| | A religious census of the US today would show one-third of adults as Christian evangelicals, many of them adherents of an extreme right wing form of Christianity. Since the mid-1960s evangelicals grew by some 50% while the mainline churches lost about 20% of their active membership. From 1970, Hal Lindsay's The late great planet Earth, a classic text of millennial extreme-right religion, sold over 30 million copies and topped the non-fiction charts for a decade. The world view of Ronald Reagan and Oliver North, Paul Gifford suggests, was informed by this movement's religious ideas, myths and political explanations which became powerful weapons in the ideology of the American New Right. |
