[They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical
record’s clear: It was segregation.] [[link removed]]

THE REAL ORIGINS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT  
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Randall Balmer
May 27, 2014
Politico
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_ They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical
record’s clear: It was segregation. _

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One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious
right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists,
emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme
Court’s 1973 _Roe v. Wade_ ruling legalizing abortion. The tale
goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically
quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by _Roe_ that they
resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In
his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher,
recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23,
1973, edition of the _Lynchburg News_: “I sat there staring at
the _Roe v. Wade_ story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more
fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering
why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he
decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- _Roe_ crusaders even went so far as to call
themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum
predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In
fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after _Roe_—that
evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul
Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a
rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why?
Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the
religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So
much for the new abolitionism.

***

TODAY, EVANGELICALS MAKE UP THE BACKBONE of the pro-life movement,
but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years
after _Roe_, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the
subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for
instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society
and _Christianity Today_, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism,
refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual
health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications
for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist
Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging
“Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the
possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear
evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence
of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical
health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal
values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after _Roe_, and
again in 1976.

When the _Roe_ decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the
Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First
Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous
fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always
felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate
from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said,
“and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for
the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Although a few evangelical voices, including _Christianity
Today_ magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming
response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular,
applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division
between church and state, between personal morality and state
regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human
equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion
decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of _Baptist Press_.

***

SO WHAT THEN WERE THE REAL ORIGINS OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT? It turns
out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court
ruling, but not _Roe v. Wade_.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt
status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from
being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been
founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public
schools set in motion by the _Brown v. Board of Education_ decision
of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white
students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771
to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

In _Green v. Kennedy_ (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury
at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the
government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that
year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to
enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in
the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil
Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination,
discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable”
educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to
tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no
longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of
Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now  _Green v.
Connally _(John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of
the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the
Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory
private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided
for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to
such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of
gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”

***

PAUL WEYRICH, THE LATE RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVE political activist and
co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white
evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If
he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority
will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich
believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were
unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle
are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote.
“If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest
dreams.”

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a
standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by
his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one
might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the
proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion.
“I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I
utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.

The _Green v. Connally_ ruling provided a necessary first step: It
captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the
IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage
parlor than a Christian school.”

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent
its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial
segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because
their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for,
of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them
how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject.
The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.

Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies,
Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio
station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In
1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted
blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation,
refused to admit  _unmarried_ African-Americans. The school also
stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who
were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial
dating, would be expelled.

The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the
school’s tax exemption.

For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue
since  _Green v. Connally_, Bob Jones University was the final
straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones
University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his
school “alerted the Christian school community about what could
happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical
institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all
involved.”

***

WEYRICH SAW THAT HE HAD THE BEGINNINGS of a conservative political
movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s
term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the
Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated
schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones
University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter
was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were
undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a
conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow
evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.

But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical
leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing
grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a
challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a
different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a
large scale.

By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were
beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following
the 1973  _Roe_ decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to
Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it
hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans
captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert
Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick
Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every
poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10
percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however,
pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church
parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark
lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.

In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty
University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it
became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step
toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between
Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a
letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized
the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for
celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that
opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’
Christian friends.”  _Roe v. Wade_ had been law for more than
five years.

Weyrich, Falwell and leaders of the emerging religious right enlisted
an unlikely ally in their quest to advance abortion as a political
issue: Francis A. Schaeffer—a goateed, knickers-wearing theologian
who was warning about the eclipse of Christian values and the advance
of something he called “secular humanism.” Schaeffer, considered
by many the intellectual godfather of the religious right, was not
known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided
that legalized abortion would lead inevitably to infanticide and
euthanasia, and he was eager to sound the alarm. Schaeffer teamed with
a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films
entitled  _Whatever Happened to the Human Race?_ In the early
months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop, targeting an evangelical audience,
toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of
abortion in graphic terms—most memorably with a scene of plastic
baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea. Schaeffer and Koop
argued that any society that countenanced abortion was captive to
“secular humanism” and therefore caught in a vortex of moral
decay.

Between Weyrich’s machinations and Schaeffer’s jeremiad,
evangelicals were slowly coming around on the abortion issue. At the
conclusion of the film tour in March 1979, Schaeffer reported that
Protestants, especially evangelicals, “have been so sluggish on this
issue of human life, and  _Whatever Happened to the Human Race?_ is
causing real waves, among church people and governmental people
too.”

By 1980, even though Carter had sought, both as governor of Georgia
and as president, to reduce the incidence of abortion, his refusal to
seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by politically
conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin. Never mind the fact
that his Republican opponent that year, Ronald Reagan, had signed into
law, as governor of California in 1967, the most liberal abortion bill
in the country. When Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals
at Reunion Arena in Dallas in August 1980, he excoriated the
“unconstitutional regulatory agenda” directed by the IRS
“against independent schools,” but he made no mention of abortion.
Nevertheless, leaders of the religious right hammered away at the
issue, persuading many evangelicals to make support for a
constitutional amendment outlawing abortion a litmus test for their
votes.

Carter lost the 1980 election for a variety of reasons, not merely the
opposition of the religious right. He faced a spirited challenge from
within his own party; Edward M. Kennedy’s failed quest for the
Democratic nomination undermined Carter’s support among liberals.
And because Election Day fell on the anniversary of the Iran Hostage
Crisis, the media played up the story, highlighting Carter’s
inability to secure the hostages’ freedom. The electorate, once
enamored of Carter’s evangelical probity, had tired of a sour
economy, chronic energy shortages and the Soviet Union’s renewed
imperial ambitions.

After the election results came in, Falwell, never shy to claim
credit, was fond of quoting a Harris poll that suggested Carter would
have won the popular vote by a margin of 1 percent had it not been for
the machinations of the religious right. “I knew that we would have
some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had
no idea that it would be this great.”

Given Carter’s political troubles, the defection of evangelicals may
or may not have been decisive. But it is certainly true that
evangelicals, having helped propel Carter to the White House four
years earlier, turned dramatically against him, their fellow
evangelical, during the course of his presidency. And the catalyst for
their political activism was not, as often claimed, opposition to
abortion. Although abortion had emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the
real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but
in the defense of racial segregation.

***

THE BOB JONES UNIVERSITY CASE MERITS A POSTSCRIPT. When the school’s
appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan
administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob
Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the
administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the
legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme
Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled
against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later
Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief
justice of the Supreme Court.

_RANDALL BALMER is a prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee.
 He holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the
oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth College. He earned the Ph.D.
from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American
Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before
coming to Dartmouth in 2012. He has been a visiting professor at
Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory universities and in the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting
professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008.  Dr. Balmer has
published widely in both scholarly journals and in the popular press
and has published more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The
Life of Jimmy Carter
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