Chapter 2: Views of Adolescent Sex and Parental Responsibility: Do Religiously Conservative Christians and Trump Voters Have a Distinctive View?

The 1970s saw a significant shift in how parents responded to their adolescents engaging in sexual behavior. Comprehensive sexual education began in earnest during this decade, and liberal and conservative parents reacted differently. As cultural issues like abortion, sex, and sexual education became powerful wedges between the two main political parties, white evangelical Protestants moved solidly into the Republican Party (Layman, 2001). This group grew as a coalition, driven in part by their opposition to the liberalism of President Jimmy Carter as well as the advent of televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority political movement. As a newly empowered voting bloc, white evangelicals turned out in massive numbers to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. Even though the Moral Majority as a political movement ended later in the 1980s, the strength of the Christian evangelical conservative vote remained steadfast. Indeed, it grew helping to elect Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, with over 80% of evangelicals voting for him (Haberman, 2018).