Berkley Center

My project broadly tracks evangelical political involvement through the late 1970s and 1980s in the United States. I identify three phases of increasing involvement: the first phase is marked by calls from within the fundamentalist Protestant community for conservative Christians to become more politically active. The second phase begins with the establishment of organizations such as the Moral Majority, which sought to mobilize their religious voter base over issues such as private school integration, the threat of communism, and abortion. The third phase is coterminous with Ronald Reagan’s second term as president, in which conservative Christian political organizations sought to expand their influence in the United States’ foreign policy sphere. My poster focuses exclusively on a subset of the third phase, highlighting shifts in the United States' stance on United Nations family planning initiatives during the United Nations Decade for Women.

Bibliography

Rebecca J. Cook, and Jeanne M. Haws. “The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Women: Opportunities for Family Planning Providers.” International Family Planning Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1986).

Michael Lienesch. “Right-Wing Religion: Christian Conservatism as a Political Movement.” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 3 (1982).

Lee Marsden. For God's Sake: The Christian Right and US Foreign Policy. London: Zed Books, 2013.

June Samuel. “Adapting to Norms at the United Nations: The Abortion Rights and Anti-Abortion Networks.” Dissertation, University of Maryland (College Park, Md.), 2007.

Clyde Wilcox and Leopoldo Gomez. “The Christian Right and the pro-Life Movement: An Analysis of the Sources of Political Support.” Review of Religious Research 31, no. 4 (1990): 380-389.

Daniel K. Williams. “Jerry Falwell’s Sunbelt Politics: The Regional Origins of the Moral Majority.” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 2 (2010): 125-47.