Dunn identifies problems with “Christian Right” label
By James Dunn

The so-called “Christian Right” is “stronger, more focused, more dangerous than ever,” a Baptist church-state specialist told a Jewish women’s organization in New York January 24.

The movement has raised money, mastered electronic religion and talk radio, and taken over the Republican Party mechanisms in 18 states, said James Dunn, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee.

While acknowledging the movement’s strength in an address to Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist organization of America, Dunn questioned whether “Christian Right” is an appropriate label.

Elements of the movement are Christian or religious in aspiration, he said: “Who quarrels with the idea of fostering families, curbing crime, diminishing drug abuse, protecting children and expecting government to work?”

But tactics sometimes identified with the “Religious Right” are only Christian in the sense that the Crusades of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries were Christian, he said. “The current politics of personal destruction regrettably have historical precedent.”

In addition, many Christians are unwilling to attach the label “Christian” to some aspects of the movement’s agenda. Many strongly resent the “promotion of mean, merciless economic extremism as Christian,” he said.

It’s not the movement’s religiosity but its platform that is troublesome, Dunn said, citing Yale law professor Stephen Carter.

He criticized the movement’s support for government-sponsored religion in schools, tax dollars for private and parochial students, and slashing federal food programs by $60 billion, three times the cutbacks of the early Reagan years.

Equally troubling, Dunn said, it the movement’s use of “extreme distortion and outright lies” to advance its agenda.

“The voter guides, routinely distributed at churches, often without church consent, distort by drastic oversimplification the positions of politicians on the issues,” he said.

April 1995