Bad Faith
Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
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What really gave rise to the Religious Right?
There is a commonly accepted story about the rise of the Religious Right in the United States. It goes like this: with righteous fury, American evangelicals entered the political arena as a unified front to fight the legality of abortion after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
The problem is this story simply isn't true.
Bad Faith recounts how it was in fact the elimination of tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory Christian institutions, like Bob Jones University, that galvanized evangelicalism into a political force. Only later, when something more palatable was needed to cover for what was becoming an increasingly unpopular position following the civil rights era, was the moral crusade against abortion made the leading issue.
Through exhaustive research and trenchant historical analysis, Randall Balmer exposes the ingrained priorities of the Religious Right movement and uncovers the roots of coded evangelical watchwords like "religious freedom" and "family values"—helping to explain, in part, what this movement has become.
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Balmer (Solemn Reverence), a Dartmouth University religion professor, delivers a brisk and informative reassessment of "the alliance between white evangelicals and the far-right precincts of the Republican party." According to Balmer, the court case that galvanized Evangelical political action was not the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, but the 1971 decision in Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of religious institutions that discriminated on the basis of race. Evangelicals emerged as a political force in the 1970s after decades of retreat from secular society following the 1925 Scopes trial, according to Balmer, who details how opposition to state interference in "segregation academies" such as Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg Christian Academy and Bob Jones University (which had its tax-exempt status revoked in 1976) sparked the formation of the "religious right." Paul Weyrich and other political activists then "brilliantly shifted public perception of the movement away from racism toward a more high-minded defense of religious freedom," setting the stage for conservative Christians, further galvanized by the abortion issue and fears of "secular humanism," to turn against Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. Enriched with lucid discussions of legal issues and incisive sketches of political and religious leaders, this revisionist history is sure to spark debate.
