Dartmouth Professor Randall Balmer argues convincingly that the origin of the religious right as a political force stemmed from opposition to school desegregation rather than opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision. I don’t think it is well known that evangelicals were largely silent about the Roe ruling at the time it was issued, nor that some of the most influential evangelical leaders at the time were supportive of the ruling.
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.
It was actually a ruling by the DC District Court upholding the Internal Revenue Service’s decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax exemption that convinced evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich to rally the religious right against President Jimmy Carter’s reelection. They could hardly make Bob Jones’ anti-miscegenation their rallying call, however, so the modern-day Republican Party was founded on an evangelical “awakening” on what had formerly been considered an issue only for “papists.”
Today, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen is the party of Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich. The party of Lincoln is now the party of voter ID laws.
Exactly. But in order to do that the segregationists had to take over the Southern Baptist Convention executive offices, which had been slowly pushing a line of reconciliation between the races during the 1970s, which has produce a few desegregated congregations (such as Oakhurst Baptist, Decatur GA) that were members of multiple Baptist conventions. The coup of the Southern Baptist Convention carried out by First Baptist-Atlanta and First Baptist-Dallas, along with Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist-Lynchburg.
The second thing that had to be done was make an alliance with conservative back-to-Latin-mass and anti-abortion Catholics. And that’s what the strategy of the Moral Majority and the march on Washington was about.
The third thing that had to happen was the turning of the Southern Baptist Convention to radical fundamentalism, which split the congregation during the 1980s. And caused the loss of several high-profile Baptist-affiliated institutions of higher education. Furman Univesity in SC, Wake Forest University in NC and others severed their ties (and their financial support) from the Southern Baptist Convention and affiliated state and local conventions rather than have academic policy dictated by radical fundamentalist and segregationists.
After 35 years, these folks have squeezed everyone else out of the Republican Party. The issue was school segregation because Bob Jones was a teacher college and technical resource for segregation academies and later the home schooling movement.
And the national media pretended that it was about morality instead of re-establishment of institutional racism (did they not notice Ronald Reagan opened his campaing in Philadelphia MS?)
The analysis of this is usually too glib. The fact is that major financial resources were mobilized to split the largest Protestant denomination in America at the time and for the express purpose of capturing political power on the sly.
There’s a lot to this story that has gone untold, or un-investigated, or that people simply don’t know about.
I am always amazed at the level of accurate detail you possess concerning the events in the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1970’s, and the rise of the Moral Majority. I was a Southern Baptist at the time, and those events are what drove me from the Christian faith.
And the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion has become the bulwark of minorities.
“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” except in politics.
True, although the sequencing is important. The Democratic party first made itself an unwelcoming place for segregationists (the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the party’s platform at the 1948 convention is one landmark event; the passage of the 1964 civil rights act is another; the refusal to seat segregated state delegations at the 1968 convention is another), then the segregationists were welcomed into the Republican party.
While the church of rum and Romanism makes up the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court, a large part of the reactionary leadership of the House of Representatives (Boehner, Ryan, who else?), and the bulwark of racist crackers pretending all they care about is religious freedom.
You may be misreading my post. I meant to emphasize how both parties have flipped roles. I guess the Democratic Party is still the party of Rum (and Pot) but the (R)’s are the Party of Ropmanism (anti-abortion religious politics) and Rebellion (Confederates).
No, sorry for the irrelevance. I was kind of lurching over to Marie’s subject above of what’s happened to the conservative side of the Roman Catholic church (I’m sure priests still drink rum or whatever they can even if they turn Republican).
Might be a mistake to view Falwell’s motivation as synonymous with that of the evangelical religious community. The latter was church and not politics centered for most of the 20th century. More individual evangelicals may have voted in 1976 than previously because Carter was an evangelical.
The Catholic rightwing (anti-communist and anti-Semitic) grew after WWII with spokespersons like Cardinal Spellman, Joe McCarthy, and Phyllis Shlafly and support for the GOP, opposition to oral contraceptives and Roe v. Wade increased their politicization. This was boosted with the 1976 Hyde Amendment —
Liberalized sexual mores had long been a surefire political winner for “conservatives” to run against and motivate greater voter participation. One trick Falwell pulled off was to get it preached from the pulpit without risk of losing the religious tax exemption. Another was to make evangelicals forget their preexisting anti-Papal position. (And in 2012 they forgot that Mormons didn’t meet their standards for Christians.)
there’s really nothing much to do with white progressives, other than to mock them for pretending like this is new knowledge.
i’m shocked there’s gambling in this establishment!
It was freedom of religion then too! Just like with IUD’s and wedding cakes.
President Johnson made the modern GOP when he gave them the South through the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965, a solid block that had been Democratic for a century since Reconstruction. Yet it was the implementation of Brown v Board of Education that became the impetus of “White Flight” into private schools. Those private schools where overwhelmingly “Christian”.
Ronald Reagan took advantage in 1980 of the sentiments in the South during his speech at the Neshoba County Fair, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair_%22states%27_rights%22_speech, making it a States Rights issue. States Right has been the battle cry of the South since the days of Strom Thurman and the Dixiecrats right up to George Wallace.
Despite all the consequences we have suffered from the GOP in the hands of Reagan, the Bushes and a Tea Party mentality that grew out of the alignment of the “Bible Belt” South with the GOP, what the Supreme Court, Presidents Kennedy, Carter, Clinton and Obama have done has been worth it.
Who knows how long it will take history to progress for both women and minorities. Yet as King said “the arc of the Universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”