Evangelical sex-ed opposition fused anticommunism, gun rights, and segregationist anxieties

Evidence

When Hargis turned his attention to sex in the mid-1960s, he didn’t do so at the expense of his anticommunism. Like Graham, Hargis considered sexual morality critical to the nation’s defense against communism. Others soon joined his new crusade. With none-too-subtle pamphlets like Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? conservative Christian leaders sounded the alarm, and battles over sex ed soon broke out in nearly half of all school districts across the nation. Many of the citizens who waged this battle were the same ones who were fighting against gun control and unsettled by the prospects of interracial dating at desegregated schools. Organizations like the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan teamed up with Hargis. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 207

Categorization

• XREF: This directly parallels the reader’s prior work on moral panics — the overlapping constituencies suggest sex-ed battles were really about race and Cold War, echoing ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’. — connects to: Evangelicals’ turn against Carter was rooted in racial segregation defense, not abortion — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 138; The Religious Right’s religious-freedom framing masked its defense of segregation — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 112; The abortion myth obscures the segregationist origins of evangelical activism. — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 166 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the Klan and John Birch Society actually coordinate with evangelical pastors, and how much was rhetoric vs. organizational cooperation?