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South Carolina: The Christian Right Wins One

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

James L. Guth
James L. Guth*
Affiliation:
Furman University
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Extract

Early in the 1994 campaign, South Carolina Democratic humorists quipped that only two skills were required to win a Republican gubernatorial nomination—speaking in tongues and handling snakes (Carney 1994). The reference, of course, was to the expanding role of conservative Protestants in the state's Republican Party. Unfortunately, Democratic strategists understood the dynamics of conservative Protestantism no better in South Carolina than elsewhere, and on November 8, the joke was on them.

David Beasley, a born-again Southern Baptist (but converted in an independent Fundamentalist church), received strong backing from Pentecostal and Charismatic activists and votes from conservative Protestants of all stripes, first winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination and then defeating a popular Democratic lieutenant governor for the state's top post. Beasley's success proves that identifying with a Christian Right movement organization is not an insuperable barrier to political success. His victory also brings into focus the broader role of conservative Protestants in South Carolina's continuing development into one of the nation's most Republican states.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 8 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1995

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Footnotes

1.

I wish to thank a number of people for their contributions to this essay. I have especially benefited from exchanges with former students active in the 1994 campaign and have often depended upon their observations. Robert Furr, Walter Whetsell, Dan Herrin, and Micahel Greer have been especially helpful. And no observer of South Carolina politics can ignore the outstanding reporting of Dan Hoover of the Greenville News and Lee Bandy of The State (Columbia, SC).

References

Baker, Tod A., Steed, Robert P., and Moreland, Laurence W. 1991. “Preachers and Politics: Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and the 1988 Presidential Nomination Campaign in South Carolina.” In The Bible and the Ballot Box: Religion and Politics in the 1988 Election, ed. Guth, James L. and Green, John C.. Boulder, CO: Westview.Google Scholar
Bursey, Brett. 1994. “David Beasley.” Point, October: 4–6, 19.Google Scholar
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Smith, Oran P. 1994. “Revisiting the Two Party Thesis: The Several Faces of South Carolina Fundamentalist Politics, 1976–1994.” Presented at the annual meeting of the South Carolina Political Science Association, Clemson, South Carolina.Google Scholar
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