Tax exemptions tied organized Christian resistance to IRS enforcement during desegregation

Evidence

Christian academies soon came to depend heavily on public support. In Falwell’s Virginia, for example, state-sponsored tuition grants allowed students to take public money to the school of their choice. As religious entities, moreover, the schools and the organizations running them benefited from significant tax exemptions. But in the late 1970s, following a string of court cases, the IRS began to threaten the tax-exempt status of religious groups running race-segregated schools. For conservative religious leaders, the previous decades had seemed like a long string of defeats. And now they had a chief bogeyman in the IRS, which was coming after their schools and their pocketbooks. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 250

Categorization

• SEED: The IRS as the original ‘bogeyman’ who unified conservative religious grievance could open an essay on how administrative enforcement, not courts, first mobilized the Christian right politically.
• XREF: connects to: The Religious Right began as reaction to IRS desegregation of Christian schools. — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 312; The IRS’s Bob Jones revocation supplied Weyrich’s racial organizing issue — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 112; The 1978 ‘insignificant number of minority students’ IRS rule was Weyrich’s rallying issue (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The Religious Right began as reaction to IRS desegregation of Christian schools. #corroborates (0.92) — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 312
• The IRS’s challenge to segregated schools, not abortion, birthed the Religious Right #corroborates (0.92) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 23
• The IRS’s Bob Jones revocation supplied Weyrich’s racial organizing issue #corroborates (0.90) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 112
• The 1978 ‘insignificant number of minority students’ IRS rule was Weyrich’s rallying issue #corroborates (0.90)
• Abortion failed for years to mobilize evangelicals before the IRS ruling #expands (0.85) — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith, 106