Free Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective by Lawrence Kaplan Page B

remembering that religious values compete with more mundane interests in the decision making of conservative Protestants. While it is certainly the case that conservative Protestants differ from their more liberal brethren in giving a higher priority to "biblical" positions, their interpretation of biblical injunctions and their willingness to act on such interpretations differ. In the period leading up to the Civil War, people with the same theology and ecclesiology developed fundamentally different attitudes toward the slavery issue, and conservative denominations divided into northern and southern branches. There may be no single secular issue likely to produce such an emotive or clear division within contemporary conservative Protestantism, but regional and status differences remain fissures which prevent conservative Protestants from thinking and acting as a coherent body. I have already mentioned the division on economic liberalism between what, for brevity, I will call North and South. Northern conservative Protestants are much more comfortable with doctrines of laissez-faire than are southerners, who profit considerably from government spending.
Another division concerns race. Although most conservative Prot-

 

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estants are less likely than liberals to be supporters of racial integration, they are divided between those who are willing to support segregationist independent schools and social action to maintain residential segregation, and those who openly reject segregationist views and actions.
Finally, there is the neglected but important issue of priorities. The large number of surveys mentioned in this work (and many others) show that religion is important as a source of political images and decisions. We know that religion matters; what is more difficult to know is its place in the hierarchy of concerns on which any person draws to make a political decision. It is likely that some of the differences in the conclusions of surveys which have tried to measure the importance of theology or denominational affiliation are a result of individuals reordering their priorities. Some reordering may be caused by the questions asked in surveys. The very fact of being asked about one thing rather than another may produce a temporary reassessment of concerns. But it also seems likely that issues vary in salience depending on what is going on in the immediate world of the respondent. We can imagine conservative Protestants arranged on an axis of orthodoxy and suppose that those at the orthodox end consistently give a higher priority to their religious beliefs and values than do those at the liberal end. But at any point on the axis, the relative importance of religiously rooted values will vary with the events that impinge on their lives. While we may assume that values have a certain enduring quality, it also seems clear that their salience varies in response to ''agenda-setting" events in the world. If abortion is a topical issue, something which is frequently addressed and debated in the media and which features in elections, it will remain high on the list of priorities for those people who have strong views on the subject. When abortion slides down the public agenda, it will also seem less pressing for many of those who have strong views, not because their views have changed but because there is pressure and opportunity to address other issues.
Clearly a section of enthusiasts will strive to keep public attention focused on their concerns, but they have to compete for attention with enthusiasts for other causes. Insofar as any particular group of moral entrepreneurs has only a limited ability to set political agen-

 

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das, there will be long periods when the issues around which conservative Protestants can unite are not very high on the lists of priorities even of conservative Protestants. To take an example from early 1987, the scandal over the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the