The religious right resulted from white southern conservatives who were afraid of losing IRS tax-exempt status for their segregated "Christian" schools. So claimed in effect none less than Paul Weyrich, the right-wing political strategist generally credited with creating the Moral Majority and the religious right.
Balmer chronicles Weyrich's statements that include such gems as "I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post-Roe v. Wade, and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world."
Weyrich also said that "What caused the movement to surface, was the federal government's moves against Christian schools" which "enraged the Christian community." "It was not the other things." Weyrich said that "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
That's right. It wasn't the so-called taking prayer out of school. It certainly wasn't abortion. In fact, in 1971, the year before the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, Southern Baptists passed a resolution in St. Louis calling: "upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." Yes, you read it right. Southern Baptists passed a pro-abortion resolution. That was back before the fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979.
After Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote that: "Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decisions."
Even a former president of the SBC and pastor of the First Baptist church in Dallas wrote that: "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, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."
Ed Dobson, an associate of Falwell and member of the Moral Majority, bluntly said that: "The Religious New Right did not start of a concern about abortion."
The religious right did arise out of a 1972 court decision, Green v. Connally, which ruled any segregated institution was not charitable and thus not tax exempt. When Jimmy Carter's administration decided to press the issue, the religious right was born. Despite Ronnie Reagan not being a regular church goer, the religious right joined forces with conservatives to defeat the evangelist Carter. Enough was enough. What abortion and school prayer hadn't been able to provoke, the fear of losing tax-exempt status for refusing to integrate was enough to spur the religious right to action.
But it has not been enough for the religious right to simply defend their "rights" to be segregated in their own schools. They have also decided that God wants them to take over the public schools. They are not to stay isolated from the world any longer. They are now to rule it.
Balmer shows how the current crop of Baptists are anything but Baptist in the traditional sense. Whereas the original Baptists were instrumental in ensuring separation of church and state, modern southern Baptists appear gung-ho for total integration of the state into the church. Unfortunately, modern Baptists, while claiming to be conservatives, haven't learned from real American conservatives like the one who said:
"By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars. Throughout our two hundred plus years, public policy debate has focused on political and economic issues, on which there can be compromise . . . The great decisions of government cannot be dictated by the concerns of religious factions. This was true in the days of Madison, and it is just as true today. We have succeeded for 205 years in keeping the affairs of state separate from the uncompromising idealism of religious groups and we mustn't stop now. To retreat from that separation would violate the principles of conservatism and the values upon which the framers built this democratic republic."
But don't count on any neo-conservatives quoting that gem from Barry Goldwater. Nor will they likely be quoting Randall Balmer's indispensable history of the religious right. The religious right will be too busy building monuments to the prophets killed by their forefathers and laying flowers on the graves of the godly men they destroyed like Martin Luther King. And while they opposed integration and civil rights every step of the way, the religious right now shamelessly claim to be the rightful heirs to the civil rights movement.
B. 1952, GA, USA. D. To Be Determined. Beloved husband, father, grandfather, lover, confidant and friend of many from bikers to Zen masters; American writer and speaker, known for his criticism of Mammon's unholy trinity of big business, big government and big religion; served the least of them professionally as psychologist and voluntarily as activist for decades; loved to shoot basketball, billiards and the bull; lived free, died game. (memorial sketch by davidhewsonart.com)
Just read your article on the Religious Right and racism. You seemed to enjoy writing the artile, too much, in fact. I hate to say it, but it struck me as a quickly written piece that was turbo-charged with sanctimony and self-righteousness. I hope I am wrong.
I do need to take issue with your thesis. It is far too simplistic to account for all the factors involved in the rise of religious conservatives in the USA in the 1970s.
Weyrich notwithstanding, Carl F.H. Henry, Billy Graham, and Francis Schaffer were far more a factor than what you site in your article. I am surprised you did not mention them, at least to discount them. Barry Hankins' book Uneasy in Babylon does a better job describing these influences. I am surprised your article does not reference him either.
(BTW, do you always agree with Weyrich? If not, why agree with his perspective now?)
A quite, introverted southerner, T.B. Maston, ethics professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (ca. 1922-1963), had a lot to do with Southern Baptist attitudes toward race, too. His vision, a just vision supportive of CRA (1964) and VRA (1965), manfested itself in Richard Land, Paige Patterson, and others. (Patterson, btw, grew up in a racially mixed home via adoption).
You argue in your article, however, that abortion, communism, secularism, sexual revolution, etc were never a factor in the revival of conservative Christianity the last 1/4 of the 20th century. While the advance of civil rights may have provoked some, the literature and memory of those now living does not support your thesis that race was the only factor and that other factors played no role.
BYW, have you been south lately? There is more integration, more black political power, and more black wealth in the south than any place in America. I do not know where you live, but if you live outside the south, you are in an area of the country that, in my judgment, is in denial about its race problems. That usually happens to people who spend more time condemning the south than examining themselves. Despite the race advances in the south, you are asking me to believe that southern evangelicals rose because of racism?
The Civil Rights Movement and Federal legislation were a positive and just development in the south. Your region of the country might want to try similar advances. They will do you good. They did us a world of good, even if your article does not acknowledge it.
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ldm12345 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Sunday, October 1, 2006 at 10:58:41 PM
I agree that the civil rights movement has been a good thing for the south, especially in that I am from the south (my French Protestants ancestors have been here a rather good while) and have been an activist for the last four decades and got to experience first hand the hospitality and brotherly love of conservative Christians who opposed integration but who now loudly proclaim themselves the heirs to Martin Luther King. But I am the one who is sanctimonious for saying that the folks who used to beat us and throw us in jail sound like a bunch of hypocrites blasting their trumpets in the street when they claim the legacy of the civil rights movement.
Religious activists were responsible in large part for the end to formal segregation. But those religious activists were not the people who went on to establish the religious right. The opposite is the case. People like Rev. Jerry Falwell who called MLK a communist are the ones who now proclaim themselves the heirs to the civil rights movement. So, yea, I guess you can say there was an anti-communist component in that conservative Christians thought that letting blacks vote was tantamount to communism. Then again, when the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1849, wasn't it in large part because they held the Bible sanctioned slavery and that abolitionists were prompting the federal goverment to interfere with state rights? Gee, that's the same argument the conservative Christians used to oppose integration. But now that integration is largely a fait accompli, it is time for conservatives to step forward and take credit for what they vigorously opposed.
Rev. Billy Graham might be a conservative but he certainly is no fan of the religious right. In response to the formation of the Moral Majority, considered to be the first modern religious right organization, Rev. Graham told Parade magazine in 1981 that he feared the marriage of fundamentalists and the hard right. Was he ever right.
While other issues certainly have influenced the religious right in modern years, Rev. Falwell, the Moral Majority and the modern religious right become institutionalized in reaction to Jimmy Carter trying to stop segregated Christian schools from being tax exempt. In my own personal experience as a Baptist southerner back when Christian schools were being formed, I never once heard any white southerner say they were sending their kids to an all white school because of communism or secular humanism. Not once. Everybody I ever knew that sent their kids back then to Christian schools did so because they didn't want their kids to attend schools with blacks. They might let in blacks now but back then they were willing to fight to keep their white kids away from blacks.
Finally, why are you trying to discredit my argument by attacking me as not being a southerner? Either you can prove my claims are inaccurate by the showing of facts, or you can resort to ad hominem attacks as you repeatedly did in your comment. Either way, it's going to take a lot to convince me that the modern religious right did not originate as the last stand of segregationists and that it is an attempt to take over the government which it views as its enemy.
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Richard Mathis (128 articles, 103 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 121 comments)
on Monday, October 2, 2006 at 9:01:30 AM
