aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Abortion, race and the roots of the Religious Right

Randall Balmer, “an evangelical Christian whose understanding of the teachings of Jesus point him toward the left,” is a visiting professor at Yale University Divinity School and Dartmouth College and editor-at-large for Christianity Today. He’s also an Episcopal priest who has a new book out, God in the White House.

In an interview with Terry Gross last week on Fresh Air, he had a number of interesting things to say. For example, “if Lincoln were running for president today, chances are he would be dismissed, at least by a large section of the voters, as being insufficiently religious.”

Then there’s this on what might reasonably have been asked of George Bush as follow-up to his claim that Jesus was his favorite philosopher:

`Gee, Governor Bush, your favorite philosopher says that we should turn the other cheek, that his followers should love thine enemies. How is that going to affect your foreign policy in the event of, say, a foreign attack on the United States? Or, `Governor Bush, your favorite philosopher expressed concern for the tiniest sparrow. Will that sentiment find any resonance in your environmental policies?’

Alas, the liberal media didn’t think of that.

But the part of the interview I found most interesting was about the emergence of the Religious Right:

[W]hat I try to expose in the book and I think I document copiously is that the religious right did not--did not--coalesce as a political movement in direct response to the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973… In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is hardly a bastion of liberalism, had passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, and this was a resolution that was reaffirmed in 1974, again in 1976. It was not the abortion issue. What galvanized evangelicals as a political block, as a political movement, was instead the actions of the Internal Revenue Service to go after the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, because of its racially discriminatory policies, and that Carter was unfairly blamed for this by the architects of the religious right, and they used that against him and mobilized to defeat him four years later in 1980. [...]

Bob Jones University did not allow African-Americans to be enrolled at the school until 1991 and did not allow unmarried African-Americans as students until 1995. The lower court ruling that really became the catalyst for the rise of the religious right was a ruling called Green v. Connelly, issued in 1971, by the district court of the District of Columbia; and it upheld the Internal Revenue Service in its ruling that any organization that engages in racial segregation or discrimination is not, by definition, a charitable organization and as such has no claim to tax-exempt status. And as the IRS began applying that ruling and enforcing it in various places, including Bob Jones University, that is what galvanized evangelical leaders into a political movement that we know today as the religious right.

And abortion?

According to one of the architects of the religious right, who told me this directly, after they had organized on the issue of Bob Jones University and more broadly the issue of government interference in these schools, as they understood it, there was a conference call among these various evangelical leaders and the political consultants who were trying to organize them into a political movement, and several people mentioned several issues. Finally the voice on the end of one of the lines said, `How about abortion?’ And that’s how abortion was cobbled into the agenda of the religious right, late in the 1970s in preparation for the 1980 presidential election.