The Revival of the Old Religious Right

The Religious Right did not organize only on the basis of Roe v. Wade. Race cannot be separated from its history nor this present moment. That we are witnessing a surge of white Christian voters to Trump’s side after two terms of our first black president cannot be dismissed. Dartmouth’s Randall Balmer has made the case that the Religious Right was galvanized in the 1970s not by abortion alone but by keeping segregation, the old order, in place. One of the architects of the Religious Right, Paul Weyrich, told him that he had not been able to rally evangelicals around school prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, or life issues. “I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” he told Balmer. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.” Schools like the fundamentalist Bob Jones University did not admit black students, and the government eventually yanked their tax exempt status—a move that incited the mostly white, mostly male Christian conservative leaders to rail against the government intrusion into Christian practices.