Yeah, this is the answer right here. There was always a latent effect on politics - i.e. since American is so heavily Protestant, Kennedy getting elected as a Catholic was kind of a big deal, but that was more of a passive preference and not so blatantly driven by party strategy. And that effects all countries, whether you want to believe it or not - America's not alone here by any means.
But, I remember when Reagan and the 'Moral Majority' (which was neither moral, nor the majority) kicked off and turbocharged the whole thing, and that's when fundamentalists started pushing congregations on their voting patterns in an organized way. It was like someone flipped a switch and the message was coordinated across the country.
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Further reading:
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
And a historical aside - the American right these days seems very much driven by religion and guns but, as the above shows, it wasn’t always so with the former and it also wasn’t with the latter:
karabiener@lemmy.world 1 year ago
i found this in a different article
But looking for an EXACT DATE (if we are talking about exponential increase in modern time) we find it to be Feb 1st 1953 as it is shown here: history.com/…/eisenhower-billy-graham-religion-in…
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
If you are looking for an exact date it’s either politicians and religious leaders have been using each other for their own ends since the dawn of civilisation or, for this modern era of American politics, it is the Reagan/Moral Majority era that saw this situation go up a notch.
karabiener@lemmy.world 1 year ago
thanks will read into it.
karabiener@lemmy.world 1 year ago
can you paste the newyork times article here, it’s paywalled.
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
If you get paywalled paste the URL into archive.is, like this.
Mereo@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Here it is: archive.today/…/religion-politics-evangelicals.ht…