How The Christian Right Ended Up Transforming American Politics
The Christian Right changed how we talked about race. The Christian Right emerged from school desegregation—and forged a movement around taxes and religious freedom. In 1978, the Internal Revenue Service sought to revoke tax exemptions for schools formed as white-flight havens from the public schools. The backlash was overwhelming. The IRS received more than a quarter of a million letters against the proposed rules. Congressional hearings reframed the issue from an attack on segregation to an attack on religion by meddlesome bureaucrats. As Newt Gingrich, then a freshman representative, explained, “The IRS should collect taxes—not enforce social policy.”
Early in 1979, Jerry Falwell formed Moral Majority, the premier organization for the new Christian Right. Falwell ran a segregated academy that would almost certainly have run afoul of the IRS guidelines. In 1967, the same year the local public schools desegregated, Lynchburg Christian Academy opened its doors. As of the fall of 1979, it had an all-white faculty, and only five African-Americans among the 1,147 students.
In August 1979, Congress inserted riders into the appropriations bill for the Treasury Department to prevent the IRS from implementing the proposed regulations. A fight over desegregation had galvanized white evangelicals to oppose meddlesome bureaucrats, and the movement was born.
It made abortion a partisan issue. The Christian Right made opposition to abortion—which until the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973 had been a Catholic issue—into an evangelical and Republican cause. The Bible’s text says nothing about abortion per se. Even W. A. Criswell, known as the “Baptist Pope,” initially praised Roe. “It was only after a child was born and had life separate from its mother,” he argued, “that it became an actual person.” Until the mid-1980s, Republicans in the electorate favored fewer restrictions on abortion than did Democrats; in Congress, partisan divides between pro-choice and pro-life votes grew threefold in the two decades after Roe.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/brief-history-of-the-christian-rightVia Fred Clark at Slacktivist, who has written much on the hypocrisy of the Christian right (he's a progressive Christian). He's well worth reading on the subject:
Reagan was overwhelmingly popular with the white evangelical voting bloc that today is preoccupied with the “social issues” that they promote as the proper concern of “values voters” — abortion, homosexuality, abortion, birth control, abortion, prayer in schools, and religious liberty (i.e., the liberty to define one’s religion as opposition to abortion and homosexuality). But culture-war concerns were far down the list of reasons why those white evangelical voters supported Reagan in 1980. In 1980, “values voters” were still mainly Cold Warriors — far more concerned with the Russians than with the gays or the baby-killers.
Abortion and homosexuality came later. They were products of Reaganism, not the other way around.
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On July 31st, just days before Reagan went to Neshoba County, the New York Times reported that the Ku Klux Klan had endorsed Reagan. In its newspaper, the Klan said that the Republican platform “reads as if it were written by a Klansman.” Reagan rejected the endorsement, but only after a Carter cabinet official brought it up in a campaign speech. The dubious connection did not stop Reagan from using segregationist language in Neshoba County.
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And that same Southern Strategy also created the space for the religious right — the large, now uniformly partisan white evangelical voting bloc. Those white evangelical voters today — not just in the South, but throughout the country — are overwhelmingly Republican. Ask them why and they’ll tell you, honestly and accurately, that it’s mainly because of the current roster of culture-war issues — abortion, homosexuality, abortion, etc.
Read more at
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/08/27/the-culture-war-has-always-been-about-race/#LhriG84Jcr5PBroB.99
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