Randall Balmer — Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right

108 published claims from this book.

• 1978 pro-life upsets convinced Weyrich abortion could mobilize evangelical voters
• A 300,000-pamphlet church-lot leafleting effort flipped Iowa’s Senate race
• A Black paper likened Reagan’s 1966 record to Wallace’s racism
• A leading Southern Baptist fundamentalist publicly supported Roe v. Wade in 1973
• A leading Southern Baptist fundamentalist welcomed the Roe decision as correct
• A tax law ruling on segregation, not Roe, catalyzed the Religious Right
• Abortion failed for years to mobilize evangelicals before the IRS ruling
• About 25,000 Iowa voters were swayed by abortion in the 1978 Senate race
• American evangelicalism was politically reformist long before it aligned with the right
• American evangelicalism’s core traits trace to three eighteenth-century religious streams
• An unknown ex-governor could win the presidency purely through sheer grinding effort.
• Antebellum evangelicals campaigned for causes the modern Religious Right opposes
• Antebellum evangelicals pursued education, prison reform, women’s rights, and even gun control
• Baptist leaders initially framed Roe as a victory for church-state separation
• Belief in Christ’s imminent return absolved evangelicals of duty to reform society
• Bob Jones University barred unmarried African Americans to prevent interracial dating
• Bryant herself linked the gay-rights fight to defending segregated religious schools
• Carter never stripped Bob Jones University of its tax exemption; Ford presided then.
• Carter won the presidency through sheer grinding campaigning, not early support
• Church-parking-lot leafleting on the final weekend flipped three 1978 Senate races
• Civil War casualties shattered evangelical postmillennial optimism
• Confronting the abortion myth could reorient the whole evangelical agenda
• Conservatives commandeered the once-diverse antiabortion movement
• Conservatives seized the antiabortion movement and turned it statist
• Days after Bloody Sunday Falwell denounced King as communist and refused civil rights involvement
• Early Moral Majority insiders confirm abortion was not its founding issue
• Evangelical abolitionism collapsed when the Civil War’s carnage discredited perfectionist optimism
• Evangelical conspiracy against Carter began well before his reelection campaign.
• Evangelical conversion is usually a datable, emotionally charged event
• Evangelical institutions built in the 1930s later powered their 1970s political reentry.
• Evangelical social concern in 1973 explicitly included women’s equality and anti-racism.
• Evangelicals abandoned social reform for individual conversion as proto-liberals embraced it
• Evangelicals built a self-contained subculture after ridicule at the Scopes trial
• Evangelicals conspired against Carter’s reelection secretly
• Evangelicals denied receiving federal money while quietly accepting tax exemption
• Evangelicals punished Carter for abortion while Reagan had signed the most liberal abortion bill
• Evangelicals traded collective social redemption for individual salvation as liberalism embraced the Social Gospel
• Evangelicals’ turn against Carter was rooted in racial segregation defense, not abortion
• Even Anita Bryant linked her gay-rights fight to the school and tax-exemption battle
• Expectation of Christ’s imminent return produced drab evangelical architecture
• Expecting Christ’s imminent return made evangelical architecture deliberately functionalist
• Falwell did not preach against abortion until five years after Roe
• Falwell opposed Brown and founded a segregated academy in 1967
• Few evangelical voices spoke against abortion through most of the 1970s
• Frontier camp-meeting revivals stamped the American South with an evangelical revivalist culture
• Fundamentalism originated as a specific early 20th-century American Protestant movement
• Institutions built for withdrawal later enabled evangelical political reentry
• Internal Religious Right correspondence celebrated abortion as an effective organizing issue
• IRS regulations topped evangelicals’ 1979 grievances against Carter while abortion went unmentioned
• Leading evangelicals initially endorsed Roe as a church-state separation victory
• Mainstream media treated Carter’s lust admission as scandalous though evangelicals found it unremarkable.
• Mid-century evangelicals boycotted voting as politics belonged to Satan
• Moral healing requires facing a community’s past sins directly
• Most evangelicals delegate their evangelism duty to paid professionals
• Nineteenth-century evangelicals adopted British premillennialism as a theology of social disengagement
• Northern evangelicals led abolition and common-school movements for poor and immigrant children
• Northern evangelicals of the era backed antislavery and immigrant public schooling
• Operatives treated the 1978 election as a test of abortion’s mobilizing power
• Politics, abortion, and school prayer failed for two decades to rouse evangelicals
• Premillennial belief made evangelicals refuse even to vote for decades.
• Pro-family leaders publicly defended an avowed white nationalist congressman.
• Progressive evangelicalism peaked in the mid-1970s with Carter’s election
• Proposed rallying issues for the Religious Right included gay rights before abortion
• Racial grievance politics produced the Religious Right’s later alliance with Trumpism
• Reagan later elevated the lone BJU-dissent vote to chief justice
• Reagan opened his 1980 campaign at the Mississippi Klan-murder site invoking states’ rights
• Reagan promoted the sole Bob Jones dissent, Rehnquist, to chief justice.
• Reagan used racially coded language that racists understood without spelling out
• Reagan’s 1980 appeal to evangelicals centered on school-tax-exemption segregation, not abortion
• Reagan’s attempt to restore the tax exemption was reversed by public outcry.
• Religious Right leaders forfeited their prophetic voice by abandoning social reform.
• Religious Right leaders reframed racism as religious freedom to mask self-interest
• Republican presidents revoked and restored BJU’s tax exemption, not Carter
• Single-issue abortion voting licenses support for otherwise anathema policies
• Some evangelicals sincerely oppose abortion regardless of their movement’s origins
• South Africa may have illegally funded a US Senate race against an anti-apartheid incumbent
• Tax exemption functions as a hidden public subsidy for churches
• Tax exemption is a public subsidy funded by other taxpayers
• The 1976 article cited as evangelical antiabortion genesis was primarily a general cultural-engagement call
• The 1978 ‘insignificant number of minority students’ IRS rule was Weyrich’s rallying issue
• The abortion myth obscures the segregationist origins of evangelical activism.
• The birther conspiracy launched Trump’s political viability.
• The IRS’s Bob Jones revocation supplied Weyrich’s racial organizing issue
• The IRS’s challenge to segregated schools, not abortion, birthed the Religious Right
• The KKK grand wizard offered Reagan electoral support after his states’ rights speech
• The political hard right exploits religion as a tool rather than honoring it
• The Religious Right adopted abortion only after racial segregation failed to rally voters
• The Religious Right began as a defense of segregated private Christian schools
• The Religious Right fabricated an origin myth linking its birth to Roe v. Wade
• The Religious Right includes more than fundamentalists
• The Religious Right needed a rallying issue besides racial segregation
• The Religious Right recruited theologian Schaeffer to lend intellectual cover to antiabortion politics
• The Religious Right strategists first favored gay rights over abortion as a mobilizing issue
• The Religious Right’s foundation is racial exclusion, not abortion opposition.
• The Religious Right’s founding narrative claims Roe v. Wade roused evangelicals from political passivity
• The Religious Right’s origin in segregation explains its embrace of Trump.
• The Religious Right’s origins lay in defending racial segregation, not opposing abortion
• The Religious Right’s religious-freedom framing masked its defense of segregation
• The Scopes humiliation drove evangelicals into a self-imposed cultural retreat.
• The Second Awakening drove determined evangelical mobilization toward equality despite imperfect methods
• The Second Great Awakening rivaled the Civil War in reshaping American history
• Three 1980 presidential candidates openly claimed evangelical Christian identity
• Trump’s 2016 evangelical support suggests racism never left the Religious Right’s core
• Unorganized evangelicals voted for Carter before the Religious Right existed
• Weyrich himself asserted abortion was irrelevant to the Religious Right’s rise
• Weyrich privately judged Reagan’s Dallas speech insufficient on core social issues
• White evangelical political positions contradict their own scriptural and reform heritage
• White flight emptied Holmes County public schools within two years of desegregation