アメリカにおける宗教右派の政治化 : 過去と現在

概要

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American politics and society today cannot be fully understood without referring to the religio-political force known as the Religious Right. This religio-political movement organizes the mobilization of white conservative evangelical Christians, especially Christian Fundamentalists, who actively involve themselves in politics in order to protect and preserve the traditional values of American Protestantism. This paper aims to describe the historical process by which the Religious Right became involved in politics, the way in which its members translated their religious values into a political agenda, and finally the current situation which is the result of this process. In its historical analysis of the political formation of the Religious Right, the paper utilizes the last two of the Clyde Wilcox's four-period-division of the movement, which can be outlined as follows: the first period, in which fundamentalist groups criticized evolutionism and propagated creationism in the 1920s; the second, in which fundamentalist groups developed the anti-communist movement in the 1950s; the third, when fundamentalist groups, led by the Moral Majority, mobilized conservative evangelicals to vote for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s; and the fourth, which is characterized by the activities of the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and the Home-schooling Legal Defense Association, among others, in the 1990s.