The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics
How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars

Explains how abortion politics influenced a fundamental shift in conservative Christian politics, teaching conservatives to embrace rights arguments.

Andrew R. Lewis (Author)

9781108405607, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 April 2018

291 pages, 28 b/w illus. 14 tables
22.3 x 15.4 x 1.7 cm, 0.52 kg

'Lewis's work contributes much to a collective understanding of how religion participates on the political landscape.' Katherine Dugan, Reading Religion

The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics documents a recent, fundamental change in American politics with the waning of Christian America. Rather than conservatives emphasizing morality and liberals emphasizing rights, both sides now wield rights arguments as potent weapons to win political and legal battles and build grassroots support. Lewis documents this change on the right, focusing primarily on evangelical politics. Using extensive historical and survey data that compares evangelical advocacy and evangelical public opinion, Lewis explains how the prototypical culture war issue - abortion - motivated the conservative rights turn over the past half century, serving as a springboard for rights learning and increased conservative advocacy in other arenas. Challenging the way we think about the culture wars, Lewis documents how rights claims are used to thwart liberal rights claims, as well as to provide protection for evangelicals, whose cultural positions are increasingly in the minority; they have also allowed evangelical elites to justify controversial advocacy positions to their base and to engage more easily in broad rights claiming in new or expanded political arenas, from health care to capital punishment.

Abbreviations
List of tables and figures
1. Introduction: rights on the right
2. Cultivating the value of rights: Evangelicals and abortion politics
3. But words can never hurt me: learning the value of free speech
4. Separation tranquility: abortion and the decline of the separation of church and state
5. First do no harm: abortion and health care opposition
6. Who's rights: abortion politics, victims, and offenders in the death penalty debate
7. Where's the right? What abortion taught the losers in the gay marriage debate
8. Conclusion. Rights, reciprocity, and the future of conservative religious politics
References
Appendix 1. Variable coding
Appendix 2. Statistical tables
Endnotes.

Subject Areas: Law & society [LAQ], Political science & theory [JPA], Sociology [JHB], Religion & politics [HRAM2]