenda by the US government as part of a divinely ordained mission. “They also are deeply invested in the notion of spiritual warfare, the idea that we are called as Christians to fight a cosmic battle between good and evil, and that it’s our duty to be boots on the ground for God in that conflict,” Brad Onishi, a former evangelical minister who studies Christian nationalism said in a PBS interview. The Christian right, on the other hand, is more focused on influencing specific policies.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that fewer than half of Americans had some idea of what Christian nationalism was. Among those familiar with it, more had unfavorable than favorable views. In 2024, PRRI published a report that found three in 10 Americans qualify as adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism has been particularly center-stage with the rising popularity of Donald Trump and right-wing movements. Reports indicate that for many people who participated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Christian nationalism played a key role. Analysts also point to the relationship between Trump’s second presidential term policies and Christian nationalist aims evident in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Leaders within the broader religious right coalition say it formed in response to evangelicals’ dismay with the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion access. Many historians and scholars argue that the central issue to the formation of the religious right instead was race — preserving de facto segregation and institutional tax benefits for schools that remained segregated, following the civil rights movement’s victories under the Warren Court (1953-69). In this view, the coalition formed in the late 1970s in response to the Supreme Court’s decisions in Green v. Kennedy (1970) and Green v. Connally (1971) to deny segregation academies tax-exempt status. It was during this time that Paul Weyrich, a conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, called for the creation of a “Moral Majority” that could mobilize conservatives for political power. Weyrich formed such a coalition with leaders like Jerry Falwell Sr. of Lynchburg Christian Academy and Bob Jones of Bob Jones University, both segregation academies, that emphasized the religious freedom of their institutions (not an outright defense of segregation). Key institutions of the religious right include Hillsdale College, Patrick Henry College, and Liberty University.
Further collaboration with conservative theologian Francis A. Schaeffer, who staunchly opposed abortion as a sign of “secular humanism” and “moral decay,” allowed the religious right to mobilize evangelical voters for their political cause. Prior to the formation of the religious right, evangelicals were not as unified in their opposition to abortion as they are today. The religious right made opposing abortion an attractive issue for evangelicals because it connected abortion to existing social anxieties around the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation. While the movement was undergirded by concerns about the impacts of segregation, the religious right mobilized through its emphasis on social anxieties building within evangelical communities. This grassroots movement set in motion by the religious right aligned with Ronald Reagan’s platform through the Republican Party and helped him win the presidency in 1980 despite Jimmy Carter’s self-professed evangelicalism.
The religious right is a coalition of politically powerful organizations, institutions, and individuals and is not typically used to identify individual voters. It is often conflated with related groups like evangelical Christians and Republicans because of these groups’ historical and contemporary overlap. Using the term religious right in its particular political context and distinguishing between these groups helps avoid simplistic generalizations (such as that the religious right is the same as the Republican Party or that all evangelical Christians are part of the religious right).
Note that while some publications alternate between “Christian right,” “evangelical right,” and “religious right,” religious right is perhaps the most commonly used term. Using the terms “Christian right” and “evangelical right” without explanation might feed into generalizations that all Christians and evangelicals subscribe to conservative politics. However, there are times when using the terms “Christian right” and “evangelical right” could help clarify the identity of a particular group instead of inaccurately grouping all religious people into this movement. Not all Christian or religious people organize with the religious right, and the religious left also has a presence in the public sphere.
Additional resources
- The Religious Right Has Never Been Smaller or More Powerful (Intelligencer)
- Religion and Right-Wing Politics: How Evangelicals Reshaped Elections (The New York Times)
- The Last Temptation (The Atlantic)
- Scholar: America is still reacting to the religious right, in more ways than one (Religion News Service)
- The “Original Sin” of the Religious Right (Slate)
- The Christian Right (National Humanities Center)
- A history of Christian nationalism (NPR, Throughline)
- What is Christian nationalism and why it raises concerns about threats to democracy (PBS)
- Understanding white Christian nationalism (Yale University)
- How Christian is Christian nationalism? (The New Yorker)
Summary
The religious right is a coalition of politically powerful organizations, institutions, and individuals and is not typically used to identify individual voters. It is often conflated with related groups like evangelical Christians and Republicans because of these groups’ historical and contemporary overlap. Using the term religious right in its particular political context and distinguishing between these groups helps avoid simplistic generalizations (such as that the religious right is the same as the Republican Party or that all evangelical Christians are part of the religious right). Note that while some publications alternate between “Christian right,” “evangelical right,” and “religious right,” religious right is perhaps the most commonly used term. Using the terms “Christian right” and “evangelical right” could help clarify the identity of a particular group instead of inaccurately grouping all religious people into this movement.