How a Santa Barbara Classroom Traced the Roots of White Christian Nationalism

UC Santa Barbara in the early 1980s was a campus still marked by the aftershocks of the 1960s and ’70s. Students surfed, protested, and moved through a setting that looked calm on the surface, even as memories of antiwar demonstrations, clashes with police, and the 1970 burning of a Bank of America branch remained part of campus lore. By the time a devoutly religious freshman from Missouri arrived there in 1982, the essay recalls, the political fire of the previous decade had faded but the larger conflict between California counterculture and Reagan-era conservatism was only beginning to sharpen.

That tension matters because it forms the backdrop for one of the most important political shifts of the period: the rise of the New Religious Right. Just a few miles from campus, Ronald Reagan’s western White House in the Santa Ynez Mountains symbolized the broader conservative turn that followed years of national crisis, from Vietnam and Watergate to inflation and a stalled Cold War. The material describes a moment when the left was exhausted and the right was furious, creating the conditions for a counterrevolution that would remake American politics.

For the student narrator, the significance of that shift did not become clear right away. At first, UCSB was mostly about school, scholarship, and playing on the top-ranked Gaucho volleyball team. But the intellectual climate changed during junior year, when a religious studies professor named Walter Capps began pulling the narrator deeper into the political meaning of religion. Capps, a seminarian and Yale-trained scholar, taught religion and politics as a subject shaped by competing ideologies, and he encouraged students to test arguments from every angle rather than settle into one orthodoxy.

Capps’s classes also became known for the guests he brought into the room. One of his most visible offerings, a course on the Vietnam War’s impact on American religion and culture, drew attention well beyond the university. Another, Religion and Politics in America Today, had already gained a reputation after debuting as a team-taught seminar with former presidential candidate George McGovern and featuring speakers drawn from across the political spectrum, including Eugene McCarthy, Jerry Brown, Paul Weyrich, Cal Thomas, and Robert Billings. In 1985, the course examined what Capps called “the New Religious Right,” then rapidly reshaping the nation’s political landscape.

At the center of that story stood Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist who founded the Moral Majority and became one of the movement’s defining figures. The essay describes Falwell as a gifted communicator and, in today’s terms, a full-throated Christian nationalist. His early preaching in the 1950s had been tied to segregation and resistance to civil rights. By 1976, through the Moral Majority’s fifty-state “I Love America Tour,” he had repackaged that politics into a more socially acceptable form. The movement’s language of religious liberty, the material says, helped defend racially segregated religious schools while shielding older forms of exclusion from direct scrutiny.

Falwell’s broader message was a campaign against what he saw as America’s moral decline: abortion, feminism, sexual permissiveness, homosexuality, liberal media, court rulings on school prayer, and a foreign policy he believed was too accommodating to communism. He framed his project as a defense of biblical authority and traditional values, setting it in direct tension with Enlightenment ideals such as individual rights, rational inquiry, and free thought. He also attacked ecumenical efforts among Christians, seeing them not as cooperation but as a threat to doctrine and cultural order.

The larger point of the account is that the rise of white Christian nationalism was not an abstract future development; it was already visible in the political and religious life of the 1980s, and scholars like Capps were treating it as a serious force in American public life. The movement did not simply emerge from one election cycle or one media personality. It developed in response to a society unsettled by war, protest, scandal, and social change, and it found momentum in the same years that campuses like UCSB were still living among the debris of the counterculture. The material suggests that this history still matters because the arguments forged then—over race, religion, sex, authority, and the meaning of America—continue to shape politics now.