What's in a Name?

Sarah Pulliam of Christianity Today writes about the misuse of the phrase “religious right”. What we know today as the ‘religious right’ apparently doesn’t want to be called the ‘religious right’ anymore by the media. We generally define this term to mean evangelical Christians with very conservative views on moral issues such as abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research and so forth.
The term was originally coined by Jerry Falwell in referring to his group, the Moral Majority. The term started taking on more negative connotations where people associated it with “hard-edge politics and intolerance”. The term also began to be used next to other labels such as “American Taliban” and “Christian fascists”. The media has the ability to characterize a debate and define players before they even get a chance to define themselves in the public’s eye. The language of a debate can sometimes pull out the winners and losers before the actual debate has run its course. Religious fundamentals are very upset with what they call the “misuse” of the phrase “religious right”. It has a developed a life of its own with negative connotations. Author Joel Carpenter notes, “These terms have a life of their own. There’s very little you can do to change them”. Part of the reason is that there are these extreme conservatives out there who are sometimes more outspoken than the more reasonable religious conservatives giving a bad name to the whole lot.
Another issue with the debate is that there is no real phrase we can replace “religious right” with. Focus on the Family’s Gary Schneeberger says the media should start using “socially conservative evangelicals”, but is this really going to change anything. It’s the same people who are saying they don’t want to be associated with the term “religious right” that now want to be called “socially conservative evangelicals”. The media will have to be tiptoeing everywhere in the land of political correctness for this new label not to become corrupted like all the other labels. It won’t be long before “socially conservative evangelical” will become the new “American Taliban” and they’ll have to come up with something else even more ridiculous like “time-honored religious sympathetics”.
Perhaps there is a deeper problem with the way the media portray this sector in general or a problem with the way religious conservatives are framing their arguments. There’s a reason why the “religious right” is conservative. They are traditionalists. As times change, conservative values have more and more rival opinions. It can be easier to adapt to a new situation than to keep an old tradition in the face of new challenges to the belief.