#49: The True Origins of The Religious Right

#49: The True Origins of the Religious Right

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

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JESSE EUBANKS: Back in November of 1990, Dr. Randall Balmer received a strange invitation in the mail. 

RANDALL BALMER: I was invited to a gathering in Washington, D.C. And, uh, to be honest, I almost didn’t go because, uh, you know, I was teaching, I had a young family and was trying to juggle all sorts of responsibilities. But the last minute I decided, “Well, I’ll go to this thing.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So Dr. Balmer finds himself in a hotel conference room in Washington, D.C. There’s about 30 other men there, but here’s why the invitation was strange. Dr. Balmer is a professor of religion. Currently, he’s a professor at Dartmouth College. At the time, he was at Columbia University. And he’s a history junkie. He’s written dozens of books on America and evangelicalism. But as he looks around this conference room, he realizes he is very out of place. 

RANDALL BALMER: And, uh, who’s there? Well, I’ll give you a name, a sense of, of the roster – uh, Richard Viguerie, who is the conservative direct mail mogul; Ed Dobson, who had been one of Jerry Falwell’s, uh, lieutenants at Moral Majority; Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, which was Pat Robertson’s, uh, religious right group; Richard Land from the Southern Baptist Convention; Carl F.H. Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today magazine; and most importantly, Paul Weyrich.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so if you’re not familiar with some of those names, these were guys who were known to be part of, or at least supportive of, the political movement known as “the religious right.” In fact, that last name he mentioned – Paul Weyrich – he’s credited as the founding father of the religious right. And the meeting – it was actually about politics.

RANDALL BALMER: And it turns out that this is a gathering to observe or to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency. Well, these are not my people, but, uh, nevertheless here I was in that group in this meeting. 

JESSE EUBANKS: In fact, Dr. Balmer told me that to this day he isn’t exactly sure why he was invited to this meeting. He had not been involved with Reagan’s presidential campaign or with the religious right, but the meeting ended up being a turning point for him in his life and his work. And that turning point happened when Paul Weyrich got up to speak. 

RANDALL BALMER: But in the first session, Paul Weyrich – again, the architect of the religious right – made this impassioned, uh, speech. He said, “Let’s remember that this movement, the religious right, did not get going in response to abortion to oppose the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.” Uh, not at all, he said. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well that caught Dr. Balmer’s attention, and here’s why. It was a widely known narrative that the religious right movement got its start from rallying against abortion. So this is an excerpt from Oxford Research Encyclopedia. Quote, “In the popular imagination, no single legal ruling is more commonly associated with the development of the religious right than the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade.” But now, here was Paul Weyrich at this meeting in Washington, D.C. saying that wasn’t even true.

RANDALL BALMER: The session concluded, and uh, there was a break between that session and the next session. And I went to Wyrick, and I said, “I wanna make sure I understood you correctly. Abortion had nothing to do with the genesis of this movement.” And again, he was emphatic about it. He goes, “Absolutely not.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: So if it wasn’t abortion that initially rallied the religious right together, what was it? And Dr. Balmer decided he was going to find out. 

RANDALL BALMER: And so that meeting, that gathering, in November of 1990 in Washington D.C. is what kind of got me started on what turned out to be a decades-long quest trying to understand the true origins of the religious right.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. Today’s episode – “The True Origins of the Religious Right.” This episode is in partnership with the show Black History for White People, so one of their hosts, Gerin St. Claire, is here with me today. Hey, Gerin. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Hey, Jesse. Thanks for having me.

JESSE EUBANKS: I’m glad to have you. Okay, so for folks who aren’t familiar with your show, can you just give us a brief synopsis of what you do? 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah. At Black History for White People, our goal is to educate, resource, and encourage white people about black history, and we believe that there are racial disparities throughout our country that still affect us today and that they teach us and train us to have this mentality that’s self-protective and tries to seek and maintain our own advantage rather than loving others. And so we’re just trying to change that mentality and teach white people to value and know black history and through that to love others. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And as we go along today, I think it’s gonna become clear why we’ve partnered with you all on this topic as we talk about evangelical history and politics and the crazy story that ultimately formed the foundation for the religious right. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: So, I guess let’s start here. Before we go any further, I wanna make sure that we’re all on the same page using the term “the religious right.” So, Gerin, how would you define “the religious right”?

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: The first thing that comes to mind is my own upbringing. My family was evangelical. We attended church every week. We watched Fox News whenever we were watching the television. We listened to Focus on the Family and Rush Limbaugh when we drove anywhere. We were Republicans and Christians, and the two kind of blurred together. I think the danger, at least for me, was that I didn’t really know which of my views were coming from Christianity and which ones were coming from the conservative culture that I was a part of.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like the line between religion and politics, you know, it gets kind of blurry, but at its heart, like, the religious right is a political movement with three goals – to get conservative Protestants to participate in the political process, to bring them into the Republican party, and to elect social conservatives in public office. So what do you think that looks like today? 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So there are individuals and there are groups within the religious right. And so on the individual side, you have white, middle-class evangelicals who vote solely based on pro-life issues and then you have spokespeople like Franklin Graham. 

FRANKLIN GRAHAM CLIP: And I think it’s important that I speak out on some issues. People will criticize me. It’s okay. I don’t care. Um, but I want people to think. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And then on the organization side, you have things like Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council. 

FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL CLIP: Stand for faith. Stand for family. Stand for freedom. Stand with us at FRC. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: At its heart, the religious right is a political movement that seeks to enact their understanding of a biblically conservative worldview into policy. So it’s a movement that uses politics to enact their notions of what a Christian social ethic should look like. Sadly though, I think it’s gone off the rails in recent years, but the definition of it is not necessarily the radical display we see today. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think that’s a really helpful thing to remember, and, you know, there are different names for it. Some call it “the Christian right.” Some people call it “the new right.” But for this episode, we’re gonna use what seems to be the most popular term, “the religious right.” And this group, this movement – it started to form around the 1970s, but here’s the thing. This tension that Christians walk between politics and power and faith – that is not something new for us.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ ministry has been leading up to him coming into Jerusalem, and in chapter 21, he makes his triumphal entry. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, this is the famous scene with him writing on a donkey and people laying down palm branches and shouting, “Hosanna.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it’s a big moment. But it’s also a very politically charged scene because the popular thought was that the Messiah was going to come and overthrow Rome and now Jesus – he’s in Jerusalem, the seat of power, and all eyes are on him to see what is he going to do. And verse 15 says, “When the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the son of David,’ they were indignant.” And here’s why. The chief priests at the time were part of a larger group known as the Sadducees, and the Sadducees were a religious political group. They were in power at the temple because they had bought their way there and they had made savvy arrangements with King Herod. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So they were both religious and political figures, but when this long-awaited Messiah actually came and was standing right before them, they missed him because their political lens was dominant over their religious one. So they were indignant because Jesus was a threat to Rome and to their own political power. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Exactly. So I’ve been really enjoying listening to The BEMA Discipleship Podcast recently. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: That’s a great podcast. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and they like do this whole dive into the history of the Sadducees and the chief priests, and truly like they were a group of corrupt, power-hungry men. I mean, they were completely distorting God’s vision for his people. The BEMA Podcast nicknames them “the corrupt Jewish mafia.” We’ll link their episode and the resources so that you can go listen to it, but here’s what I want you to know. Part of what I like about their podcast is that they dive into history for the purpose of self-examination. So it’s not simply to say like, “Oh, look at these awful chief priests. They were so terrible. Let’s all point our fingers at them.” But they do to say, “What can we learn from this? What can we learn about ourselves or about our place in history?”

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, I love that. History doesn’t stay neatly in the past, both because it says something about human nature and about then how we are – it’s like a warning to us – but also we inherit the story itself. It sets the stage for and shapes our worldview as well as the world itself, and you can’t know how that lens that you’ve inherited is distorted if you’re unwilling to examine it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So as we dive into the history of the religious right, that’s the posture that I want us all to take because we’re gonna have to uncover what may be shocking or what are terrible things. And the reason for looking at this story is not just to point our fingers with self-righteous arrogance, but to ask – What can we learn here? How can we do politics and religious faith better? How can we walk in the model and the lifestyle of Jesus? 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Love it. Let’s dive in. Where do we start?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, well, typically in our episodes we dive right into some sort of narrative – and we’ll get to plenty of narrative stuff as we go along – but to start we’re actually going to take a moment to dive into some history because we need to know the history of the relationship between evangelicals and politics in order to understand the backdrop. And I just wanna make a note here – when we use the term “evangelical,” we understand that there are a couple of different ways that you can use that term. One of those, of course, is theologically what is an evangelical. But the other way is to consider more so what is the social movement of evangelicals, and that is actually gonna be more of the term that we’re gonna be using – mainly white, middle-class Christians who would refer to themselves as evangelicals, that is those who take a literal interpretation of the Bible.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Right, evangelical is a broad term, so I think that’s really helpful to make that distinction. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so let’s dive into some evangelical history. And to do that, we’re actually gonna go back 200 years to the early 1800s. In the early 1800s, evangelical Americans were actually pretty involved in politics in society. Again, here’s Dr. Balmer.

RANDALL BALMER: And so they were very active in a number of social reform movements really that, uh, set the agenda for much of the, the nation in the 19th century. 

JESSE EUBANKS: It was evangelicals who were often found at the helm of things like prison reform, public education, women’s rights, and of course in the north, the anti-slavery movement.

RANDALL BALMER: So in the 19th century, you have a really remarkable heritage of caring for those that Jesus called the least of these, and evangelicals were very much involved in that. In fact, they spearheaded many of those, uh, initiatives. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So that’s interesting because it’s not the posture we see many evangelicals take today, and this is partly due to a theological shift. Back then there was a popular belief called post-millennialism, and not to get too technical, but it held that the second coming of Jesus was tied to reforming and making society righteous. So by doing all this social good, evangelicals believed that they were ushering in the new kingdom.

JESSE EUBANKS: But the culture doesn’t end up cooperating very well. You know, so this is all happening in the early to mid 19th century, and then three big events really change the face of society. You have the Civil War, you have the Industrial Revolution, and you have this influx of non-Protestant immigrants. And evangelicals look at the emerging society around them, and they wonder if their reform work has even accomplished anything.

RANDALL BALMER: And so what happens in the late 19th century is that evangelicals began to look around and see, for example, the teeming, squalid tenements on the lower east side of Manhattan, and they began to say, “Wait a minute, we thought we were constructing the precincts of Zion here.” You look at the lower east side of Manhattan, it certainly doesn’t look like a heavenly outpost. And so they begin kind of casting about for a different understanding of the Bible.

JESSE EUBANKS: And that new understanding took social reform out of the end times and out of Jesus’s second coming.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So that’s what’s known as pre-millennialism. Basically, Jesus isn’t returning after we’ve reformed society, but rather is returning at any moment. So that means social reform is no longer important. 

RANDALL BALMER: If Jesus is coming back at any time, why bother about reforming society? Why bother about making this world a better place? There’s no reason to do that. And so that shifts their emphasis rather dramatically from post-millennial optimism to pre-millennial pessimism the notion that Jesus will return at any moment therefore we are absolved from the task of social reform. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And of course, like, we still see remnants of this today. I mean the debate between “we need to simply preach the gospel and save souls” versus “we should be socially involved.” But evangelicals didn’t just step away from societal reform – they went even deeper than that. So that was the 19th century. Moving ahead to the early 20th century, you start to see modernism come into view. And of course, modernism brought all these new ideas into society that ignored or even rejected a religious foundation. Uh, so a good example of this would be the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Gerin, I’m assuming that you know about the Scopes Trial. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, that’s the case about the teaching of evolution in public schools. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, exactly. And even though the ruling ended up not in favor of evolution, evangelicals saw the broader culture as becoming more and more corrupt with non-biblical ideas and their solution was to basically form their own holy society huddle. 

RANDALL BALMER: Evangelicals began to retreat from the larger society into what I call an evangelical subculture, which is this vast and interlocking network of congregations, denominations, bible schools, bible camps, publishing houses, missionary societies, bible institutes, seminaries, and so forth, so that it was possible in the middle decades of the 20th century – and I can attest to this personally – to grow up within this evangelical subculture, this interlocking network of institutions, and have very, very little commerce with anyone outside of that evangelical subculture.

JESSE EUBANKS: And of course, with this retreat came a vast retreat from politics. 

RANDALL BALMER: And it hardly needs to be said that during those years evangelicals were not engaged politically, certainly not in any organized way. Now, many were not even registered to vote because, again, “Jesus is coming at any moment. Let’s not concern ourselves with the affairs of this world. Let’s get our house in order. Let’s try to convert or, uh, get as many as people possible saved and, uh, get ready for Jesus to return.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so quick recap. Early to mid 1800s, evangelicals are really involved in social action with the belief of post-millennialism. Late 1800s, society doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Evangelicals take on the belief of pre-millennialism and step away from social action. Early to mid 1900s, modernism is seen as corrupting society even further and evangelicals retreat even further from society, forming their own schools, their own media, their own businesses, and essentially evangelicals disengage from politics. And so this is the context when in the 1960s a guy named Paul Weyrich steps onto the scene. And remember Paul was at that meeting in Washington, D.C. with Dr. Balmer, and he’s essentially going to be the founder of the religious right. But right now, in the sixties, Paul has one goal in mind – to get evangelicals and biblical values back into the political arena.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, and that’s gonna be a pretty tall order at this point. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So to do it, he’s gonna have to find an issue that will rally enough folks out of their retreat posture. And what would that issue be? It wouldn’t be abortion. Instead, it would be racism. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And I’m Gerin St. Claire, and today’s episode is “The True Origins of The Religious Right.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So we walked through a brief history of evangelicals and their engagement with society, or sometimes lack of engagement. We are now in the 1960s and evangelicals are largely disengaged politically, but one guy who wants to change that is Paul Weyrich. Paul Weyrich was a conservative political activist and strategist, and even from an early age, politics was his world. Paul actually passed away in 2008, but here’s part of an interview that he did with CSPAN back in 2005. 

PAUL WEYRICH CLIP: I’ll tell you a funny story. You know, when I was in the eighth grade, there was a, a kid that lived on a farm that, uh, went to my grade school and he invited me to spend the Memorial Day weekend, uh, with his folks, uh, on this farm. And, uh, after I had been there, his mother called up my mother in a state of great agitation saying that, uh, I had violated, uh, their household because I insisted on talking politics at the dinner table and they never talked politics in their household. I didn’t know, uh, anything else. I mean, uh, my father used to say, “In America they say that you shouldn’t talk religion and politics, but one determines your temporal life and the other determines your eternal life. What else is there to talk about?” 

JESSE EUBANKS: And Paul’s motivations for getting involved in politics in the 1960s – they’re noble. He wrote that, quote, “It is basic to my philosophy that God’s truth ought to be manifest politically.” And he saw that the way to do this was to get the country focused on moral and family values, so he starts looking for somebody in Washington, D.C. who will back up an evangelical issue and get evangelicals back into politics. And in 1962, the Supreme Court ruled prayer in school was unconstitutional, and Paul thought, “Surely this will be the issue.”

PAUL WEYRICH CLIP: I remember calling the, uh, Republican party chairman, a fellow by the name of Claude Jasper, in, uh, Wisconsin in 1962 when the ruling came down against prayer in the schools, and I said, “You know, the party ought to come out really against that.” And he said, “Oh, why would we wanna mix up, you know, the party in that kind of an issue?” And I said, “Well, because it’s the, it’s wrong.” And, uh, we just argued back and forth, and, uh, you know, he didn’t end up doing a thing about it.

JESSE EUBANKS: No one would bite. Sure, there were evangelicals who were upset about the ruling, but not enough to make a political movement out of it. Paul tried again and again with different issues, each with no results. Here’s how Dr. Balmer recounts his conversation with Paul at that 1990 Washington, D.C. gathering. 

RANDALL BALMER: He said, “I’ve been trying since the Goldwater campaign back in 1964 to get these people, meaning evangelicals, interested in politics.” He said, “I tried everything. I tried the school prayer issue. I tried the pornography issue. I tried the women’s rights issue. I tried abortion. Nothing got their attention.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Now remember, we’re in the 1960s at this point, and what is going on in America in the sixties? 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Oh yeah, this is peak civil rights era. Y’know, you’ve got Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. You’ve got sit-ins at lunch counters across segregated America where African Americans would sit at whites-only lunch counters in protest. You’ve got Malcolm X, and you’ve got the Civil Rights Act prohibiting employers from discriminating on the basis of race. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, this is a really charged moment in our history.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, but here’s why this is important for this story. For a lot of evangelicals at the time, there’s a big issue with education. So also around this time you have Brown vs. Board being enforced by the government, and of course Brown states that it’s illegal to practice segregation in public schools. So in the sixties is when we start to see these stories of these brave children like Ruby Bridges, who go in and walk through these picket lines to desegregate schools that were formerly segregated, all-white schools. And if you know your history, then you know this wasn’t well received at the time. Um, in fact, there were some school districts in which every single white student was withdrawn from the public schools within the space of a couple years.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: And so what happens after Brown is that you have many school districts, you have parents really resisting integration. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So this is Olatunde Johnson. She’s a professor of legislation at Columbia. Law, and she also has a background in civil rights and has worked with both the Senate and the Supreme Court. 

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: And as courts seem to be getting more serious about it and as districts start to try to integrate, uh, you have white parents, white families, um, leaving the public school systems.

JESSE EUBANKS: And, you know, it’s like it’s one type of reaction when controversial things are happening out in the culture or you see it on the news, but like it’s a totally different reaction when those things are impacting our kids. You know, reactions get a lot stronger when parents become scared for their children.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: But of course, these families still have to send their kids to school somewhere. So what did they do? They just make their own schools. 

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: Many white families moved their children into private schools, they engaged in what we call massive resistance, and they set up these private, uh, academies that would come to be known as segregationist academies.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And when Professor Johnson says massive, she’s not kidding. Between 1950 and 1965, private school enrollment grew by 90% across the country and by nearly 130% in the south.

JESSE EUBANKS: So basically, white families found a loophole and said, “If public schools have to be integrated, well then we’ll just go start our own schools.”

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Exactly. And this is also where you see the explosion of growth of the suburbs because another way for families to escape integrating schools was to move out to newer, whiter parts of town.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: A lot of these segregationist academies wanted to have a kind of public imprimatur, and so that showed up from the start where some of them would take the identity of the public schools. Some of these segregationist academies had the same school colors as the prior public school. They’d have the same mascots. Um, they use the same symbols.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And many of these private schools were under the banner of Christianity. In fact, nearly one-third of the schools that are now part of the Association of Christian Schools International were established around the same time as the Brown vs. Board ruling. One particular private school that was started was Goldsboro Christian.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: So it’s a school that’s founded in 1963 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, which is in Wayne County, North Carolina. And the county’s half black, but Goldsboro Christian doesn’t allow black students to attend and what they say is that God doesn’t want the intermixing of the races. And so the idea of what’s our religious identity, um, our right to free exercise is pitted against this public value of allowing racial integration.

JESSE EUBANKS: And of course, like, there’s all kinds of issues there with, like, bad theology and bad interpretation of the scriptures, but, like, there are also legal issues, right. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, totally. Things quickly turned political, and here’s why. These segregation academies were receiving tax exemption, which not only meant they didn’t pay tax, but their donors also got tax exemptions when they donated.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: Um, using a portion of a tax code that we all know, 501, uh, (c)(3), which allows nonprofits and religious institutions, um, to not have to pay taxes.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And of course that doesn’t sit well with the opponents of segregation. Tax exemption is supposed to be for charitable institutions, but you can’t really call an institution charitable if the whole reason for their existence is to protect racial segregation. So a group of parents in Mississippi call foul on these private schools not paying taxes.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: That starts because black parents in Mississippi challenged this policy of allowing these schools to receive tax exempt status. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And this challenge by these black Mississippi parents makes it all the way to the Supreme Court. And they win.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: That resulted in the Treasury Department changing its mind, and in 1971 you get a revenue ruling from the IRS saying it violates 501(c)(3) of the tax code and another provision to give tax exemptions to racially discriminatory private schools. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And so the IRS comes to these private Christian schools saying, “Hey, if you don’t allow these black students, we are going to revoke your tax exempt status. You can’t discriminate and also receive tax-free donations. That’s illegal.” And naturally all of this sparked a huge uproar. 

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: So when the IRS issues its revenue ruling, eventually saying we’re not gonna grant tax exempt status to schools that discriminate on the basis of race, you have a set of organizations, you have religious groups, you have churches who say, “You’re violating my free exercise right because it is my religious belief that segregation is what God wanted.”

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So two schools in particular that fought back were Goldsboro Christian and Bob Jones University. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Uh, hang on, hold on. Bob Jones was founded way earlier than the 1960s. They were founded in like the 1920s, you know, back when there was uproar over evolution in schools and all of that. They were part of that evangelical subculture that formed overseeing the ills of society. So, like, it was not a school that was founded in response to integration.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yes, that’s right. Bob Jones was founded in 1927 years before the Civil Rights Movement was at the forefront of society, but from the very beginning, they had racially discriminatory policies that didn’t allow black students to enroll. Thus, they were still a private, tax-exempt institution that discriminated on the basis of race. And so both Bob Jones and Goldsboro Christian end up going to court, and they become part of a single case known as Bob Jones University vs. The United States.

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: I do think it’s interesting that Bob Jones itself involves two cases. It involves Bob Jones, which is more easily styled as a case about free exercise, and it involves Goldsboro Christian Schools, which was founded, um, as part of this resistance to school integration.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: But here’s what’s also interesting is that this debacle between the IRS and the private Christian schools creates this public fight throughout the seventies. And in the one corner of the ring you have the IRS, and in the other corner you have private Christian schools. And this showdown boils down to this basic question – is the IRS allowed to force these institutions to follow the law even if it violates their religious beliefs?

OLATUNDE JOHNSON: So it becomes a very, very prominent political issue. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And so finally in 1976, the IRS officially removes Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so that kind of connects all the dots for me then. So from the point of view of this particular corner of the evangelical world, here’s what just happened. The, the government has intruded on their evangelical subculture, they’ve done it on the basis of race, and that’s gonna be the thing, like that’s the thing that fires evangelicals up. So it wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t prayer in school. It was actually the enforcement of desegregation. And now that the evangelical political field is ripe for harvest, Paul Weyrich is gonna make his move and he’s gonna solidify the religious right. And how’s he gonna do that? He’s actually gonna do it with upcoming presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Gerin St. Claire. And today – “The True Origins of The Religious Right.” 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so let’s do a quick recap of what’s happened so far. So in the 1930s and 40s, evangelicals retreat from society and political engagement. 1950s, Brown vs. Board and desegregation are mandated. 1960s, evangelicals formed their own private segregated schools and Paul Weyrich steps onto the political scene. 1970s, tax exemption for private schools becomes a political battleground. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So how does all this lead to the religious right? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so while the whole private school tax exemption fight was happening in the seventies, Paul Weyrich was not sitting around doing nothing. He was actually forming his own conservative think tank in Washington. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And so for any of our listeners who aren’t familiar, a think tank is an organization that does public policy research. So they’re looking at problems and saying, “Here are some ideas or proposed solutions to those problems.” And then they’ll typically try to publish this research for the public and distribute it to political figures in hopes that the ideas will be heard. So they’re not directly making policy, but they’re lobbying and trying to influence it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yes, exactly. So Paul’s think tank was called The Heritage Foundation. Keep that in mind as we now move forward in time to the 1980 presidential race. 

NEWS CLIPS: The dedication, the humanity, and the good sense of President Jimmy Carter… The time is now for strong leadership. Reagan for president… Now from CBS News election headquarters in New York. It’s Walter Cronkite, former governor of California that has taken a strong lead tonight toward the…

JESSE EUBANKS: So in the 1980 election, you have current Democratic President Jimmy Carter face off against the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan. And previously evangelicals had loved Carter. They voted for him because he was a Southern Baptist. He unashamedly talked about being a born-again believer. He taught Sunday school. He was their guy. But at the beginning of that election race, Paul Weyrich and The Heritage Foundation sent a policy research paper not to Carter, but to the Reagan campaign. This paper was titled Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management and a Conservative Administration, and it was 1000 pages long. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Okay, a thousand pages long. That’s huge. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s like the equivalent of, like, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and then some. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So why did they send such a long document? What was in it? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so this paper covered policy ideas, ideas for things like tax breaks, how to run the cabinet, how to run independent government agencies. But the final section of the paper actually calls for the overturning of affirmative action. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Affirmative action is government mandated inclusion for minority groups, and so this has a clear connection back to the whole school desegregation issue. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Exactly. Because if affirmative action could be overruled, well then private Christian schools would be left alone by the IRS. So Paul’s foundation sends this huge document to Reagan, and Reagan and his administration are like, “This sounds good,” because they know what’s in it for them – all of these evangelical voters. Again, here’s Dr. Balmer.

RANDALL BALMER: August 22, 1980. This is the event in Dallas, Texas when Ronald Reagan addresses, uh, anywhere from 10 to 20,000 evangelicals. Estimates of the crowd vary. This is the event where he goes out and he opens his remarks by saying –

RONALD REAGAN CLIP: Now I know this is a nonpartisan gathering and so I know that you can’t endorse me, but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.

JESSE EUBANKS: So this speech is given at a National Affairs briefing for evangelical leaders. Here’s how The Washington Post described the event – “Evangelist leaders joined forces with conservative politicians here last week in exhorting millions of non-voting Christians to crawl out from under those padded pews and take up political arms in the equivalent of a moral war to save America.” Here’s another part of Reagan’s speech. 

RONALD REAGAN CLIP: When I hear the First Amendment used as a reason to keep traditional moral values away from policy making, I’m shocked. The First Amendment was written not to protect the people and their laws from religious values, but to protect those values from government tyranny.

RANDALL BALMER: Brought down the house and arguably sealed the evangelical vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. I read through Reagan’s speech out at the, uh, library, presidential library in Simi Valley, California. In that speech, he talks about his support for creationism, he bewails the Internal Revenue Service going after the tax exemption of evangelical schools, and he says nothing whatsoever about abortion. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And this is a little strange, right? Because on the surface, Reagan was not the picture of morality and family values. He does not seem like the guy evangelical voters are going to support. 

RANDALL BALMER: Remember Ronald Reagan was divorced and remarried. At that time that was a huge issue for evangelicals, a huge barrier, but they simply looked the other way. Ronald Reagan had signed into the law the most liberal abortion bill in the country when he was governor of California back in 1967. Nevertheless, the religious right overlooked that and threw their support behind Ronald Reagan in 1980. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And one of the big reasons that they threw their support behind him was that he promised to get the IRS dogs off the backs of private, segregated Christian schools, and that was something Jimmy Carter simply did not promise. In fact, many evangelicals saw the Carter administration as partially responsible for the IRS tax exempt invasion. And essentially what we see is that this support of Reagan became the final link in the chain. It catapulted evangelicals to vote strictly within the Republican party, it taught them to vote straight ticket along party lines, and it formed what we now know as the religious right. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: And I don’t want folks to miss this. This means that the religious right formed on the basis of racism. Reagan had actually opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and as governor he had called African leaders “monkeys” in a call with Richard Nixon, but Evangelicals seemed happy to overlook this because he promised to fight for their segregated subculture. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And I think it’s important to know that the religious right included more than just Paul’s think tank The Heritage Foundation. You know, at the start, there was also the group Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell Sr. You also would’ve had James Dobson and Focus on the Family, radio personality Pat Robertson, Michael Farris with his Home School Legal Defense Association. And many of these folks were already active prior to Reagan, but what the IRS tax exempt issue and the Reagan administration did was provide a platform for these groups and individuals to come together. It was the foundation on which all these already existing bricks could then build into. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So then that begs the question – what about abortion? Because now that is the flagship issue for the religious right and for evangelical conservatives. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, we could spend, like, a whole other episode unpacking the history of the abortion issue, and Dr. Balmer actually goes into detail about that in his book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. But to quickly answer that question, here’s what Dr. Balmer told me. 

RANDALL BALMER: Weyrich recognized that organizing a grassroots political movement around the defense of racial segregation, essentially the defense of racism, was not going to be effective, and so they began looking for other issues. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So they needed to find another issue to lead with, even if segregation was the energizing force.

JESSE EUBANKS: The other issue that did eventually resonate with evangelical voters was abortion – but not without some political legwork and some convincing. And shortly after the religious right took off, they did hang a lot on the issue of abortion, but that’s not really where they got their start. In fact, Paul Weyrich has been quoted saying the following – “Let’s remember that the religious right did not come together in response to the Roe v. Wade decision. What got us going was the attempt on the part of the IRS to rescind the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University. It shattered the Christian community’s notion that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they pleased.

RANDALL BALMER: The charter issue behind the movement’s formation, which was racism – uh, there’s no pretty way to say this – defense of racial segregation in evangelical schools. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And so there’s no point at which Paul Weyrich flat out comes out and says like, “Oh, I’m a racist,” but instead builds this political movement around these things that are very opposed to integration. He himself described his own movement as a coalition of single interest groups organized around – among other things – anti-bussing, tax resistance, and private school survival. And Gerin, what impact do you think that all of these policies have had on African Americans? You know, obviously there was all this pushback on integration. We have largely settled that issue, but like what are the long term effects of all of these policies?

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: So, I mean, another one that we haven’t really covered here, but I think the religious right is like pretty complicit in is mass incarceration. The way that racism through Reagan kind of evolved was the war on drugs. And so like at the start of the war on drugs, only 2% of white Americans considered drugs to be a major problem in America. And through the Republican pushing of the war on drugs and the marketing around it, that grew to like over 60% within a decade. And then through mass incarceration and through the war on drugs and criminalization of drugs, millions of black people have lost all the same rights. It’s like basically you can legally discriminate against a criminal. And now it’s almost like it obscures racism because it used to be you could discriminate against someone ’cause he’s black but now that’s not kosher anymore so the racist language has changed to like, “No, we’re not opposed to black people. We’re opposed to criminals.” But then there’s been this, like, marketing campaign and policy shift – and, uh, it’s a lot more than I can get into here – that basically Reagan and Nixon kind of led out in and Clinton also furthered that in the minds of white people largely just criminalized a huge swath of black people and given like a socially acceptable reason to take away their rights and discriminate against them.

JESSE EUBANKS: John Perkins talks a lot about what happens in impoverished communities when people of resources are present in the communities and then suddenly they vacate. Basically, they take their social networks with them, their education. They take their job opportunities. They take their family stability. There’s so much that gets robbed out of communities when people suddenly up and leave. And with the creation of the suburbs, with white flight, with this, uh, reluctance for Christians to be in the public schools, essentially what happens is that you have Christians taking their toys and going home. It’s like we have all these great resources, but we refuse to share them with other people.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Mm-hmm. So the religious right started because of segregation, not because of abortion. That’s almost unbelievable, but Ed Dobson backs it up. He was Jerry Falwell’s assistant at the Moral Majority, and he said quote, “The religious right did not start because of concern about abortion. I sat in the non-smoke filled back rooms with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion being mentioned as a reason why we should do something.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So, what do we do with all of this? What’s the point? First of all, let me say this. The point of this is not to be against conservative politics. I myself am conservative on a lot of issues, and I don’t think that forming a religious left is going to get us any better results. Instead, I think that there are three things that we can consider as we look at the history of the religious right, and the first is I think that we can acknowledge the impact that it has had on American society.

RANDALL BALMER: I think the impact has been profound. I don’t think there’s any question about that. I think on the political level, uh, the national level, the religious right has, has reshaped the political landscape. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean, think about this. Evangelical voters have gone from being on the fringes of political engagement to being a group that politicians and candidates take seriously and they want to appeal to. That is an amazing feat, and I think that we can recognize the work that folks like Paul Weyrich have put in to making evangelical voters a very influential force in our politics. Second, I think that looking at history gives us context for where we are today. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Yeah, I can speak to that some. We’ve seen this growing trend among the younger generation that they’ve been rejecting evangelicalism and religion altogether. The Public Religion Research Institute’s religion census shows that those who identify as white evangelical went from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2020, and the largest growing religious group continues to be the “nones,” those who are religiously unaffiliated. Professor of Research Dave Campbell says, quote, “Many Americans, especially young people, see religion as bound up with political conservativism and the Republican party specifically. Since that’s not their party or their politics, they don’t wanna identify as being religious.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. In fact, Dr. Balmer, who himself grew up in the evangelical subculture and identifies with the movement, expressed his sadness at what it’s become. 

RANDALL BALMER: This is a movement that, that shaped me. It’s part of my DNA. It’s who I am. And to see it being so utterly perverted and – again, I’ll use this word advisedly – prostituted for political ends is, is deeply troubling to me.

JESSE EUBANKS: But I think the third thing to consider about this story is this. For those of us that are Christians, we have hope, even in the midst of dark or corrupt things. It’s easy to look at the state of evangelicalism or the state of conservative politics and be deeply discouraged, but the gospel – it doesn’t leave us in despair. Earlier in the episode, we talked about the chief priests in the gospel of Matthew, and these priests were part of an elite power structure that they had gained through wealth and politics. And when Jesus comes to Jerusalem, they are indignant. I love how The BEMA Discipleship Podcast describes this. 

THE BEMA PODCAST CLIP: The Romans are on alert. He’s been flipping over tables. He’s doing the triumphal entry. But, but let’s be clear here. Jesus wasn’t picking a fight with Rome. Jesus wasn’t marching on Rome or leading a revolt with swords or clubs. Jesus wasn’t fighting a worldly war over a worldly kingdom in a worldly way. In fact, it’s when, uh, it’s when Pilate asks Jesus if he’s king that Jesus responds by saying, “My kingdom is not of this world, because if it were, my servants would fight.” But they are not here to wage war on Rome as a political empire. They are here to wage war on empire itself. An empire is showing up in their own house, their own Jewish house with their own leadership. Forget about Rome. Jesus marches on the temple to do some house cleaning of his own. I’m sure it’s possible that Jesus had Rome’s attention, but was Rome out to get Jesus? What kind of a threat is this peasant rabbi who’s been running around telling people to forgive their enemies? But what Jesus is doing is he’s really ticking off the religious, the corrupt religious authorities.

JESSE EUBANKS: And we know that these corrupt religious authorities will get so ticked off that they’ll actually end up killing him. Matthew 26 tells us, “Then the chief priest and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest whose name was Caiaphas and plotted together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him.” And that is exactly what they do. They have him crucified, and from the outside it looks like Jesus’ crucifixion is simply a political play by the chief priests in order to keep their positions in power. It’s an ugly story of manipulation and politics, but we know now that Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t just about corruption, but that it was the greatest hope for mankind. And Dr. Balmer tries to remember that hope moving forward. 

RANDALL BALMER: I decided a few years ago that despair is not an option. There are times when I’m tempted to kind of descend into despair about this, but I don’t think I have that option. I think we have to be hopeful. We have to work for a better world. In my case, I think I have to work for a better evangelicalism, and so I don’t really have the option of, of despair. I don’t think the followers of Jesus have the luxury of despair, frankly.

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: The religious right has roots in racial injustice. And if we are unwilling to turn away from that history to examine the ways it has distorted our lens around racial minorities, then we will continue to hurt and fail to speak up for and even become complicit in the abuse of those whom Christ identifies with. Christians are called to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves and for the rights of all who are destitute. We are called to a higher loyalty than to a political party, and we need to be ready to speak up for those who are hurting and who are hurt. That is what love does. That is what Jesus did and what he calls us to. Our loyalty is to a higher kingdom with a better king.

JESSE EUBANKS: We want Christians engaged in politics, but we have to do it with wisdom and we have to do it not from a posture of self-defense, but we have to do it from a posture that trusts that God is at work in this world and that our role is to trust him and to follow him. So if you look around at politics or evangelicalism and you’re in despair, all you see is a movement that has gone completely off the rails and doesn’t look like Jesus anymore, remember that it’s not the first time that this has happened and God is still at work. He brings light out of darkness, so keep following him because when the days are dark he may be bringing something amazing just around the corner.

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you benefited at all from this podcast, please help us out by leaving a review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Your review will help other people discover our show.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode – Dr. Randall Balmer and Professor Olatunde Johnson. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Gerin St. Claire. Gerin, thanks so much for being on the podcast. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Thank you. It was a pleasure. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Listen, go check out Gerin’s show, Black History for White People. They walk you through different moments in history as well as interview experts on hot button topics. It is a great resource to learn more. You can find their show by going to BlackHistoryForWhitePeople.com or by looking up Black History for White People in any podcast feed. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: This episode was edited by the following Love Thy Neighborhood staff and team members – Rachel Hamm and Case Raisley.

JESSE EUBANKS: Rachel Szabo is our media director and producer. She told me last weekend some sorority girls dragged her to the mall to try on dresses. 

RANDALL BALMER: Well, these are not my people, but, uh, nevertheless, here I was in that group.

JESSE EUBANKS: Anna Tran is our audio engineer. Music for today’s episode comes from Mark O’Connor, President Lincoln’s own band, Ben Bernie, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. 

GERIN ST. CLAIRE: Apply for your social action internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or for a whole year. You’ll grow in your life skills and faith. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”