ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to gauge the impact of the New Christian Right (NCR), to draw attention to features of the movement and its environment that limit its effectiveness, and finally to offer a tentative explanation of the exaggerated responses to the movement. The NCR has had little success on what J. H. Garvey calls its “offensive agenda”: the use of law to regulate people’s behavior. States are with increasing frequency repealing or refusing to enforce their laws against sodomy”. The presidential campaign of Pat Robertson, though pointless as an exercise in electoral politics, brought the NCR unprecedented exposure. Using the NCR as refutation of a caricatured “secularization theory” leads to an exaggeration of its influence and to neglect of the complex social and political forces that constrain it. If one begins with a view of modern social structures that pays appropriate attention to the “functional prerequisites” of culturally plural democracies, one sees a very different picture.
