Cif belief

Marginalised, but angry

The religious right may be splintered and adrift but its most radical elements could become more dangerous than ever
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The question: Will Obama be good for religion?

These are dark days for America's religious right. During the Bush administration, Christian conservatives formed the most powerful social movement in the United States. Now they're marginalised and dejected.

Though they succeeded in overturning gay marriage in California, their victory there was a kind of last electoral hurrah. Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based theocon behemoth that's big enough to have its own zip code, pumped so much money into the effort that, in its aftermath, the group had to lay off nearly a fifth of its workforce. In 2004, preachers whipped vast crowds into ecstasies of outrage by railing against a homosexual menace said to be corrupting the nation with sexual sin and leaving it weakened and vulnerable to terrorism. But with tolerance increasing even as the wrecked economy gives voters more concrete things to worry about, anti-gay demagoguery is now paying diminishing returns.

In one way, Obama's invitation to the fundamentalist preacher Rick Warren to give the opening prayer at his inauguration signalled that the religious right is still relevant. Yet Warren's behavior during the ensuing controversy shows that he realises where mainstream opinion is heading. Pastor of Southern California's Saddleback megachurch, Warren is a canny impresario who is desperate for popular attention and acclaim, and he clearly realised that the national conversation over his long-standing homophobia was harming his reputation. Thus, besides going on and on about all his gay friends, he scrubbed language from his church's website which had said that someone "unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted at [sic] a member at Saddleback." It's telling that even a preacher who has worked to strip gay people of their rights, and who has compared gay sex to incest and peadophilia, fears being seen as intolerant. After all, an older generation of fame-loving clerics wore their homophobia like a badge of honour.

Yet if the religious right is splintered and adrift, its most radical elements could become more dangerous than ever. During the election, some Republicans argued that, should Obama become president, we would see renewed terrorist attacks on the United States. They might have been right, though not in the sense they intended. The 1990s saw a deadly series of rightwing domestic terrorist assaults – the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombing of the 1996 Olympics, the murders of several gynaecologists who performed abortions, and many bombings, arson and acid attacks on women's health clinics. As the LA Times reported last year, such violence fell off precipitously during the Bush presidency, for a number of reasons.

"Many observers attribute [the decline] to Sept. 11, for diverting the rage of disaffected Americans away from the US government and toward foreigners, and for fueling the subsequent Patriot Act-driven crackdown," wrote the Times. "Others say the movement began to crumble earlier, when the Y2K disaster, a favourite prediction of conspiracy theorists, failed to materialise." A third factor, not considered by the paper, was that as the right saw its agenda progress legislatively, some of the frustrated rage that led extremists to defy the law was dissipated. Shut out once again, it's not unlikely that a few on the fringe will once again turn to violence. Indeed, the very economic angst that has rendered the religious right broadly irrelevant may help radicalise a tiny minority of alienated and humiliated people casting about for someone to blame. In the last few months, I've spoken to several people who work at health clinics that perform abortions, and they've told me they're beefing up their security to prepare for that possibility.

For liberals, one of the terrifying things about the Bush years was watching people and ideas that had once occupied a weird reactionary underground suddenly move into the centre of American life. Now, those who believe that evolution is a sinister hoax, or that the second coming is imminent and should perhaps be helped along, or that gay people are a threat to the republic and a menace to children, or that legal abortion is a reprise of the Holocaust, will no longer be able to exercise much political power. The most zealous will find another way to be heard.

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