Up until the 1960s when you thought of Christian activists and protestors, certain images would come to mind. Volunteers in soup kitchens trying to help the homeless, marchers asking for civil rights and women’s suffrage, and if you went back even further those who demanded humane treatment for society’s outcasts. Before that they were the men and women who deeply desired an end to slavery. After the 1970s though that tune began to change with the rise of the Religious Right; politically motivated and politically participating Christians.
The Religious Right’s track record includes a number of less-than-stellar examples of Christian values. They enacted the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and strongly support anti-abortion legislation that’s come to be referred to as the “war on women.” The Religious Right has challenged evolution being taught in the classroom, and they’ve supported the Tea Party in various political ways. The group has even moved completely against civil rights, particularly those of homosexuals. How did the progressive Christian activists, who seemed to follow the socialist agenda of Jesus, make a complete 180 in the Religious Right movement to become Inquisitors wielding the Witches Hammer? The short answer is because the Religious Right did not, in fact, grow out of Christian values.
Author Randall Balmer places the origin of the modern Religious Right movement sqarely in the 1970s. The popular story that’s been told is that what shocked evangelicals out of their apolitcal stupors was the issue of abortion in the form of Roe v. Wade. The decision that allowed and to this day protects abortion as a legal, medical procedure was such a threat to the sanctity of life that moral Christians who would never have thought about getting involved got involved at great personal cost and expense to campaign against the killing of the unborn.
This story is still popularly told, and believed, today. It is however in direct conflict with statements made by churches and evangelicals of the time. Indeed even in places like Missouri there were churches that were pleased with the decision of Roe v. Wade and they felt that it could save the lives of mothers and help stop further suffering on the part of victims of rape and incest. There was some grumbling, no doubt about that point, but American Christians as a whole did no more than disagree and then shrug their shoulders about the issue. The general feeling seemed to be that if you felt an abortion was wrong then you shouldn’t get one, and generating more feeling about it than that wasn’t going very well politically.
So where did all of the fire and ferve of the Religious Right really begin? There had been small brush fires of argument over text books in some states, heated discussions about sex education in others, but technically it began with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. More specifically with the order that desegregation in schools was now government mandated. Initially this lead to many white parents sending their children to private schools, many of which were religious in nature, as a way of getting around the desegragation laws. So it was another court case that set the match to the gunpowder keg; Green v. Connally. Never heard of it? That’s all right. The case stated that, as far as the government was concerned, any institution that practiced segregation was not a charitable institution and therefore would not qualify for tax exempt status.
This meant that many Christian schools that depended on tax exempt status now had to make a choice. They could either agree to dispense with segregation and discrimination and continue to not pay taxes, or lose the status and pay the government what they would otherwise owe as a for-profit organization. One of the more notable institutions to suffer this decision was Bob Jones University, which was going to have its tax exempt status taken away because the school had rules that prevented interracial dating.
Among the evangelical community the case of Bob Jones university struck a chord. Paul Weyrich, a long time conservatve activist, saw this discontent as a way to mobilize evangelical Christians as political foot soldiers. Once a base had been built over what was seen as attacks against Christian universities the ground work was laid. The early founders of the Religious Right held meetings and added other issues to the agenda. Abortion, in a very ironic note, wasn’t added till more than a decade after Roe v. Wade and even then it was added with reluctance.
Thus we see the real origins of a political movement. It wasn’t the sanctity of life, prayer in school, gay marriage, abstinence only sex education or even abortion that gave birth to the Religious Right. Rather it was taxes, money and the discontent of a large group of people about a single issue that allowed all of these and many others to be brought to the forefront of political agendas.
“Evangelical: Religious Right Has Distorted the Faith,” by Linda Wertheimer at NPR
“With God on Our Side: Reflections on the Religious Right,” by William Chavanne at Religion Online
“Why Religious Right Watch?” by Anonymous at Religious Right Watch