Here’s a quick trivia question to demonstrate that fact: Which Republican presidential candidate holds the record for receiving the highest percentage of the evangelical Protestant vote (at least as measured by National Election Survey data)? Was it Donald Trump? Ronald Reagan? George W. Bush?
Actually, it was Richard Nixon in 1972. According to NES data tabulated by political scientist Lyman Kellstedt and his cohorts, Nixon received 84 percent of the evangelical Protestant vote in 1972. Reagan received 74 percent in 1984, Bush received 78 percent in 2004, and Trump received 81 percent in 2016.
So, it appears that Falwell and the Moral Majority were never needed at all to get white evangelicals to start voting Republican. Nixon had already done that. And before that, according to the NES data, a majority of evangelical Protestants in the nation had supported Eisenhower. Whatever Falwell did – and whatever causes mobilized him – his actions were not the main reason why evangelicals started voting Republican.
How then should we tell the story of evangelical Republican partisanship? When did it begin, and what were its sources? As surprising as it may seem, the answer – at least for northern evangelical institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today magazine – may begin with developments that occurred as early as the 1850s, when the Republican Party formed as the party of Protestant moralism. That’s because for a place like Wheaton College, there never was a time when it wasn’t a bastion of Republican support; Republican voting could be traced back to the college’s founding in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Republican Party was the party of Protestant moral campaigns.
The Deep Republican Roots of Northern Evangelicalism
The Republican Party attracted a lot of northern evangelical support when it initially formed, because many evangelicals whose moral fervor had been aroused in the Second Great Awakening were attracted to the party’s opposition to the expansion of slavery. This was true of the evangelicals who started Oberlin College, for instance, as well as some of those at northern Baptist colleges such as Brown. Of course, it was not true of southern evangelicals, nor was it true of some northern working-class evangelicals who remained Democrats. But nevertheless, while both the Democratic and Republican parties had significant evangelical constituencies in the mid-nineteenth century, it was the Republican Party that established itself as the party of Protestant morality. In addition to taking a stand against slavery, the Republican Party also made a campaign against Mormon polygamy a key part of its nineteenth-century mission. The Republican Party was also more supportive of legislation against alcohol and other alleged moral vices than the states-rights, moderately libertarian Democratic Party was at the time.