Politics has been called the art of the possible, which basically means that politics is all about compromise. Something is made possible because people are willing to compromise - without compromise, you either need a dictatorship that imposes things on everyone or you become an outsider to the political process. Unfortunately, it's difficult for religion to compromise.

In the April 1982 issue of Political Quarterly, Michael Johnson discusses how the Christian Right developed during the early 1980s, acquiring a willingness to engage in political compromise within the two-party system rather than remain a revolutionary outside movement:

The predominant style of American politics at the national level is one of brokerage or compromise among a variety of interests and constituencies. This is an incremental politics characterised by instrumental goals, and is clearly a style not suited to a fundamentalist insurgency. Indeed, in the Congress, this brokerage style has swallowed up many a political crusade, such as the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century.

In the electoral arena, brokerage among interests is common as well, and has been reinforced in recent years by campaign finance legislation, which to an extent imposes a common interest-group structure upon a wide range of institutional participants in campaigns. It is also still true that American campaigns are won and lost in the ideological middle. These factors create strong incentives for the NCR [New Christian Right] to act as an interest group. Fundamentalist insurgencies by definition cannot bargain and compromise; and if they cannot do that, they can accomplish little in Congress or in the bureaucracy.

The New Christian Right came onto the political scene with the “Moral Majority,” a hypothetical force that would remake American politics, culture, and society along a conservative, fundamentalist ideal. That failed — they had an influence and caused changes, but all the election victories failed to result in any fundamental shifts in the nature of politics, culture, or society.

The Christian Right has had to compromise in order to achieve even small parts of its agenda. Politicians understand that this is the way things works; religious zealots, however, do not accept this. Conservative politicians who compromise have been viciously attacked for not upholding a strict position. Zealots don’t simply want a small part of their agenda enacted, they want the whole thing. They don’t want just a piece of the pie or even just the pie itself, they want to control the entire table.

What will happen once it starts to dawn on them that this won’t happen in the context of America’s normal political process?

 

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