The destructive influence of rightwing evangelical Christianity is one of the most underrated factors in the devolution of American politics. Despite falling rates of religious participation among the general public, Christian conservatives have, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, poisoned everything.
By conquering the Republican Party, the religious right has taken over the Supreme Court. The horror of this is currently on full display in Texas, where the state government has deputized random citizens to report women (or anyone who assists them) to authorities for even inquiring about how to obtain an abortion. For the McCarthyite act of “naming names” to draconian law enforcement agencies, Texans can receive a $10,000 reward if they file a civil lawsuit against the people they name.
Meanwhile, white evangelical Christians—81 percent of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2020—are the most zealous and deranged in their objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. As if enabling the spread of a deadly disease wasn’t poisonous enough, many Christian conservatives express blanket opposition to anything deemed remotely “progressive,” such as Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and measures to mitigate climate change.
It often mystifies observers of U.S. politics how so many Christians could routinely behave according to an agenda of hatred, paranoia, and oppression.
One of the most shocking images of the January 6 insurrection was a group of young men, including the so-called QAnon shaman, standing at the head of the Senate Chamber, praying to Jesus that their efforts to dismantle democracy would prevail. They were not alone. In the company of white supremacists and violent militia groups, large numbers of Christian nationalists carried crosses and religious banners as they stormed the Capitol building and cheered for the execution of one of their brethren, Vice President Mike Pence.
It often mystifies observers of U.S. politics how so many Christians could routinely behave according to an agenda of hatred, paranoia, and oppression. Randall Balmer, a historian of U.S. religion and professor at Dartmouth College, puts an end to the mystery in his riveting and important new book, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company). At a breezy pace and in clever prose, Balmer examines the impetus of the religious right, tracing exactly how its adherents entered politics and why they have developed into an enemy of multiracial democracy.
The book opens with Balmer, for research purposes, begrudgingly attending a 1990 closed-door conference of evangelical leaders to mark the tenth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency. In the middle of an otherwise dull and self-congratulatory event, Paul Weyrich—a Republican strategist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, who, perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for the politicization of evangelicals—gives an “impassioned soliloquy in which he declared that abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the emergence of the Religious Right.”
The initial issue that galvanized Christian conservatives into political action, by Weyrich’s own admission, was the federal government’s removal of tax exemptions from religious schools that refused to admit Black students. Balmer writes that Moral Majority leader Ed Dobson, one of the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s leading surrogates, quickly concurred. Surrounding them on the stage were rightwing power brokers such as Richard Viguerie, the pioneer of direct mail fundraising for the Republican Party; Ralph Reed, then executive director of the Christian Coalition; and Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. No one objected to Weyrich’s assessment.
Evangelical Christians were largely apolitical in the 1960s and 1970s, due to their theological doctrine that the world is irredeemably corrupt and the belief that a Christian’s sole duty is to evangelize for the faith while waiting on the apocalypse. The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973—yet, Jerry Falwell’s first reference to abortion did not appear in a sermon until 1978. Six years before Roe v. Wade, Ronald Reagan, who would become an icon for the Protestant right, championed and signed the most liberal pro-abortion law in the country in 1967 while he was governor of California.
Contrary to popular belief, it was not Reagan but Jimmy Carter who first attracted the electoral support of evangelical Christians because of his own “born again” testimony. Without regard for ideology, Christian Conservatives were compelled to vote a fellow evangelical into the highest office in the United States. Less than four years later, the flock would choose Reagan as its shepherd, helping to lead the country off a cliff of union busting, exploitation of the poor, and racial demagoguery.
Balmer marshals a staggering amount of evidence to prove that the Religious Right turned away from Carter (and forever into the arms of the Republican Party) because of the federal government’s revocation of tax exempt status for religious schools that discriminated against students and families of color.
Following the Brown v. Board decision, Balmer shows that there was a mass exodus out of public schools in the South, and many Christian alternatives, including Jerry Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, opened with the explicit promise to enforce a “whites only” admission policy.
It was actually not Carter but President Gerald Ford who began to investigate and punish Christian “segregation academies,” to use Balmer’s appellation; Carter enhanced the policy by devoting more funding and personnel, including lawyers in his newly created Department of Education, to the cause of racial integration.
As Balmer notes throughout the book, Falwell, James Dobson, several administrators from Bob Jones University, Grover Norquist, and many other rightwing luminaries are on public record confirming Balmer’s thesis: “The real roots of the Religious Right lay not in the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.”
The birth of the religious right is critical in comprehending U.S. politics for several reasons. First, it demonstrates the centrality of racism to the Republican Party, both among its leaders and its foot soldiers. Reagan barely attempted to disguise his hostility to Black people in his public statements, decrying “welfare queens” and praising “states’ rights” in a Southern city infamous for hate crimes against civil rights activists.
The increasingly reactionary GOP is not a “blue-collar protest party,” but a white nationalist and theocratic insurgency.
Decades later, Donald Trump tore off the thin mask that Reagan had worn with his wry smile. No amount of propaganda or delusional leftwing theorizing about the consequences of the real failures of the Democratic Party can conceal the truth of what the Republican Party is today. The increasingly reactionary GOP is not a “blue-collar protest party,” to quote Thomas Frank, but a white nationalist and theocratic insurgency.
Second, the Religious Right’s commitment to Jim Crow exposes the deceit of its favorite weasel term “religious freedom,” which is regularly invoked to justify sexism, homophobia, and opposition to mask and vaccine mandates.
The book ends where it begins, with the nauseating candor of Paul Weyrich. He told Balmer, and other journalists on various occasions, that he knew a transition to abortion was ultimately necessary because overt appeals to racism would have undermined the nationwide popularity of the Religious Right.
Cooperating with the advice of his handlers, Reagan, as a presidential candidate, turned on a dime into one of the most obstinate forces against reproductive freedom. His running mate, George H.W. Bush, did the same.
Abortion now has members of the Religious Right in combat mode, and they’ve finally succeeded in establishing their dystopic dream in Texas. As long as the rightwing Supreme Court refuses to hear challenges to the Texas law, many other states in the South and the Midwest are likely to enact their own versions, leaving women in a desperate position where their health, constitutional rights, and bodily autonomy exist under the control of Christian nationalists and the politicians who pander to them.
Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right provides a rich irony to anyone looking to better understand the Christian conservative insurgency and its fanatical opposition to democracy and public health. It is a phrase belonging to Charles Darwin that best summarizes the religious right: They bear the stamp of their “lowly origin.”